Everything's wrong in the desert
Except us
Hi folks, thanks for reading WanderFinder, and thanks for waiting for this one. It took me a little while to wrap my head around it — the desert’s a big place, and space is even bigger.
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Everything’s wrong in the desert. The street signs are pink. The fire hydrants are white. The birds are murder birds.
Street sign in Joshua Tree, CA.
Fire hydrant outside of Joshua Tree National Park in California.
An extremely blurry picture of a shrike on top of a cactus. (I think maybe a loggerhead shrike? correct me if I’m wrong in the comments.) The shrike is also known as the butcherbird because of its charming habit of impaling its pray — such as lizards, insects, or even small mammals — on cactus spines, thorns, or even fence railings.
I read about a Lockheed engineer in the desert who met some aliens from Venus. They gave him instructions, and like Noah he followed them. There’s a building now with a perfect white dome roof. The Integretron.
Friends in front of the Integretron, the Lockheed/alien mashup building.
It seems plausible, almost, that aliens could request this building. Aliens would have good design sense, it goes without saying. Aliens know where the energy fields are. Also the underground water. This building tops both. It’s a perfect instrument, this building, and it’s played with crystal bowls.
Crystal bowls ready for a concert at the Integratron.
I looked at the pink street signs, the white fire hydrants. Nothing seemed impossible.
My friends and I bought tickets for a crystal bowl concert at the Lockheed/alien building for New Years Day, at noon.
It made sense to me to be here with these friends in particular, friends from Louisiana, friends I spent time with in Donaldsonville, right by the Mississippi. Swamps have monsters just like deserts, an alligator for every scorpion, a loup garou for every yucca monster. They’re on the edge. They’re a good place to run away, if you’ve got something to run from. They’re a good place to build your communes, your artist colonies, your alien buildings, if you’ve got one to build.
New Years Day, a bunch of crystal bowls, a wiry man at the end of his middle age, he’d been playing them for fourteen years. The esteemed beings, the Venusian aliens, wanted us to get better, he said. Our life spans were so short, we weren’t getting figured out what we needed to get figured out before we died. We died before we became generous, open, kind, everything we were capable of being. Crystal bowl concerts in this perfectly domed and energy-ed building would help.
The dome of the Integratron.
He played the bowls.
He played me.
The bowls contained and echoed the music.
The building contained and echoed the music. My body contained and echoed the music. My body contained and echoed the desert. I was in the desert and also the desert was in me.
I guess that’s where I was trying to get to with Oppenheimer and Burroughs. Here were two young men, sent out to the desert to get tough. They became men, they grew up, but also, in their own ways, they became mystics.
Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, brought Los Alamos to the desert, practically back to the location of his old boarding school. When the first nuclear bomb dropped, it was the Bhagavad Gita he quoted. "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Did he become generous, kind, everything we are capable of being? Maybe the Venusians know.
Burroughs was grandson to the inventor of an early adding machine. He came out of the desert boarding school an icon of the counterculture, an artist of the absurd, an addict, a sensualist, and an All-American sceptic. “Whether as founder of the Beats with Kerouac and Ginsburg, portraying a priestly old heroin addict in Gus Van Saint’s Drugstore Cowboy, or creating shotgun art with a disheveled Kurt Cobain … Burrough’s writing is packed with studied paranoia regarding government, technology, taboos, and especially ‘the virus of language,’ which was the ‘result of deliberate infection by alien ‘management’.”
That alien landscape, that sweet looking butcherbird. Are the aliens esteemed beings or a virus? Why is the emptiness of the desert so meaningful? Does it echo the emptiness of space, to be weirder than we want to be, to get beyond language, into death, into sound, into crystal bowls.
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
How long had Oppenheimer planned to those words, that mystical incantation. Did he imagine it when, as a boy-about-to-be-an-adult, in a boarding school in the desert, he walked alone, becoming tough as his parents desired and thought about particles and energy and endless space?
I read about Oppenheimer and Burroughs, including the passages about Burroughs above, in the book Desert Oracle, sold in several Joshua Tree desert oases gift and bookstores such as the Hey There Project and Space Cowboy. Desert Oracle is a quick enough read that you can get through most of it on the flight from LA to DC on the way back from visiting the Integration.
Everything’s wrong in the desert. The street signs are pink. The fire hydrants are white. The birds are murder birds.
Except me, except you. You can be broken and live in the desert. You can be broken and the desert, once visited, can live in you.
Hope you’re having a wanderful week. Let me know of your desert travels, or travels with aliens, or anything else on your mind, in the comments.
I've been waiting for you to write about this trip, and it was worth the wait.
I am afraid of the desert. The longest I've been in the desert was Burning Man 1998.
Thank you for this amazing description and interpretation.