The messages of the powerful are always invitations to submit.
One of the insidious effects of the climate catastrophe is that every time we learn something new about it, the situation has apparently gotten worse. This can easily lead to despair and self-destructive attitudes, accelerating the power dive. Desert Notebooks doesn't conjure a rosy sunrise in our future, but Ben Ehrenreich's answer to the soul-crushing advance of a gathering storm is to choose any other path than the one that put us here, and start moving. All roads are connected, he writes, and as long as we pay attention along the way, we can always move in a better direction.
Although he's talking about climate change, I found this to be a good analogy for creative despair. The weight of indecision can easily intensify if unchecked, but its antidote is simply attentive momentum. Just start making shit. The answer will only reveal itself through action anyway.
Ehrenreich succinctly critiques the whitewashing of mythology around eurocentric ideas of progress, and digs up several colorful indigenous myths as counterpoints. If euro-Christian ‘enlightened’ thinking and technology have brought us to our current predicament, then maybe it's worth paying closer attention to the stories of the cultures we crushed along the way.
The magic of the desert comes alive in petroglyphs, star-painted skies, and dramatic storms. But also in stories. Ehrenreich pays homage to the desert throughout the book, and one of the highlights is his account of the archaeologists who discovered that a series of petroglyphs in Southern California map the movement of the sun and the stars onto an indigenous creation story. It breathes life into the hidden magic of the desert, like a shaft of sunlight penetrating a sandy hovel and solving a piece of the puzzle in Indiana Jones.
Time and space are twin themes of the book, and Ehrenreich chronicles how various cultures have viewed them differently. He charts the Anglo notion of time as a straight line, exploding out of some traumatic past, and along which progress marches like a creeping barrage of artillery, destroying other cultures and nature in its path. Many indigenous traditions had more cyclical concepts of time. Hunting and harvesting occurred in tune with a seasonal tempo, and history was sometimes divided between the recent past and an ancient ‘Story Time’ where the ancestors and gods guarded the lessons of life. Time was a metaphor or a rhythm, not a resource to be managed or a tool of exploitation.
Desert Notebooks is an ode to the magic of nature's arid temples. It's both a call to break out of destructive patterns and an acknowledgement that we probably won't. But as many of the cultures that inhabited those deserts for millennia have already learned, "worlds end all the time."