Desert Notebooks

Part One: Joshua Tree

• Time and writing are intimately related
• John Berger: “One can lie on the ground and look up at the almost infinite number of stars in the night sky, but in order to tell stories about those stars they need to be seen in constellations, the invisible lines which can connect them must be assumed.”

…that time and space are inseparable. The sky is a clock, and a calendar is also a map. To know a date and a time is to know the positions of the planets and the stars, their relation to one another and to us. To know where the stars are is to know what time it is, what day and what year. Time is not an independent vector that pushes on, stubborn and cocksure, taking us to a place called the future. It lives in our bodies and in the stars, in the mountains that rise up floors, wind and rain that wash the mountains from the sea in the back into the sea. Everything moves. Mountains and oceans as well as stars.

• In recalling how long it can take lichen to grow, hints at the concept of saecculum from Orwell’s Roses.

Part Two: Las Vegas

• Poem to read: “The Signature if All Things,” by Kenneth Rexroth
• Babylonians referring to the star-filled sky as “the heavenly writing”

Vocab

• Coeval: having the same age or date of origin, contemporary
• Peccaries: piglike mammals found in the Americas
• Troglodytic: relating to a troglodyte, or a human being who inhabits a cave or the area beneath the overhanging rocks of a cliff