I Went To The Desert
Jasmine Dreame Wagner
I went to the desert and it rained, and it rained, and it rained.
We chased a storm across Arizona and into New Mexico. Lightning on all sides as we entered Albuquerque. To our right, purple billows over the buildings. Straight ahead, forks of light. Over the slope to our left, a dark smear below a cloud fizzled over the sunset. Vergis, I learned, is when the rain evaporates before it’s even hit the ground. The moisture pulls back up into the cloud like the cloud’s ladling its own tears and drinking them.
In Santa Fe, I walked the railroad tracks from Aaron’s house to the grocery store. Hot gravel, signposts: shunt, faught. One thing I love about travel is accumulating new vocabulary. Hear a word, say it, repeat it. The process of becoming an individual is repetitive. It involves repeating one’s movements, re-considering one’s thoughts, until the motion, the thought becomes indistinguishable from the person.
The process of individuation is also performative. Becoming an individual requires us to draw from the performances of others. If I lived by myself in the desert, how would I know how to behave.
The sun came out. I wore Sondra’s black wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses, my neck and hair tied back in a bandana. My skin turned pink.
We played two shows: Santa Fe and Albuquerque; then we had two days off until Amarillo, Norman, St. Joseph, and on and through the middle of the country to Des Moines, Chicago, Columbus, Cleveland. Pennsylvania, then home to Brooklyn. We’d started in Los Angeles.
On our two days off, we stayed with Ben and Roland at the Dome. We couldn’t make it out to the geodesic homestead our first night in New Mexico because the rain would wash out the road (thus the stay at Aaron’s in town, the errands, the tracks) but the rain dried fast. The Dome is located somewhere in the desert between Santa Fe and Taos. The town is called Espanola, but from the front porch of the Dome, you can’t see a town. You see buttes. BLM land. There’s a dirt road and another dirt road and then a dirt drive and the human-borne paths cross a system of arroyos.
Ben told us how Roland’s wife once tried to cross an arroyo during a storm. She misjudged the current and nearly cut off her hand when she was swept downstream and got snagged in a barbed wire fence.
In the desert, heat and light and cut are pure. I could almost forget the words self-mythologize, fabricate scarcity.
My dad had died sixteen days before Albuquerque. I didn’t want to tell anyone. I wanted it to be a secret. Back in New York, someone I trusted had robbed me. I didn’t want to talk about this, either. I wanted it to be a secret, too. I also wanted to tell everyone, shout it loud, but I’m shamed by things that shouldn’t shame me. What is shame. What is cut.
(Was it Leslie Jamison who wrote: “intellect swells around hurt”?)
All year, I’ve been making work about cuts and digs. I’ve been writing confessional poems and critical essays about women, art, the sunset. The world doesn’t need any more photographs of sunsets. Sometimes it seems our cultural institutions only support women who write about sex and penises, ice cream and meat. Women who like to get naked. Who have good bodies. Who take self-portraits. Women who know how to pose. Sometimes I’m tired of third-wave feminism. Sometimes it seems all artists must be body artists. Sometimes I want to be me, unkempt me, sexless me, with my frizzy hair and faded clothes. Outside the Dome, on my back on an inflatable mattress, my hamstrings and shoulders ill with ache (the meat kind of ache), I write:
In the sunset, there is no cultural past.
In the sunset, there is no sex.
Note: in the sunset — not — at sunset. Time is cultural. So is sex. So is moment.
One is receptive to the sunset the moment it appears.
One receives the sunset as the angle lessens. In this way,
the sunset is parliament to all forms of measured loss.
If there be a philosophy of the sunset, it must appear and reappear
in adherence to the freshness of its image.
If I take on the burden of writing a philosophy of the sunset, I
must appear and reappear in adherence to the freshness
of my image. Freshness: a kind of cleanliness,
a kind of death.
If I take on the burden of writing philosophy, the language
must be genderless.
At midnight, it is hard to know at what depth the archetype’s cry
will reverberate, how long it will be until it dies.
At noon, the archetype sleeps.
I am in between. It is morning.
We drive to Chimayo. Ben at the wheel, Sondra in front, me in the backseat with our water bottles and tote bags. The last line of Meghan’s Chimayo poem stuck in my head like a pop song: “I was inappropriate in gold.”
Chimayo is a site of miracles. I’m still not sure what miracle means. But I have a plastic baggie from when I bought a ghost bead bracelet from a two-spirit person in the parking lot of a reservation gas station. The baggie is tiny. The bracelet is tiny; I have child-sized wrists. I fill the baggie full of holy dirt. It looks like a bag of heroin. I could get addicted to miracles, I think. Couldn’t anybody.
I feel like I need a miracle. I tell myself, I do know miracles. The miracle of modulating from past to present tense. The miracle of friendship. The miracle of crossing a continent. A while ago, I shared an article that decried (mourned? vocalized?) the lack of female road narratives. Like this is something that women don’t just do: get in the car and drive. Book shows and readings in places they’ve never been, show up, make friends. Watch sand dry from the head of a butte or from the gut of an alluvial fan. Seems like I’ve been a punk for so long that there’s no other way for me to live.
But driving can’t cleanse me of my cuts.
Driving can’t cleanse me of my gender.
Driving can’t cleanse me of my status anxiety.
Joan Didion writes about the desert twice in The White Album, first in “Holy Water” and again in “At the Dam”. She speaks of a “reverence for water” but what she’s really talking about is power.
She says: “I wanted to drain Quail myself”; “I wanted to produce some power”; “pull it down and then refill it”; “I wanted to shut down all flow”; “I wanted to stay”; “I wanted to be the one”; “I want it still.”
At the Hoover Dam, she steps across the star map, an illustration of the sidereal revolution of the equinox, that “fixes forever” the date the dam was dedicated. She writes: “I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.”
From Wikipedia’s Dynamo (disambiguation) page:
- Dynamo, a magnetic device originally used as an electric generator
- Dynamo theory, a theory relating to magnetic fields of celestial bodies
- Solar dynamo, the physical process that generates the Sun’s magnetic field
The word dynamo comes from the Greek dynamis, meaning “power.”
Dictionary.com offers two definitions: 1. an electric generator, 2. an energetic, hardworking, forceful person.
I think, Joan. You became your dynamo. You became immortal. As immortal as the sun’s archetype, that is.
In Santa Fe, I walk the tracks in the other direction, to the yoga studio. The biological process of becoming a body is repetitive. The social process of becoming a body in space is also repetitive. It’s also performative. In yoga, you’re supposed to repeat but you’re not supposed to perform. Not in the way we think of performing, like on a stage, or in a video. But I do perform, in ways I’m proud of and in ways I’m not. (I once left a man after he pointed to an American Apparel advertisement and said: “This is what you’d look like if you actually exercised.” More recently, I left a man who had the gall to say, after closing a browser of bondage porn: “I prefer a Japanese body.”)
(They knew what to say to enrage me. But still, I can’t help but want to look good, be perfect. Their words make me eat smarter, move harder.)
The yoga teacher is an older woman who tells us she used to ride horses. She corrects my arms, coaxing them further and further from my core. She whispers in my ear: “Take up more space.”
Pledge: to take up more space. From California to the New York island.
Solar dynamo,
use the heat from your sun salutations to generate a magnetic field
Dynamo theory,
remember the attractive and repulsive qualities of your celestial vibrations
Dynamo,
when you twist, an electric current pulses outwards from your heart
Originally published at jasminedreame.tumblr.com.
