darkflavor

Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature by Paul Shepard

…on deserts and prophets.

Landscapes without place names are disorienting; without categorical forms, awful. We think of heaven and hell as places; cling to the idea of an earthly paradise, even though only in a poetic sense; venerate historical sites; and imagine sacred places in terms of habitats. The colors, architecture, and landscapes of visions do not fit out name categories. This quality astonishes the beholder. In spite of the threat of the unknown he is fascinated, freed momentarily from the name bonds and the web of intellectual and emotional associations signaled by them. He escapes, a traveler in the highest sense, awakened and inspired. He does not return entirely to the old vision or the old words. He has crossed a threshold to that world where silence reigns. He sees more clearly in this world the vividness of color and form, its “meaning,” and the mystical importance of wordlessness and namelessness.

Temple and moutain are the sacred centers for communication of the core of belief. Here the society enfolds and orients the individual with ceremonies incorporating motion, sound, smell, space. Recognition of ineffable otherness has, in contrast, no fixed signals in the confrontation. Silence and emptiness convey divine immanence by their lack of prosaic forms. The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien, sensorily austere, esthetically abstract, historically inimical. It is always described as boundless and empty, but the human experience there is never merely existential. Its solitude is a not-empty void, a not-quiet silence. Its forms are bold and suggestive. The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible. In other habitats, the rim of sky above the horizontal is broken or obscured; here, together with the overhead portion, it is infinitely vaster than that of rolling countryside and forest lands. The moon, sun and stars are perceptually exaggerated lower in the sky. Apperent motion in the horizontal plane is always greater. In an unobstucted sky the clouds seem more massive, sometimes grandly reflecting the earth’s curvature on their concave undersides. The angularity of desert landforms imparts a monumental architecture to the clouds as well as to the land.

The constancy of sensory experience in the desert — or in a cave in the desert — is in effect sensory deprivation. This is the saturation of solitude, the ultimate draft of emptiness, needing courage and sanity to face. It brings introversion, contemplation, hallucination. Space and time and silence are metaphors of the eternal and infinite. To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.