Stillness and Desert
I step out of our room and into the cold of the predawn hours. The big dipper hangs in the purple-turquoise sky, pointing towards the north star, but the other stars are starting to fade, hidden by light emanating from a streak of soft orange hugging the horizon.
The world is still. I strain to listen, but am faced with utter silence: not even nocturnal insects, not even the wind, not even my breath. The only sounds I can hear are a faint ringing in my ear and the whoosh of air if I turn my head quickly. The quiet is immense and vast. A feeling wells up within me, "this is where I could come to think, to write."
A swath of pink sandwiched by deeper indigo hues circumscribes the sky above the mountains in the west. And as the sun inches towards sunrise in the east so too does this glow of pink inch closer towards setting in the west. Are these colors what Agnes Martin spent her days looking at? Is this what sustained her compulsion to perfect those bands of pastel paint?
After lunch we visit Noah Purifoy's outdoor desert sculptures, assembled over 15 years. Facing a dilapidated stage adorned by fading white stars on blue paint, rusting folding chairs are set up in a sparse array, waiting for echoes of a performance already given. Bars of shiny tube metal are interlocked in an organic skeleton. Rickety contraptions built atop bicycles and wagons line up orderly on train tracks. Toilet bowls are stacked into imposing forms and hold up archways. Metal bars alternately sing and groan as they waver in the wind and strain under the weight of holding up Adrian's little theatre.
I don't know what Noah was trying to say, but his pieces feel pregnant with meaning. I imagine it's not unlike the fixation, the urges I feel when I find my mind circling around words and concepts. When words take on symbolic resonance and meaning that I'm not sure they have for anyone else. I feel Noah's compulsion coursing through every one of his precarious assemblages of found materials.
As we wander the desolate desert landscape, strewn with brambles, ferns, and the inexplicable modern dance contortions of the Joshua trees, the whole desert is compulsion after compulsion after compulsion issuing defiantly from the sand. Why, Joshua tree, do you bend like that? Why, why do you persist in face of the searing sun? Do you even need to answer that question?
Why is it that in that first desert night, I impulsively felt, "this is where one comes to think"? What is this inspiration? It's different from going to the ocean and letting the profound blue and steady cadence of the ocean waves fill my consciousness. It's different from going to forested mountains and letting the myriad shimmers of light, rustling of leaves, and chirping of birds catch my curiosity. The desert isn't nourishing, doesn't "complete" me like that. But something about the openness and inhospitableness of the desert lays bare the compulsions within me. The desert opens me and lets me be. In the desert that compulsion is all there is.
I imagine my response to art is not unlike my response to the ocean, forest, and desert. Upon hearing a grand symphony or the perfect earworm (*cough* "Levitating" *cough*) I feel a release and am filled with relief from a tension that I may not even know was within me. I resonate, "yes! that's it!" Upon stepping out into the still desert night I instead unearth the outlines of the quiet inner compulsions within me in an, "ah! that's what was buried there! let’s dig more." Compulsions and relief from those compulsions, both are equally engrossing.