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DESERT TIME
We’ve all been lost in the mind’s desert. A place, where you lose your sense of direction. A place, where you are constantly haunted by your own shadow. Where the sun rises just to mock you, burning your nerve endings into ash. And as the sun goes down, it leaves a darkness so dense, it can only turn into an entity. This entity won’t let you sleep.
It keeps repeating your failures with a voice emotionless and monotonous. Your personal Hal. A broken disk inside your head. Distorting words, distorting your perception of desert time and space. A red light keeps pulsing in the blackness. Your thoughts crash on windy barrens.
MADNESS IS ONLY A SYMPTOM. DO NOT DIE, says a graffiti on a cemetery wall.
There’s nothing modern about modernity. Our ideas are all ancient. Read the Veda scriptures, and be surprised. Dante said: Hell is repetition. Hell is simulation.
We wrap ourselves in nostalgia these days. For pain relief and system support. We stay immune to ourselves, but not the evening news. What is nostalgia if not sadness? What is sadness if not yearning. Craving.
If we crave a certain food, we should eat it, says Dr Berg in YouTube.
A cave woman knew this and ate sadness for dinner. Then she picked lice from her child’s head.
WE ARE THE ALIENS. LOOK AROUND YOU.
The most recent, great religion, artificial intelligence, was born in the Mojave desert.
If it had a sound, it would be the Santa Ana wind echoing in an abandoned space station.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam were born in the desert. Their sound is a child weeping.
Silence is not silence, really. You can still hear the irregular pulse of time. And through the layers upon layers of sand, the roaring of the ancient city. God Himself escaped to the desert and became a relic. An anthropological freak.
A WOMAN WHO PUT THE DESERT IN DANGER.
A woman wandered into the desert and as the night fell and the fire went out, she saw the magnitude of the universe above and around her. This gave her vertigo, but also a sense of belonging. This belonging she named God.
A woman wandered into the desert and at noonday she confronted her shadow. The shadow made her think of all the things she had sold in herself. Things forgotten. Partsof her that got away. She knew the shadow would always hunt her down. So she named the shadow The Devil.
I CAN NO LONGER RETURN TO MY TRUE SELF . I WILL RETURN TO THE DESERT.
I went to the desert and was never the same again. How does one define change?
The desert is a delicate, magnificent ecosystem. Life persists against all odds. A drop of water makes a desert moss bloom in an instant. Yellow and gold. Atonal symphony of the wind sweeping across a soft plane. The air is thick with red dust. Distances vanish, blur away.
The main character can only be the desert. This I knew from the beginning. Then, slowly, the visitors begun appearing from behind the dunes: The woman in black. The Possessed man. The pianist. Three sisters in mourning. The poet. The lady with a broken heart. Jesus as a boy. And their shadows.
Have you met your double, your caricature?