writing - blog

A man can perish so easily in the desert. He is like a man underwater, holding his breath. Sooner or later he must come to the surface. Sooner or later the desert survivor must drink, he must drink to survive.
How does he find his way to water? His way out? How does he escape the certainty of a waterless death in the desert? He follows tracks. He follows any track he can find, any prints, any marks, any alem (stone markers) even the strange wavering line left by rootless dry bushes, windblown and rolling like tumbleweed in a Western. Man is a track following creature. He will follow any track, even the wrong one, to his death- or lucky escape from the burning hell, the inferno that is the desert without water.
I realised, after I had been in the desert a while, moved there, travelled there, that I didn’t need to, hadn’t of needed to. I knew its secrets already. The desert is in all of us. It’s in the first books- the Bible is a desert book, so is the Koran. Poets- Shelley, Yeats and Eliot come to mind- all write with perfect accuracy about the desert though they have never been there. Cowboy westerns are desert morality tales. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Searchers. Even modern versions such as No Country for Old Men; all of them tap into and exploit our inner desert landscapes, our prior knowledge.
I suffered from migraines as a child. No pills worked. I had to lie in a darkened room and feel the ebb and flow of the pain until it had passed six or seven hours later. I found only one thing worked to ameliorate the pain, only one thing distanced me enough from it so that I could fall asleep. Sleep was really the only cure. But to fall asleep was hard. I used to imagine a vast studio of white, a curved penumbra with an endless horizon, glowing at the edges, the white of white sand reflecting sunlight, perhaps even a few dried bones, a cow’s skull shrunk and shrivelled remains, a typical desert offering.
Is it in any surprise that the first atom bomb tests were made in the desert. This huge and awful replication of the sun’s heat fused the sand into an impure form of glass called Trinitite after the bomb’s first name: Trinity, itself a sign of the suspect megalomania behind such a project. Trinitite bears some resemblance to natural glasses, some very pure, all found in nature and known as tektites. The purest of all, completely transparent with a slight greenish tinge are to be found in the Egyptian great sand sea. The knobbly cruddy Trinitite from Almogadro looks crude by comparison. One understands immediately some force a million times more powerful than the bomb made these rocky lumps of natural glass.
I had already written about the desert in a book criticised by one desert explorer as ‘proving you don’t have to go to the desert to write about it’. But, as I said, poets had proved that centuries ago. Some things you don’t have to experience. In fact the whole nature of experience fascinated me. How much did you need and in what exact quantity and quality? The desert was my way of getting ‘experience’ in the sense of dealing with situations or people whom I might never otherwise encounter. Young men seek such experience traditionally, but now we keep up such endeavors longer. I was glad for this type of experience because, as a writer, though I had had a fair number of encounters with scary people I had never had to work with them or try and get them to do things. But in the desert I had to.
But parallel to getting this experience with handling difficult people- Bedouin, Policemen, customers, was another vein that pulled away from such mundane experience. This was a sense, purer, and closer to the poetic vision of the desert, a feeling that you only needed so much worldliness, so much push and shove to get your way. That if you had too much you’d lose sight of something.
But enough about me. Far more interesting – to me, now, at least- is the prospect of the Future. I’ve given it capitals throughout because a) it is obviously important b) I like capitalising and c) I want to distinguish it from individual events in the future- that other one. 9.
I grew up in the 1970s really- gosh back to me already! By the 1980s I was already looking back and looking forward. I had escaped my time so to speak. As soon as you can read books and watch films from other eras- and appreciate them- you’ve escaped the tyranny of the present. People who don’t get that kind of mobility are doomed to look back on their miniscule length of living on earth as their only benchmark of time passing. Depressing. Historians are generally rather cheerful folk, geologists even more so- the longer the timescale the rosier things look.
So, I grew up in the 1970s- meaning this was when I took what was on offer- on TV and the Radio and what my parents said and I swallowed it all whole. The 1970s were the beginning of the endgame for the planet. By this I mean the sort of local doom of Silent Spring now spread to the whole earth. We were all doomed. The whole place was on a high road to hell. A new ice age was coming (check old copies of New Scientist and John Gribbin’s scare text ‘The coming Ice age’). But most obviously and most repeatedly the deserts were encroaching.
JG Ballard wrote about it in fiction and school textbooks had photos of fences under creeping dunes. Arable land was turning into dust. The soviet Aral sea was a sand sea. Lake Chad was filling up too. Writers brought up on the dust bowl stories of John Steinbeck applied that imagery to the planet. We were drying up, turning into a global desert.
And the big players in the 1970s- the people who gave it that peculiar flavour of desperation and novelty were the desert dwellers- the Arabs and Israelis and Palestinians- the oil rich and the dispossessed vying for the agenda.
But it was that picture of the creeping sand, overwhelming houses, fences, roads, telegraph poles, railway lines that burned itself into my retina. Years later, when I actually travelled in the desert I was really pleased to discover the road to Bahariya oasis in the Egyptian Sahara makes a huge loop, adding sixty km to the journey, just to avoid a long dune. The dune isn’t that high, it’s just that it will overwhelm the road. Even if you cleared it everyday it will cover the road each night. The desert can be as relentless as a flood. It cannot be stopped.
If you read the scientific press now there are rarely articles about increasing desertification. The idea that the Sahara is going to cover Africa, cross the Med and creep all over Europe is just not in fashion. Desert dune articles are more technical nowadays- some will be about moving dunes and some about dunes that never move. Quite a few will question the whole notion that desertification is even happening on a serious scale.Fashions come and go. Maybe the encroaching desert will come back in. That doesn’t concern me here, my point is- the encroaching desert was the way we chose to view the future in the 1970s.
Fashions come and go but the desert remains. I had to visit it. My first trips were in the early 1990s, but it wasn’t until 2004 that I made my first real desert journeys. And it wasn’t until 2007 that I began taking people out into the desert who had paid money for the experience. In the seven years since then I’ve seen a lot of dry rock, sand, empty places. But that tells you almost nothing about the significance of the place. It’s as if the mere addition of dates, times, bald description, strips away the essential atemporality of the desert experience. The desert takes you outside time, back in time and also, I found, into the future. This is why this book is called The Desert and the Future.
Think about it. When you weaken your conviction of the past being elsewhere you find yourself in a strange place. In the desert Bedouin will crack jokes about events that happened 1500 years ago. You will see tyre tracks left by Bagnold’s Ford Model A’s in the 1930s, tracks that look as if they were made a week ago, maybe a few weeks at most. The place is unchanged in not just centuries, but thousands of years. The last people who lived in the super arid part of the Sahara I criss-crossed died 4000 years ago or more. Only their rock art and stone tools remain to remind us this desert used to bloom.
I would argue that the extreme temporality of the current era is precisely what makes it hard to accurately predict the future. You need to go into a different zone, a place like the desert where past and present and future are welded together by silence, emptiness, starlight.