THE BUILD is now SUCCULENT
Seasons change and so did I
At some point, Lawrence of Arabia was on the TV. There was the charge on Aqaba, “Nothing is written,” Lawrence blowing out the match. Staggering. I recall he left the Seven Pillars of Wisdom manuscript on the train and had to write it over from scratch, from memory. What he began — not the book, the great deed, in the desert — was never properly completed if such a thing was ever possible, as today it still seems not to be. Gnarly rumors still swirl about his proclivities, last time I checked. But David Lean’s sprawling, staggering masterpiece has always stuck with me.
The most recent private screening I attended really leaned in and screened it whole, intermission and all. During that time I was reminded of why it stuck: not the runtime, not the exploits, not the history or the exoticism or the death and the robes and the glittering blue eyes. It was this:
“I like it because it’s clean,” he adds. End of conversation.
Of course now I’m reminded it was my first encounter with this, another touchstone of cinema in my life:
There’s a desert California, and I spent New Year's Eve Y2K there. I woke up to the twenty-first century in a campsite folding chair surrounded by bees. I recorded my most recent LP, the self-titled Vast Asteroid, in the desert, in the freezing rain, at Rancho de la Luna studios, the weekend of Donald Trump’s inauguration and the release of my first book The Art of Being Free. I turned 40 in this desert. The view from that campsite folding chair, mountains stretching from end to end of the horizon, became my laptop wallpaper when I returned; I’m looking at it now.
The list goes on. It will go on. The desert is clean. Open, not blank. Vast, not empty. This is not a void. The desert reminds me there is no such thing as a genuine void. Each one you think you see is only a mirage. (Yes, some mirages are invisible.)
At this moment, the call of the desert has grown stronger than ever. I’m going to be spending a lot more time out there, in the broad sunned zone stretching from the Mojave through the Sonoran desert and out into the Basin and Range Province. The past isn’t there begging to be belabored, nor the future to be predicted. Presence of mind increases. Presence of heart:
The Athonites of St. Anthony’s Monastery outside Florence, Arizona, just south of the Gila and east of Cactus Forest, understand spiritually both the visibly inhospitable and the invisibly life-giving aspects of the desert, forested as the physical eye can see with xeromorphic succulents, sometimes referred to as resurrection plants.
More and more people I talk to nowadays want to live in the woods. A lot more, judging by population, the Census and Electoral College votes are turning to the desert. There’s plenty to go around. You can go from downtown in America’s fifth-largest city to the manifest middle of nowhere in around 30 minutes. Even hyper trendy Joshua Tree yawns into the heat-shimmered sands after a handful of miles. A ghost town named Siberia has as its neighbor one called Bagdad. Due east, at the foot of Mojave Trails National Monument, sits Amboy, Pop. 4.
Between the last settlements of the L.A. megalopolis and the fringes of metro Phoenix, we have a genuine real-life frontier, befitting the place where the last U.S. territory between Canada and Mexico became the most recent of the contiguous 48 states. Here tribes and empires have vanished, and lavish cities that never were. Beyond the deep Southwestern desert, things change; the altitude, the vibe; it can get bone-chilling at not-necessarily winter times of the year, and that’s not my desert. Those places are not where I want to be watching the present, as opposed to the past or the future, with invisible, spiritual, eyes. No offense, but I do get much more freedom, and far better an anchor, from the Gadsden Purchase and its anchorite-graced environs than from the headspace of the Gadsden Flag. I’m not interested in treading on anyone but snakes.
Which means I’m most inclined to lean out, opt out, nope out on the tail-eating snakes dominating so much of tech and politics now. One does not simply walk away from tech and politics, both of which ate the world long ago, or, really, just keep on eating it, a cannibalistic impulse at cosmic odds with the life-giving spring of the desert-traversing Lord. But lessons need to be learned and administered, not with mere words but actions, with the taking up of incarnate positions, not abstract ones. I said most of what I had to say on tech and politics over the past three years, in Human Forever, in speeches on the road, and here in this newsletter. It’s a hopeful sign that many are coming around now, but while the words on the screen are catching up, too many, in life, fall further behind, or, really, away. “Mind-blowing” events, sects, manifestos, cultic lore, warring factions — you have to seek the desert to lift a rock and not find a host of those formerly marginal things crawling and crowding beneath.
“Governance is the administration of Power,” my brother in matters technological and spiritual, Ardian Tola, wrote not long ago. “Power is not derived from the seat of the philosopher but from the crucible of the frontier. Government is always adjudicated by competition on the frontier.” But he also wrote “Go to the frontier to hear the silence of the Sky Father. Only the Monasteries will reopen your frontier. The frontier, where God merges with man, awaits you.” These words are rough approximations of what I experience in the desert, where the boundaries of our temporal and spiritual frontiers meet in an arena of beautiful paradox. It’s a presence that hums with a vitality the futurists and nostalgists alike can neither force nor fake.
And so, THE BUILD becomes SUCCULENT. You’ll notice changes in content and emphasis consistent with the themes above, and probably not much more for a while. If you liked THE BUILD, I think you’ll love SUCCULENT, more and more as time goes on. Everyone knows the worshippers of justice and knowledge who pass for politicians and technologists worship fragments of God, as if elevating these now-twisted parts above the Whole offers Promethean redemption through sin. The myth of the holy theft crumbles before the words of the Good Thief amidst the Holy Gift. This is no time for cultish and sectarian violence, in word or deed, although that, it seems, is what we will get. It’s a time to artfully produce beautiful but true work that shows people the eternal resonance of what’s going on with us here and now. Perhaps all our talk will be a little less, and a little less cheap, if we focus it in around that.
Happy trails. Some things do never change.
We bought 10 acres recently, and will keep much of it forested. This is not a retreat as much as it is an action to be more involved in community. We fancy build a small private orthodox chapel on it though, to contribute to the peace we found.
"No prisoners."