Enantiodromea: Autumn in the Desert
There’s just something about the desert. Turns me into a believer every time, just like Terry Tempest Williams said it would. No place to hide. There’s just something about it. Something about that coyote-lean beauty. Something about those splitter cracks that go alllll the way up, way past the the point at which sticking my hands and feet in them to ascend feels like glorious torture. There’s just something about the desert.
And never is there more something about the desert than in Autumn. A teacher tells me that in Chinese Medicine this season is characterized by the metallic element–the scythe that separates the wheat from the chaff, the essential from the superfluous. If we are to align with this season, we must begin the descent, deepening into what is vital, and letting the rest fall away. The Winter will be long. Always is. How can we prepare ourselves for its stillness, its expansiveness, its cold quiet? I suppose these are the questions to ask in Autumn.
I can scarcely imagine a better place for this inquiry than Indian Creek in the Bears Ears National Monument. It’s an honest place. In all directions, a pageant of every red known to God with the occasional fleck of deep green. Harsh, but kind in its clarity. No bullshit. Has a way of drawing life together. It engenders camaraderie in such a way that a waving biker on an epic journey somehow makes me feel supported in my obscure, formless, lifelong art project as I wind my way in on Highway 211 in a creaky van that was born to be there.
Such was the case a few weekends ago. There were peaceful crazies descending on the place from all over, frothing at the mouth to climb those worldclass cracks and following the magnetic scent of what they call “desert season.” It just makes sense to be there this time of year. There’s just something about the desert.
Oh, and there’s something else.
That stuff I said about the desert being honest…that’s only true during the day. At night, it’s a different story. The place transforms. Becomes a trickster playground of moonshimmer and shadow, as deceptive at night as it is frank during the day. The post-sun desert is the domain of the mythical Coyote, Yucca Man, the ghosts of Everett Ruess & Ed Abbey, La Llorona and countless unidentified flying flashes. A place to be adored, but not trusted.
It’s a place of extremes, as they say. This utter transformation from apparent candor to secret snickering scheminess calls to mind the greek term enantiodromea–the universal tendency of things approaching an extreme to turn into their opposite. It turns out the propensity to entangle applies even to antipodes. Proteins do it. Frustrating garden hoses do it. I do it.
And living into that truth is part of what drew me down to the desert a few weeks ago. Deepening into what is essential and letting the rest fall away, yes. Touching a blast of long gone Summer fire, yes.
And so it went. And although the dichotomy of night and day in the desert makes my memory fuzzy, I know this to be as true as anything else: there was crack-climbing and there was dancing.
In some remote region of my remembering body, there plays on a scene of sincere desert bacchanal. The date was not quite October 31st, but I think I heard someone rightfully say “Fuck the Gregorian, it’s All Hallows Eve!”
Costumed and drunk on desert night, we joined the ranks of Yucca Man and Coyote. Spiderman was there. Bob Ross was there. Edna Mode and a few other Incredibles were there. The hideous child of Steve Buschemi and a Walrus was there. There was a witch doctor and at least one bedsheet ghost. Kali was there, four arms and all. Ancient ritual found modern form amongst plastic-clothed hooligans making some kind of sense beneath a swath of starry sky.
And there amongst them was the beloved bride to be of my beloved brother, dressed as her father, replete with full Pakistani garb. Her father had died a few days before. It was not a sudden thing, but a protracted affair of ups and downs and ongoing uncertainty. Many machines and tubes and sepsis and pain. He was awake and alert when they finally pulled the plug. The air went out of me when I heard that. I wanted so badly to hug my brother, who was on the other side of the country, who I imagined was outside on a dark DC sidewalk on respite from days in the stale hospital. Once they removed life support, it took him a day or so to cross over. Grahame Aziz Khan. We danced him alive again and laid him to rest in ecstatic ceremony. Grahame Aziz Khan. Bless his soul. He will rest well. The dust stirred up by prayerful feet in the moonlight told me so. The first sliver of pale sunlight in the canyon–the only possible conclusion to the dancing–told me so.
At least that’s one version. In another, we were in bed by 9:30pm, shivering in our bags, bloodied fingers flipping book pages as we patiently awaited the accumulation of precious warmth. Hard to say which came to pass.
There’s just something about the desert.