Ben Ehrenreich’s Dispatches From the Beginning and End of the World

DESERT NOTEBOOKS
By Ben Ehrenreich

Silent, static, skeletal, the desert has always been a symbol of death. That’s part of its appeal. But it also signifies transcendence: It is the realm of the prophet as well as the outcast. For the Desert Fathers of third-century Egypt, Christianity’s founding monastics, the desert was not merely a place for undistracted prayer or a sanctuary from persecution; as the realm of the Devil, it was a spiritual battleground. You went there as if to the front line.

In “Desert Notebooks,” Ben Ehrenreich, a columnist for The Nation, confronts more familiar demons. The book has two strands. The first, which is in the nature of a journal, describes scenes from Ehrenreich’s life in desert America. From a cabin near Joshua Tree National Park he moves to a desolate apartment in Las Vegas (a city rife with “compressed, ambient violence”) to undertake a semester’s writing scholarship. In Joshua Tree he hikes in the desert, sometimes with his partner. They look at the night sky, enjoy the scent of creosote bushes after rain, admire petroglyphs and watch owls. (The owl, real and imagined — “deaths dreadfull messengere,” in Edmund Spenser’s words — is the book’s presiding spirit, a little desert god flitting from chapter to chapter.)

In Las Vegas, Ehrenreich’s world shrinks. He goes jogging and observes the many homeless people sleeping near his apartment. All the time, he summarizes the daily horrors in the news with ticker-tape detachment (it’s 2018), especially the latest works of the colossal wreck who is his country’s commander in chief: “the Rhino,” a creature so damned its real name shall not, it seems, be uttered. Having apologized to rhinoceroses, which do “not deserve to be tarred by this analogy,” Ehrenreich remembers a speech given by the president after his first State of the Union address, in which he lamented the difficulty of unifying the country. “Without a major event where people pull together,” Trump said, “that’s hard to do.” That “Desert Notebooks” was written before the coming of Covid-19 only makes it feel more, rather than less, timely. Read two months into lockdown, it feels creepily prescient: We are all living in the desert now.

To observe that these notes from arid America, vivid though they are, lack weight is not a criticism, since they are really only the framework for a series of learned, arcane, startlingly original mini-essays — on Mayan cosmology, on colonialism, on black holes, on the racist elisions and misdirections of ethnologists, and on the suppression and distortion of Indigenous knowledge. Ehrenreich’s scholarly reflections serve to locate the origin of America’s present crisis in the atrocities of its founding; but the root causes he identifies are above all epistemological, and far older than America. We are living in the “Time of Crisis,” he contends, “Vertigo Time”; though he is less interested in the Rhino or other manifestations of the apocalypse than in our flawed conception of time itself — which, in his view, has “led us to precisely this perilous moment, in which everything, time included, appears to be on the verge of collapse.”

“Messianic time” is Walter Benjamin’s term for “time filled with the presence of the now.” Confusingly, Ehrenreich uses the same term to mean almost the opposite: a model in which events are understood to occur “like the beads of a rosary” (Benjamin’s words) with Christ’s birth at one end and his “return hung like a lantern” (Ehrenreich’s) at the other. This vision the author sets against nature’s “timeless and cyclical rule of death and regeneration.” It is linear time, “that empty, overbright hallway with a single door at the end,” that, in the hands of colonialists, capitalists, missionaries and nationalists, has driven us to the cliff-edge of the present: to “active shooter alerts and fracking-induced earthquakes,” to “concentration camps for the immigrant poor,” to the ascent of despots and the collapse of the Antarctic glaciers. (To say nothing of pathogens flushed out of the forests of Hubei Province, China.)

We might ask where the desert comes into all this — what lessons might arid landscapes conceal about time? It’s true that its passage is generally more discrete in deserts than elsewhere, partly because there the mark of history, the human mark, tends to be less conspicuous. But it’s not just that the flow of Ehrenreich’s “Messianic time” appears, here, to be arrested. Look out on any desert landscape, from the Egyptian boulder-plains of the Desert Fathers to Ehrenreich’s relatively verdant Joshua Tree National Park. In their apparent minimalism, and the repetition of their forms (rock, cactus, bush; rock, cactus, bush), and the illusion they present of limitlessness, desert landscapes promise nothing less than time’s erasure. This the Desert Fathers understood. “If eternity, all the past and every future, flits through every moment,” Ehrenreich writes, “then we can grab it there.” “There,” in this sentence, might be that singular moment — but it might also be a place.

Ehrenreich’s desert is not a depopulated void, of course. Petroglyphs, scribed into desert rocks thousands of years ago, alert him to the human pasts of places deemed unpeopled “wastes” by the first white men to apprehend them. And then there is Las Vegas, a hysterical mockery of environmental providence, conjured in a location where evaporation has always far exceeded rainfall. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, traveling in New Mexico in the 1980s, declared that in America, deserts “denote the emptiness, the radical nudity that is the background to every human institution.” Las Vegas is that nudity tasseled and flaunted. “I never left the desert,” Ehrenreich realizes. “This is it.” And he doesn’t just mean the heat.

It’s probably inevitable that a book that critiques the linear model of time will also be ambivalent about both the act of writing itself and the clicking rosary that is narration. “Desert Notebooks” sometimes seems to aspire to the atomized condition of sand. Writing itself is invariably a form of plunder, Ehrenreich accepts; and “all narratives are lies.” Certainly he has no illusions that the writer himself can outpace time: “Even if The New York Times loves you and everyone reads your books,” he writes early on, “what is any of it worth? Gossip squeaked between lemmings racing for the cliffs. Why bother to write when there will be no one left to read?”

It’s a question revisited in the final pages (this being a book that exalts the circle over the line), when Ehrenreich unearths the transcript of an interview with Emmanuel Osague, whose Paiute ancestors were massacred in the aftermath of the annexation of California. “It was like the end,” says Osague, “yet our stories still survive.” This note of hope, if not exactly solace, is affirmed by those desert petroglyphs — “bighorn sheep in profile, wavy lines like rivers or serpents or the surface of a stream, six-fingered hands” — and while Ehrenreich’s book might not aspire to such endurance, it is more than lemming-gossip. Out of love and despair (where else does art come from?), he has built a potent memorial to our own ongoing end-times.