desert

Embarassing Personal Photogaph: Me (really), on a bike, in the Sinai desert.I have to admit to an outsider's fascination with deserts. I grew up in the flat, green Midwest and then moved to New York at 17. Prior to that, my desert experience was limited to one family vacation to the Grand Canyon at age 14. But I am fascinated by the desert landscape, a term which indeed, Jackson notes, "conjures up a pleasant image of silence and mystery and strange beauty" (63). Since moving to New York, I've traveled through Texan, Mexican, and Israeli deserts, which essentially all look the same. I don't think my fascination with deserts stems from an interpretation of "the relentless progress of ruin and abandonment…as a kind of romantic growth, something to be recorded and perpetuated before it's too late" (62). The idea of what Jackson describes as "vanishing America" doesn't hold weight for me—the physical location of the desert, whether it be in the US or elsewhere, is not important. I am interested much more with the contradicting thoughts and emotions the desert lanscape elicits. What I want out of the desert is the opposite of progress: vast nothingness. I want the "panorama of endless range country with a rim of violet mesas and dark mountains" (57). What I see as one of the most interesting contradictions of my desert-fascination, and is clearly a tension that many others face, is the loneliness of the desert. Jackson describes Chihuahua's most striking feature, "exhilarating at first, then depressing, is its emptiness" (45). In the next chapter, writing on New Mexico, "it [was] the sort of landscape which (before the creation of the bomb) we associated with the world after history had come to an end" (57). Even though he then goes on to explain that this landscape may have existed more purely in the past, the concept behind desert fascination remains the same: many people like to live in shared spaces (i.e., cities, suburbs, towns), and then occasionally trek out to an empty place to see the difference. Is it that we want to feel humbled by nature? Do we like to imagine what it would be like to give up community, to “get back to the earth” and live in isolation? The desert is a challenge. I am enthralled by it, and afraid of it. Such is the case with many vast land or seascapes: the ocean, canyons, mountains, etc. Something so enormous, so entirely not created by man, and furthermore completely capable of destroying one, is both awe-and fear-inspiring. Perhaps the desert is so appealing to me because it represents a sort of physical Other, completely removed from the familiar geographic scenes from my life. Part of me worries that if I were to experience the desert more often, it would lose much of its significance. I am not a religious person, but to me the silence and mystery and strange beauty of the desert is something sacred.

I picked a random Brazilian movie, and it turned out to be perfect for this particular assignment. I watched “Cinema, Aspirins, and Vultures,” a movie made in 2005 about a German man traveling through the barren desert of Northeast Brazil in 1942. He left Germany because he did not want to participate in the war there, and he landed a job selling aspirin to the poor townsfolk of the nordeste, which is experiencing a drought. The film uses strange camera technique – it almost looks like the movie was shot in 1942. It focuses the camera on the people in the film, and so there are not many (if any) landscape shots, despite the open space to shoot film. Surely a high definition camera would capture all sorts of colors, but this movie was about the characters’ relationship with each other. That said, the main character, Johann represents a true traveler, as our class has defined it. Johann claims that he left Germany with no particular destination. He came to Brazil and liked it, so he stayed. He seems to do everything without reflecting on how this journey is changing him. He found work that allowed him to continue seeing new places, and he does this work efficiently. There is no sign from him that he does not belong in Brazil selling aspirin. One would think that this was his destined place in the world from the beginning. Tara Kolton wrote in her essay, “It is in this light that the Western world (particularly America here) views the less developed world as a place that can teach the traveler something about himself.”(21) Johann, a Western traveler of the 20th century, seems to have known everything about himself before he even started his journey.