Hetmaikaa Desert

POST: L.A.

Where grasses

once wind-waved,

concrete and neon

blossom, birthing

sunset-washed

iron-rich lungfulls,

fledgling devoured the sky,

fractured imagined neon,

flowers to challenge,

a desert never thirsts.

♮ ♮ ♮

The land here looks like tan wrinkles pulled over tight shapes. There is plenty of large-grain sand and gravel, all of it the same fragile white color. Overgrown brittlebushes and aster dot the hills.

They pass across the dilapidated highway, sides and asphalt crumbled in falling sections of jagged blocks, half-eaten by sand. To their right a formidable graveyard of solar panels stretches into the distance. They look like giant broken teeth stuck into the earth in various directions. Beyond the ruins are bigger ruins, of old wars this trio was not a part.

Large yucca palms grow around long-abandoned buildings. In the late morning sun they look like lonely, multi-armed attendants waving semaphore flags. Talking to each other through a ponytail language.

Their destination is the hidden desert of dreams, salt flats known as Hetmaikaa somewhere northeast of Jawbone. Legend says that patterns of sonic waves spill from the mountains when the winds pull across the flat expanse. The low frequencies work to drop the living into a dream state.

Dreaming while walking is a haunting exercise. Pushing forward one step at a time while magical sound, reverberant ribbons from somewhere high to the north, pulls travellers into threads of illusion.

♮ ♮ ♮

Seth stops for a minute, regards the others behind him, looks at the Joshua Trees, and keeps walking down the terminally straight highway. To him the scene feels so typical of people who walk into the desert to perish. At least they brought sun protection and water, plenty of those protein squares, they’ll be fine.

Still, he wonders if he’s ready for this.

Once they turn north, the road meets the ridges to signal Hetmaikaa’s entrance. According to Lyra’s information, the oasis will be at “the corner of the dragon’s tongue”. The long ridge looms ahead, rising ragged from the earth, the real distance confounded by the extreme flatness of the land.

The barely paved road ends in a disintegration of tar-gravel and rock licked into sand. Here the land has been smoothed and stretched, its features flattened between two ridges stretching down like a mouth into the desert flats. A forgotten lakebed in an endoheric zone, a salt-dried tongue filling the space between.

They find a vague path up an erosion trail that hugs the flats, avoiding the mountains to the south. Presumably they will hit a corner somewhere that points them to the oasis. Soon they come across a set of rotted square poles, vertical woodgrain reaching for a blue sky, erosion-worn smooth into frozen fingers. They walk steadily north. The path gradually succumbs to crowns of thistles so thick that they find themselves bushwhacking and blazing their own trail.

Seth feels his tired, hypnagoigic mind wandering.

This is how you leave me, grasping helpless

along cliffside shelves and shifting plates,

she is and like and paper-torn stone borne

from a slight volcanic burst.

“What?” Seth calls, almost tripping over a weirdly solitary and abnormally large rock. He does not see it begin to move.

Lyra snaps her head up. Not immune. She has to remember that. “I had, I didn’t know I drifted, words and figures started to form in front of me, all I could do was read them.” Seth probably cannot hear her from up there. “What did you find?”

She looks to make sure Paisley hasn’t lost them. He ambles a few long steps behind. Hard to tell if he is affected or not.

They stumble ahead through the brush.

♮ ♮ ♮

He walks. Fingers of consciousness lift into a mass of wire-borne impulses, sweeping the full range. The combination of these places, the representation of sentience, combine external to his biological self. A sense that tendrils reach through multifarious vectors, morphologically diverse, extending bulbous through time and location, a measure of mere bits delivered. Through data are perceived conception, the natural extension of the psyche into a world-mind, inherently capable of calculations made possible by an endless stream of information, grouping leaves in swirl by eddies of knowledge.

“Paise? Paise are you OK back there?” The words flange through the air in front of Paisley. He has never reflected like that since… since then, whenever ’then’ was. He looks up, still walking, raises an arm at Lyra. She turns and continues toward Seth.

Unconscious mind, developed like consciousness, would be similarly complex and perform computations without us knowing.

Paisley forwards knowing himself with each step. He will not dream, but the magical strength of the Hetmaikaa works to rebuild something powering his soul.

♮ ♮ ♮

A few minutes later Lyra has reached Seth. He stands next to the rock in the afternoon sun, watching the mountains behind them and reciting:

Prefer the stone

as perfect still

slips silent away to death

Sinking rock

is better caught

as rough its edges felt

Parabolic figures

whisper breath

and bindings melt

Diagonal wisp

into gradient sky:

Green mounds buttressed

a melting blue-gray.

Colors of Los Angeles

bleed softly heart-ward

mixing down the palette

as a golden sun.

Seth slowly recognizes his friends walking towards him. Friends. They are blurry, like mirages, wavy suggestions against the hillside. But then the closer they come, the sharper they are. It is Lyra the Magnificent, she walks up to him perfectly. She seems as solid as a column of air.

An instant of music. Like an evolving plane, engaged to intuition. Enhancing adaptability to the speed of existence. Inherent personality is laid raw, outward facing as if stripped of skin, a gruesome creativity.

The movement becomes a series of eventualities perched hawk-like, spurred by the moment to take flight in any direction. No more choice than influential suggestions, capable of turn-screw solutions in the fraction of form. Lyra sings out:

Sightings shimmer the way

moonlight hunts the shoreline

Sounding out each ending

smoothly infinite the touch

In light, in ubiquity, in resonance;

reflected shades absorbed,

Fondle shapes glimmer, shadow

hinted surfaces, responding curve.

Seth watches Lyra’s statuesque pose as she sings, an ebony figurine against the white fluffy stage of dust, and when she is finished he answers: “These are our true voices! These are signals to Sun Ra, calls for help to the magnificence of Saturn, come save our fate! Layers pinged out and looped through, sifted into each other and shuffled along fractally whistling fifty progressions in organum, solidly resonant firmament of filtered noise!”

He stops suddenly. Lyra, silent, moves again. Seth follows. Paisley trails.

Seeing enough, their unknown pet rock lifts and they watch as it shuffles slowly to the east, stopping to touch a low-lying cactus with big fleshy leaves that look like commas.

♮ ♮ ♮

Paisley guards.

To him, technology is jazz improv; in order to succeed, you must internalize and begin to think how the system thinks, adjust to the continuing behavior. It all involves a complex balance of adaptation and sustenance. Riding the normalized figures of known quantities is not enough, there is a necessity in reconfiguration and expansion through creative design. That we must build our intuition together.

The sun flares higher skyward, beaming thistles as they tumble.

Seth walks furtively along the crusty salt edge, minerals of toxic insulation blossom in fractals of cauliflower slices marking the ground with crystals, he chants in organum:

The artist a cactus.

When cut back,

resources diminished,

forced to grow,

fruit surprisingly.

He spins, Lyra and Paisley behind him look as if they were toys, set onto a dusty table, with peaks of paper-maiche rising around them.

He feels the need to explain, and shouts: “We work towards being who we are! The instinct to just be different, to do something because no one else is. The reason for that is connected to our desire to search for the truth in ourselves!”

“You’re looking for what?” she asks, suddenly right next to him.

He glances at her, astonished. “A reason for words.”

Lyra looks squarely in Seth’s eyes, but she is looking beyond him, opals between her eyelids. The centers swirl.

“Won’t find that here,” she intones, “the poem exists in time as music or theatre, a necessary facet of our entire experience at that moment; as we comprehend its language, encapsulate and translate semiotic tones, feed meaning into our always running sensory system and processing units, we are a biocomputer.”

Paisley lights up at the word, a swirling candy cane of green passing across his face, cheek-lamps cycling smoothly.

♮ ♮ ♮

The flat and quiet desert lurks around them. Above the sweeping ridge to their right, a planet has appeared alone. Or is it a visitor?

Seth watches the evening star as he says, “Is it possible? I have recently noticed the ease at which I can feel the energy present in another person interacting with me. It is amazing what one sees when one pays attention to what is real.”

Lyra reply-chants:

How often do we realize the view around us?

Perceive not the screen of plate glass,

but an encompassing notion of movement through space.

Laws of physics prescribe things like speed,

set us firmly in our expectations, removing fear.

The dynamism propels arcs into time with every moment

of leg, finger, eyelash, lip, or heart.

The very expanse of these things coming together defines a dimension,

describes a place between movement and time.

Mirage-like lines are rolling in from the salts, compressing the image of the other side into impossibly thin stratification. Rusty mountains lean to the north.

A lucid moment, gathered together. It is hard to see, late sun reflecting white into their eyes as they make their way.

♮ ♮ ♮

Nothing lives here. How can there be an oasis?

Salt-blind, they all free-fall forward, one foot at a time, each moment a glimmer of the next. Several minutes or hours of spinning, a ride wave urging on and on and on. Words appear, gravel-voiced harmonic singing, in their heads all the vowels exaggerated, droning:

Living through art, being creation, tapping

quantum torus even now too tensed.

Drink in and sponge, resolve as exuberant

sound, searching pathways to action.

Regardless of approach these three,

attentions swimming as awareness,

flood senseless into consciousness

and outward in expression.

Energy of the creator reified

finds its way to deep connections,

intuition carries them along

pathways occupied by dreams,

a tumbling gyrus endlessly expansive.

Leg by leg around bush by cactus branch, snorting things to help jolt their brains out of ululating hallucinations. When they first started it did not seem so bad. After seeing the pet rock fool them is when things got complicated.

As they meander another hour the dreams taper, Seth and Lyra in a sort of brainfog hangover. Ghosts of visions still pass before them…

curtains of green light, slight figures emerge like mist, barely distinguishable forms, creeping toward them.

ROAD ~~~ ROAD ~~~ ROAD

The words flash at Seth, green and ephemeral, awaking him from a vision. Paisley stands ahead. How did that happen? Or did they turn around? Paisley’s jaw is bright green and scrolling the word ROAD.

♮ ♮ ♮

Beyond them is a dirt road that was not there before. Hidden between the flats and foothills, wide and well-packed dirt disappearing into rust-hued haze. The sun begins to dip under the illusion of a horizon, swept by the orange and gray slopes. The trio starts walking side-by-side, headlong into the unseen.

Lyra calls out to the others, “Something about the smell is familiar. I feel like we’re by a lake?”

They walk deeper into the haze and begin to smell the soil and humidity of a forest. Before long the haze turns into mist and begins to part as they approach a large pool of water, hidden by grasses. A rising moon is silvering the landscape, but the pond glistens unnaturally at the edges. Reflective like glooping mercury or some other heavy metal.

Lyra blurts out, “It looks like an oil spill. Definitely don’t drink it.”

♮ ♮ ♮

Goferaizai listens from where he hides in the tall sawgrass surrounding most of the bank. The travelers, hungry to feel they have found the right place, decide to continue to the center at night. The road here is wide, and their receding shapes soon combine into the dark jungle.

Satisfied, the large tortoise slowly crawls towards the setting sun, into the low vegetation between desert and oasis, munching on a cactus branch.