Imagining Wild America by Knott John R.;

Author:Knott, John R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Over the desert and the canyons, down there in the rocks, a huge vibration of light and stillness and solitude shapes itself into the form of hovering wings spread out across the sky from the world’s rim to the world’s end. Not God—the term seems insufficient—but something unnameable, and more beautiful, and far greater, and more terrible. (AR, 120)

This is something beyond the mystery of the obvious, a suggestion of a presence much larger and more powerful than anything one could expect to find in the visible scene. One could call it a kind of desert sublime, arousing awe and fear, which Abbey responds to despite his hard-boiled rejection of the supernatural and the fraudulently mystical. In his classic The Desert (1901), which Abbey admired, John Van Dyke asks, “What is it that draws us to the boundless and the fathomless?” and concludes that it is the sublime that we feel in “immensity and mystery.”21 Abbey does not invoke the sublime so readily, and his temperament was profoundly different from Van Dyke’s, yet his response to the mysteriousness of the desert resembles Van Dyke’s and may have been shaped by it. Van Dyke anticipated Abbey and other writers on the American desert in his emphasis on the desert’s silences, the “splendor of its light,” and the paradoxical grandeur of its desolation.

Abbey’s transient vision of hovering wings holds a suggestion of terror as well as of beauty because the immense stillness conveys a sense of nothingness that seems wholly alien to ordinary human consciousness and points to the annihilation of consciousness in death. In an interview Abbey once said, “I am terrified and at the same time fascinated by solitude, silence, and death,” and went on to comment on his attraction to the “silent tension between death and life” that he found in the desert.22 One sees the danger in the appeal of the nothingness Abbey finds in the desert in his attraction to the abyss, particularly apparent in the Grandview Point chapter of Desert Solitaire. Searching along the rim of the canyon for the tourist who will eventually be found dead, he looks down into the “awful dizzying vacancy” and imagines that the man might have gone over the edge deliberately, “spellbound by that fulfillment of nothingness” (DS, 238). The passage suggests Abbey’s own romantic attraction to death, seen as the ultimate way of merging with the other world of the desert. His frequently stated wish to die on a rock in the desert, which he tried to realize in fact, is one form this attraction takes. Here it takes the form of envy of the tourist’s actual manner of dying: “alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird . . . before this desert vastness opening like a window onto eternity” (DS, 240). Jeffers anticipated Abbey in this wish, imagining himself crawling out on a ledge to die like a wolf (“The Deer Lay Down Their Bones”), as he had in the wish to become a part of the vulture he imagined feeding on him (“Vulture”).

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