It’s not hard to say what I find beautiful about the desert. The desert is an underwater landscape drained of water. It is a lunar landscape with humming air. What’s more difficult is to pin down what I find off-putting about it.
I was in Joshua Tree for a day this week and thought about it a lot. How the desert quietly hums to my ear with hostility. It has a silence I find foreboding or eerie in a way. There’s always past in the present, I think, but in the desert’s present the past is so evident, bleached and jagged, the silence has a ring to it, something ghostly – a suggestion of death so omnipresent, so easy to sense, I find it almost perverse.
The trip to the desert was with a friend. We stopped on the way so he could do some shopping, and he purchased a new cashmere coat. He wore the coat in the desert. Cold winds whipped across the sand. We scrambled up some boulders to watch the sun set over the park, and the rocks were buff, brown, and pink. His coat made no sense whatsoever – and it fit the desert’s decadence seamlessly. Remember Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? Kind of like that.
A camera can take a picture of the world, but it doesn’t understand how it’s able to do so. That is me so much of the time. What is the desert? The desert is silence and struggle. The desert is yellow borage, Joshua trees, sand verbena, skyrocket gilia. I woke up early the next morning and took a cup of coffee outside to see the sunrise. The light was crimson, striped by flares. I thought if I take together what I find beautiful about the desert and what I find sinister, the middle point still is hope.
Something new next weekend
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From tomorrow’s “Sunday Supplement” – why you should listen to Jazmine Sullivan in the driveway; some philosophical unpacking; and my favorite book about eating, drinking, and napping in the nude.
I’m pretty sure if you like my Saturday essays, whether for style, topic, voice, whatever, you’ll read this book and realize how much better they can be done. Also, I’ve been to the restaurant on the cover – Ajax Diner in Oxford, Mississippi – and I highly recommend it too.
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“Meditations in an Emergency” is a micro-essay published three Saturdays a month by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful, with a longer essay dispatched to subscribers from the wilderness.
Also for subscribers: a Sunday supplement with three-plus ideas for things to love, no paid placements lol 💸
Rosecrans is the author most recently of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. If you’d like a signed copy for yourself or somebody else, just reply to this newsletter or send a note. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. Rosecrans’s debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Any other books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.