Sacred, profane deserts hold much appeal
Study of eight deserts pulses with the vastly different essence of each
Possibly in a fit of lovelorn ennui, British writer William Atkins embarked on a series of journeys into some of the world’s most inhospitable areas: its deserts.
And from the onset he was intrigued by the contradiction that is the essence the desert’s appeal: it’s an environment that is both sacred and profane.
Some sections of The Immeasurable World: Jour
neys in Desert Places read like a spiritual quest for life’s meaning and others explore the hedonistic appeal of the outlaw culture of the arid Australian Outback and the bone-dry American Wild West.
Interestingly, as Atkins notes, all the Abrahamic religions (Juadaism, Christianity, Islam) emerged in arid regions. He quotes theologian William Harmon Norton on one possible reason: “As the rich scenic profusion of India and Greece led the Aryan to think of gods as many so the barren simplicity, the endless monotony, the sterile uniformity of the desert led the Semite to think of the God as one.”
Then there’s the counter-narrative: “the desert as the image of death,” as described by a 15thcentury German monk named Felix Fabri in Wanderings in the Holy Land.
“There it was,” writes Atkins, “the hyper-arid zone in all its abundance: solitary, godless, lonesome, deathly barren, waterless, trackless, impassable, infested, cursed, forsaken — and yet, at the same time, the site of revelation, of contemplation and sanctuary.”
Atkins learned of the connection between Christian monasticism and the desert at a Cistercian monastery in England. But after making a pilgrimage to two ancient monasteries in Egypt’s Eastern Desert, he almost reflexively runs into the Red Sea. My takeaway from this literary gesture is to signal his re-embracing a sensuous life after exploring a world of “solitude and denial” in the desert.
After returning from the Holy Land, Atkins found his thirst for arid landscapes unquenched but was now eager for a walk on the wild side of desert life. “I was drawn to the lawlessness of the desert … and yearned for places where the word ‘good’ itself was loosened from mean- ing.” So he jetted to Australia.
For the continent’s early white settlers, the Great Victorian Desert was viewed as “terra nullius: unowned, untenanted, unexploited.”
That it was sacred land to the Aboriginals seemed not to concern them, so the Brits conducted A-bomb tests there in the mid-20th century. Such savaging of arid habitats is a recurring theme in The Immeasurable World, whether it’s in China’s Gobi Desert or Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea. “Desertification affects a sixth of humankind and 70 per cent of all arid areas,” laments Atkins.
Still, for me the book’s most astonishing interlude is the chronicling of the Burning Man bacchanal held at summer’s end in the Nevada desert. For a week, libertines gather to indulge their wildest fantasies. “It’s where the subtleties of civic life evaporated along with its impositions.”
This sex-and-drugs jamboree is the complete antithesis of the monastic quest that initially inspired Atkins’s desert odyssey, but it’s this tension between the sacred and profane that gives the book its pulse and panache.