The desert as literature..

[mnaz]

None of this is true you know, the desert set adrift on my words. If you sit quietly on a buff mesa, slaked perhaps by a taste of foul, hot bourbon, and your scrawl gets lucky, starts to follow the spiritual contours of the place, it may feel as if your notebook and words are merging with the beaten ocher rims and starving light saturation, mapping indefinable space. But that space is not virtual. The desert has height, breadth and length. It is a coiled Panamint Red, one foot around, on a moon-bathed, cracked asphalt center stripe. It is the forlorn crunch of a withering white salt flat exactly three miles wide. Don't let my words fool you. The desert was never immune to mathematics, though it's always been much greater and more terrible than the sum of its parts.

[Lightning Rod]

up to your usual panoramic prose, mark
I can't wait to read the novel

(I would put a 'more' in front of 'terrible' in the last line)

[mnaz]

Thanks Clay... (and good editing eye).

came on like spatial therapy for me today... I needed to be there for a while, to go back.

[westcoast]

wonderful, expansive. i could feel the desert through the poem.

~westcoast

[WIREMAN]

for me the desert is a goddess....her undulating curves soothing me o- soooooo......her prickly cacti keeping me ever so warily tamed....all i can do is big cat growl....

[saw]

we need to trace those"spiritual contours"....an imaginative journey...
makes me want to read Carlos Castenada ....enjoyable read

[Arcadia]

well, don´t worry... I never understood mathematics anyway... (and I´m not joking!!!!! )

beautiful writing, mnaz!!!!!

[hester_prynne]

Mnaz I like this, I like the idea of a sum more terrible than it's parts, as well as parts more terrible than the sum.....a nice blade of grass to chew on while awaiting the sum of this book.....
H

[mtmynd]

nazzer! love the title. enjoyed the writing. keep going if it's in there. (no shit) (really).

[judih]

totally agree with cecil.
been enjoying reading and re-reading the title.
lush, lovely landscapes in this piece

[Dave The Dov]

Write you words in the sand and see what happens.
_________________
green crack photos