Curvaceous Space (revised)

[mnaz]

On the far side of Death Valley I climb into a long canyon until it opens up to a rounded valley, where it's hard to tell up from down. How high am I on warped roundscape between mountainsides? How high am I in space that curves due to effects of mass? How high are billions ascending through chakras at different speeds? How high does it escalate, or undulate? Modulate? How high were those stock prices scrolling on those damned tickers on screens that beamed in a new war from the center of the universe at the middle of careening axes?

The rounded valley curves up slowly and branches to others through gaps in massive granite. Two burros stand and watch, no longer ridden by old jackasses but still on the same timeless wander. The trail heads for a steep, boulder-strewn passage, and if I made the top I'd see the next raw valley lie to my eye, so distant and close, beyond a jumble of ridges and ripples, one of them harboring burned-out ruins of Manson's hideout. But expanding cosmos is in my face, so I camp below the top.

Twinkle fades in after darting across itself for millions of years at a speed of instantaneous to meet me, and this desert garden right in the middle . . . strange physics at the frontier of non-physical, but we were bound to encounter a few gravity tricks and a God mine or two, and aliens writing weird equations about curved space in all these vastitudes. And that must be the answer: curvaceous space. The rock was flat until it wasn't, and now everything curves into itself-- matter, energy, particles, waves, vision, belief, spirit, logic, intuition and variations on the theme. Nothing is flat; peaks glisten, and roundscape fills in between. I drop the tailgate and set up camp.

A new moon gives the granite behemoths around me a faint silver sheen, and I can see the rounded valley's curve shoot up steeply at the end. Just like McKenna said. So maybe he had a point. And maybe the street corner wailers with doom painted on cardboard signs also had a point. Maybe the fire-breathing preachers too. And all those missiles on the prairie lurking in their gopher holes. But I can't worry about that now, not in this opulent warmth, alone with a thin moon and a hard silence nicely tamed by a breeze.

[sasha]

I've always enjoyed these travelogues of yours, through internal spaces nearly as vast as the landscape.

[mnaz]

Thanks sasha. It occurred to me that the "roundscape" deserts I've been fascinated with could be a metaphor, for ... well, just about everything. At least if I wrote about them that way.