The Great Vision & The American West: Conclusion

distant dust storms, Mojave Desert

“Man is an interloper in this country, not merely because he maintains a toehold only on sufferance… but because everything he sees is a prophecy of his in consequent destiny” Wallace Stegner, from Mormon Country.

There is not much that we can do, either to alter our fate or make our way through the world with greater clarity than we already

view of the Colorado before Lake Mead

possess.  We are all born with certain innate abilities, and we do or do not develop them according to our social or ethnic circumstances, the wealth (of lack of) of our parents. We may be lazy or driven.  We may strive or give up.  At various times in life, we think we are at our prime.  This must be our Golden Age.  At others, we feel used up by reality; we are ignored by our loved ones, cast out into obscurity; we die overripe on the vine.

This is the human condition, and it is the compact in which we are bound (although we never actually signed up for it; we are here, as far as we can tell, by sheer accident).  Yet within this rather dire set of conditions and circumstances, we do have some wiggle room.  Prognostications of doom only scare you if you care about the end

a statue to the god hubris, at the Hoover Dam

of this or that person, place or thing, or world.  Being creatures of limited imagination and intellect, we must shut those fonts off to be somewhat free.  We must sit in a room and listen to white noise in our earbuds. We must clear the mind of extraneous thoughts, and from there, perhaps inch our perceptions just a bit forward.  Gain, if for a few seconds, a wider sense of the world.

I can see now that our horizons of perception can be expanded by tramping out to the desert southwest. I know of some who have done this successfully.  They forged a mystical union with the landscape, stayed for days, weeks, months, years.  The land was transformed into a tool for mystical adventure.  On this trip, I felt tugs in that direction.  The desert creates a wider vista, both physical and mental, which brings about sudden leaps in insight.  You are enlivened viewing the downward cascade of the landscape from the Bryce Canyon’s uplands.  This insight hit you in spurts – they fill you so much with feeling and sensation, that it takes some time to unpack all that has happened. A sense of wonder both fills and empties.

At the same time the land expands you, it also reminds you of your

palms at the Hoover Dam

fundamental weakness.  Here is a place that is, not in all but in key ways, death itself.  Many people, including its seekers, have found such a fate.  Perhaps that is how it should be; in order to gain so much from a landscape, from a place, from a sense of space, life should be the bail we must post, the down payment we leave. 

The quest for greater insight, to expand the parameters of what we see and how we see it, is a zero sum game.  We must throw our full weight behind the quest.  If we do not, our reality becomes a patchwork of jerky, inconsistent and unsatisfying encounters.  We need a bit of the fanatic to bring forth the greater vision.  Otherwise, we get a lesser version.  

But in the end, if this all we can muster, then we must nibble the scraps of the great vision.  Sometimes, being kind to oneself and others is more important than clarity.  After all, we are singularly weak creatures.