Irénée de Cuarzo y Sabaku by David Mecklenburg

The lakebed—my closest and most inscrutable neighbor—is written as a dry memory. Doubtless
it speaks and writes in its own language of waves: those undulations of existence that hint and
transcribe the grain of everything. Here, the accretions of sodium and silicon oscillate in
biography: the abyssal geologic context and the mercurial inflection of anemology.

I am loved by this place. I am alone. Everyone else gives it wide clearance and symbolizes it into
death and a solitude so vast it is considered personal and hideous; it must be insanity brought on
by ressentiment that has driven me into such a tangible signifier of bareness. But the arid
atmosphere above the salt flats wicks every drop of water from my skin. It would kill me in time,
just like the rest of the world, but as a neighbor I can sojourn in, without the noise of judgment or
entitlement, I relish the evaporative caress of the Darsh Mandolla.

I wear sandals to protect my feet from the hot lakebed and my hat is wide and dark. I marvel that
the vicuña wool can felt itself into a blackness which forms a moveable refuge of shadow on my
face and shoulders. With it, I am cooler, protected.

This small, seeming contradiction of sombrero de bolero, the pink sky, and the verses of
Makendō are the remainder of my belongings. How much the desert sees in me. How much I am
the desert. We are so far from the lush avarice of the depersonalized cities so redolent of sapient
apes. I look across the miles of desert and its mirages which come at no cost and watch them
shimmer in subjunctive fantasies. Their distance always beckons, but I know better.

Once the earth has turned me directly below the sun, I walk back to my lithic home: half-dug,
half-hewn from the hillside. Inside, shade greets me like a dog, and the stones walls are cool. My
captaqualqué—that complex heat exchanger made of bronze—draws out the scant water of the
desert and replenishes the cistern, my aloes, and myself. I sleep deep within this space that others
might call a tomb.

I wait and sleep for evening and the promise of pomegranates, dates, tortillas Mélinda, cool
water, and the rekindling stars. Since water is sacred here, I bathe in the quartz sand and oil my
skin because tonight the moon is full, and I will once again gaze upon the lakebed. In the night,
the world is true—and I do not hope to translate the mind of the sand, the salt, the saleratus, the
earth of this desert painted in darkness and starlight. I know Understanding is impossible. That is
why the Gods gave us Beauty instead.