Lines not mines in the lands of sand

I heard from a friend today, a good man who has spent an accomplished period of time in the desert, and I was thinking after emailing him back that the desert is like a giant canvas. And I hope it still is for the last of the Bedouins, badawi, or desert-dwellers, people my friend knows well, still scratching, etching, even caressing their nomadic way across today’s desert sands, the rest reportedly having already begun their possibly last migrations to the cities some forty or fifty years ago. War aside, man’s expression in such places from what I can gather is largely humbling. I love, also, the misleading simplicity of deserts being split into three basic types: semi-arid, arid, and extremely arid. (That’s your lot.) Even aside from my own experience, squeezed as it was into the run-up of a war, I know it to be a hostile place, but how complete and spiritually fulfilling the sense of perspective must be when you are actually born there, brought up to respect it, bound to watch it, and there is no war. Sometimes when I speak to the artist about these things, as she steps back from her work, there is an initial feeling of none of this being real, so abstract I guess is the idea of the desert. And yet when she thinks about it as an artist she seems to understand it immediately, and responds first and foremost to the scale. I also tell her things like how I remember briefly the utter cleanliness of the sand, the harsh coldness at night, the purity of the mornings. (Alternatively, as William Blake said: ‘To see a world in a grain of sand.’) This goes back of course to the idea of beauty and the eye of the beholder. It’s funny that the friend who triggered all these thoughts about the desert is across the ocean in fact in the heart of what I think is forest, not desert at all, reminding us that it’s not just the desert which accommodates the big idea. (And as for the sea...) The one thing possibly in common with all these themes is nature as your teacher. (Can there be safer hands?) I'm also thinking: there are so many places I have not been, so many canvases I have not seen. (The desert is indeed a giant canvas.) But the last thing we need now are more desert shots of Multiple Launch Rocket Systems - MLRS - shooting mournfully across the sky.