Death Valley is no ordinary place. In 1913, the air temperature was recorded at 56.7°C, the hottest in the world ever. Furnace Creek lies 282 feet below sea level. The perpetual micro sand avalanches of the Mesquite dunes cause them to sing a low frequency hum, like the Om of ancient Vedic texts. The Devils Hole Pupfish lives at the pit of a 500 foot deep cavern reaching into the prehistoric, unchanged bowels of the earth. Hematite, Limonite, Celadonite and Chlorite dapple the rock formations with pink, gold, purple, green and teal. The Black Mountain that dominates the salt-lined Badwater Basin is nearly 2 billion years old. As you walk through the valley you see the strata of time torn and mangled by tectonic forces, geological tears of prehistory twisting and turning as they are broiled and mangled by the inexorable force of the earth. Here rocks seem to scream out in jagged formations of expression; they are alive.
Nothing is dead here, all is alive, but the scale of life is so gigantic that as you stand on its expansion like a mite on the back of a whale, you are not aware of it, and the stillness lulls you into a hypnotic eye of a storm.
There is no Wi-Fi connection out in the desert.
The silence is so thick at the foot of valleys enshrouded by sheer rock that even your own breathing and heartbeat is no longer detectable. I never understood the phrase deafening silence until I came to this miraculous place, for the whole paradox is there: the silence is so thick, so voluptuous, that it covers every other possible noise. And what you are left with is an overwhelming sense of inner peace that diaphanates outward toward a cosmic peace: the alpha and the omega. Nothing seems to matter anymore, all is insignificant but for the power of the ever-crumbling sandstone and sodium borate white gold that towers above you and protects you from any vain or destructive thought.
When the French philosopher Foucault came here in the 1970s, he stood at Zabriskie Point at sunset and, beholding the Milky Way in that manner only a desert can evoke, spoke of the sky exploding above him and stars raining down. The beauty caused him to weep and from that moment on he changed his philosophical direction completely, writing now on the way society conditions us to think. There are those who attribute this turning point to his taking drugs, but what need of drugs in a place so illuminated? The turning point in Foucault’s philosophical positioning must have been due to the Spiritus Mundi of the Golden Canyon below him and the warm night air with its eye winking to the heavens.
If George Lucas chose Death Valley for the planet Tatooine in Star Wars, it was because the place literally lifts you out of reality into another realm of being. That sensation of being on another planet is strong in Death Valley, and I think it is tremendously profound, because what it is doing is putting you directly before your own limits and natural surroundings, forcing you to consider the entity of your being as it is contrasted by a place that is utterly defamiliarizing. Paradoxically, this creates a feeling of existential freedom, for in seeking a point of commonality between your hot-blooded flesh and the salt, rock and dryness, you realize that what connects you is not mere existence, it is something greater, more transcendent, the elemental truth of star dust.
If Stanley Kubrick filmed Spartacus here it is because there is an eternal whisper of freedom in the air, like a silent song dancing across the multiple ripples of sandstone.
Camus spoke of the benign indifference of the world in his novel The Outsider; it is in the closing paragraph as Meursault lies on his deathbed contemplating the stars from his prison window: a highly symbolic image. However, when in Death Valley, the sensation is very different. The world is benign, yes, but not indifferent, for in the overwhelming power of mass and force, in the toiling battle of rock against sand, in the salt-strewn plateaus and rose-dappled skies at sunset, for some ineffable reason, some elusive truth of being, there is a love for us as creatures of the earth that emanates from each moment.
What Death Valley brought to my senses was a philosophical and educational reflection: it is quite simple. At some point in your life, it is imperative to travel somewhere where the primal elements of nature dominate you totally and invade your being. It is a spiritual cleansing, like standing under the stars, by a giant waterfall or in a jungle, swimming in the ocean or trekking through the desert. Such an experience reinvigorates your imagination, your sense of being and above all, reminds you of how wonderful and sacred it is to be alive on our planet earth, how blessed this planet really is and how little everything else means.
To live with hope and to feel invigorated, we must recharge our inner self with this presence, this power, this love. This is not death, it is the essence of life itself, a place of imagination, of dreams, of the soaring and indomitable cry of space and time, strewn across the horizon of the cosmos today and forever.
Furnace Creek, 27th of February. Early evening.