where is my mind
The last time I was in Arizona it was for my grandmother's funeral. It was three years ago, early June, and the heat was already enormous: a thunderclap of a thing, rolling in endless, shimmering waves across the expanse of the land. We stayed at a resort remodeled to look like vintage, tiki-kitsch with mahi-mahi tacos and artisanal cocktails. It was so hot out that even if you woke up at 8:00 am, the only thing you could do was put on a bathing suit and get in the pool.
That had been the last time, anyway, until I flew in for a wedding this last weekend. As soon as I stepped outside I realized that I had forgotten that Arizona is different than Palm Springs, where I have been probably a couple dozen times since my last flight to Phoenix. They're both desert, beautiful and barren; they're both places I spent a lot of weird in-between time when I was a kid. But Palm Springs has come into its vintage-y allure in the years since, sitting stylishly at the juncture between Mad Men's 50's in its architecture and its 60's in its festival and party culture. Arizona remains stubbornly un-hip, dust and adobe decorated in earnest Native American symbols, little pockets of capital-C Culture dotted amid a landscape that seems to be comprised mostly of repeating lanes of big box stores. I mean, Palm Springs is California, and California is a dream; even Tucson, one of the best parts of Arizona, is still part of the eternally beige, empty, earnest southwest. Palm Springs has become a place I imagine myself. Arizona is just a place I used to go.
Still, I spent so much time there, growing up. Wind kicked up on Saturday afternoon and it felt supernaturally familiar, like it was defying the years that had passed, to remind me that, whatever I like to believe about myself, there are certain immutable facts. There is the desert as talisman, and then there is my skin getting tight from the rotation of chlorine and AC, the sucking sound my mother always makes to describe the way water disappears from your body when you're there.
I've been thinking a lot lately about this page from Joni Murphy's Double Teenage, in which one of its heroines, who was raised in New Mexico, talks about talking to people about where she's from:
"Oh, the desert is so magical."
Celine had heard this many times from nice people who maintained the desert as a dream space that remained purer than other American realities.
"I spent one summer in Taos, doing a residency. Have you been to Ojo Caliente?"
This fantasy was about some Georgia O'Keefe floral starkness. Healing mud and sun-cracked signs pointing to tiny towns. Cow skulls and yucca flowers. Celine knew the picture. This fantasy was also made real by the nice northerners who ran galleries on Santa Fe's Canyon Road... It was real. A beautiful dusty place where people created a mystic desert for tourists, but also really did do peyote ceremonies and sweat lodges. The real stuff mingled with the postcard image. But what about the diabetes and the strip malls and the nuclear waste? She was, Celine thought of saying, from the shitty border.
I'm not from the desert-- any desert, shitty or otherwise. I'm not really even from the border. But I am very obsessed with geography and fantasy and the way they intertwine-- how eager we are to tie our selves down to the land we live on, or even just visit. Last week I wrote something about how we celebrate anniversaries because time is so imprecise; this week I want to say we get so involved with landscape because it's a way of attempting to define or concretize or at least explain the weird unknowable frightening mutability of our selves. To say: I am from here, so I am like this. I have gone here, so I am like this. It's not that it's not sort of true. Landscape shapes us. Of course it does. It's just that every landscape shapes us-- the ones we lovingly fantasize, as well as the ones we're all too eager to forget.
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I wasn't kidding about the slowdown in bylines; I have nothing new on the internet for you this week. But you can win a copy of GRACE AND THE FEVER on Goodreads, so go enter to do that, please and thank you! And then pre-order yourself a copy, just to be on the safe side. Reminder: I'll be signing them on 5/25 at Skylight in LA, and 6/7 at McNally Jackson in NYC.
Also, from the archives, it's Passover, so here are some things I wrote about my feelings about dietary restrictions as component of religious practice, and also about brisket and tattoos and narrow spaces.