The desert is a powerful, unique sensorium

 

The desert is a powerful, unique sensorium. Silence and emptiness are the ambiguous descriptions of sounds and landforms. The desert is at once a place of sensory depriva-tion and awesome overload—too little life, too much heat, too little water, too much sky. Its cool shadows offer "thermal delight," and yet the desert evokes the terrors of the inferno. Its distance and scale, the sweep between horizons and the loftiness of stars, its winds and mirages, its hidden life and conspicuous shapes seem at once to dwarf and to emphasize the human figure. Its sensory impact is profoundly stimulat-ing and disturbing, a massive shock to the human limbic sys-tem—the neural basis of emotional response—which seems to demand some logic or interpretation.

Between the senses and the logic is perception—that is, the biopsychological screening devices, filters, combined forces of inherent tendency and individual experience that direct attention and focus possibilities. Thus, what the desert means is preceded by preconscious selection of what is seen and how it is seen. Myriad qualities of the desert beg for interpretation: the firmness of outline; the linearity of horizon and movement; the separateness of things and their static, fixed quality as though made by some absent artisan; the way light and dark, sky and earth, life and death insist on contrast and duality; the ephemerality of creatures and transience of man; the flickering vitality of things distant, such as the planets; things unseen but heard, opposed to the frozen immobility of stone. These are some of the preconscious pointers toward interpretation.

Nature and Madness
Paul Shephard