Valley of Fire
(Nevada)
By
Dave Alton
To stand in the desert for a first time
Is to stand at the very beginning
Of creation, and at the very end.
Another world orbiting a different,
Bigger sun, a sense life is otherwise,
Invisible creatures with difficult
Intelligences and all seeing eyes.
Time is sculptor here, fashioning absurd
Abstracts from huge blocks of fiery sandstone,
Wielding wind as hammer, rain as chisel.
A cunning hand that long since gave up skin
And tendons, muscle and bone, precisely
Etched pictograms for snake, for long-horned sheep,
For spiral and labyrinth, and for Man,
Drawn out through black skimmed vertical flat screens
Of varnished canyons. Who now can translate
Such a strange, distant vocabulary,
Which might be magic or coarse graffiti,
Or menu of giants who once dwelt there
Before disbelief forced their extinction?
But, having stood and witnessed sudden gusts
Lift powdered earth whirling up into air,
Stood there in an absolute fog of sand,
Stood and peeked through squinted eyes while the land
Was re-arranged, the obvious declines,
A requirement for transliteration
Becomes an impertinence. Let rocks speak
For themselves, as do the wings of the bird
Of prey circling, its eloquent shadow
Echoing along the desiccated
Riverbed flooded to overflowing
With vibrant, infernal dust. It’s just those
Dependent on metalled ways who’re deafened
And blinded by desert’s shrill brilliance.
This poem expresses Deistic sensibilities in relation to creation, recreation and creator. Of itself it indicates the being of a poet. This is not some chance formation of words, but the product of mind operating within identifiable laws of language.
Much more can be reasonably inferred: that consciousness and intelligence exist, that there is a greater medium, poetry, of which this is a particular expression, that these are undeniable features of the universe.
The poem itself cannot be proved to be objectively true even though some of its detail is available for general scrutiny. It is a singular, subjective view of a moment in all the vastness of time. Whether the poem is good, indifferent or bad cannot be scientifically established.
However, neither is the poem an attack on science or scientific methodology. Indeed, the weathering referred to is most certainly open to scientific scrutiny and explanation. The scene is a product of evolution, formed through the action of weather and climate.
Creatures living there can do so because adaptation makes it possible; natural selection is the dynamic, favouring one feature over another, as a poet chooses this word and not that.
The pictograms etched into rock faces are mysterious because not only are the artists long gone, the people to which they belonged have also vanished. Their signs and symbols defy interpretation; are they sacred or profane or idle doodles?
Reason demands, though, not only can the existence of those folk not be denied, but also they are a part of a greater singularity, human being. What a vastly complex individual is human being and only a tiny, tiny aspect of the universe.
Although the possibility of the sacred is mentioned in the poem there is no explicit reference to God. For the Deist poetry expresses the abstraction for which the word God stands.
If a poem is its own universe, then the poet is its creator. Should there be some minute expression of the poet’s consciousness deep within the poem that became self-conscious, how much might it come to understand the entirety?
From the structure in which that conscious fragment existed it could reasonably deduce the existence of a poet without being able to comprehend what such a figure is.
Surely the multifaceted variety of poetry would be beyond its comprehension, as would the abstract overarching concept of The Poet. And even the individual poet is so much more than the poetry.
Analogies are always weak and ultimately flawed and that constructed here is no exception. This merely demonstrates the difficulty of writing or speaking of the ineffable.
Read a poem: better still, look around at creation and, employing reason, ask, is this all merely the product of purposeless chance or are there patterns suggestive of something greater?
Just because beneath that fascinatingly weathered rock resplendent with ancient pictograms there lurks a rattlesnake is no a denial of God. Rather, the existence of all and more is at the very least suggestive of the divine, whatever that might mean.
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