You can’t avoid the cruelty, though that’s the wrong word because it’s nothing so intentional. Your consciousness is not central to this drama. No one’s is. That may be the real source of horror here, and of liberation. Whatever you imagine is unique about yourself, whatever you think matters, the coyotes don’t care and the owls don’t care and the stars most certainly don’t. The desert would be fine without you. It will be. Even if in our heedlessness we wipe out half the species in it. The desert practically shouts that at you, all day and all night, that it, and life in all its resiliency and multiplicity and magic, pulsing force, will go on. Whatever we do or don’t do, whether we’re still here or not.
When I was an unbearable teenager—think unfiltered cigarettes, hair in my eyes, long black overcoat, a walking sulk in pegged Gap jeans—I came across a line of Samuel Beckett’s that stuck with me. (This would have been in the late 1980s, when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose for the first time in about three million years above 350 parts per million, the level to which human beings, and most life on the planet, are adapted. I didn’t know that then. Most of us didn’t.) “Every word,” Beckett had said in an interview, “is an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” This confounded me. I agreed with him, enthusiastically. I was solidly in the pro-nothingness camp. Showily, even. But Beckett had found it necessary to say those words. Ten of them in that sentence alone. Ten stains running into one, dripping all over, spoiling the virgin purity of the void. It angered me, as if Beckett had betrayed a vow. But I held him in sufficient awe that I figured he must have had his reasons, and this was reassuring. It let a little light in. Beckett had validated the urge to speak, to write. He couldn’t stay silent about silence. Words are self-propelling. They boil up. The void coughs them out, like hair balls. Or the pellets regurgitated by owls: bones and hair, whole undigested limbs sometimes, teeth, feathers, claws, everything the gizzard can’t digest.
That’s the thing about silence I would tell my teenage self if I could: it’s very loud. And nothingness is teeming. I say this here because Borges made some version of the same move in “The Writing of the God.” The priest’s vision convinces him of his own insignificance, of the insignificance of any man, being, nation. That’s why he doesn’t pronounce the holy formula, he admits in the story’s final sentence, “that’s why I let the days forget me, lying in the dark.” But Borges made him say this. He wrote the story, published it. He created the priest as a character, in prose, so that he might attest, in lasting print, to the futility of words.
I’ll admit it’s not my favorite Borges story. It is perhaps not a very good one at all. Borges’s best tales fold in on themselves vertiginously, losing the reader in the same paradox that dissolves the narrative foundations of the story itself. This one simply dissolves. The ostensible plot, the historic Maya frame, reads like a stage set hastily constructed in anticipation of the main act, a mystical revelation to which the setting bears little relation. Borges appears to have borrowed the name Tzinacán, which means bat, from a Maya chieftain (not a priest) who is mentioned just once in Bernal Díaz de Castillo’s True History of New Spain. The name of the god who writes the hidden sentence, Qaholom, comes up, by my count, five times in the entire Popol Vuh. Any other exotically indigenous name would have served him just as well.
Borges was impatient to get to that wheel. He may have seen some echo of it in the calendar stones carved by the Aztecs, which at least are circular and have to do with time, but the image is more likely borrowed from his readings of Buddhist and Kabbalistic texts, and of the Renaissance mages and mystics who borrowed from the latter. Like any good Argentine bourgeois, Borges looked across the oceans for profundity. Time existed elsewhere. In his writings he displayed little cognizance that the hemisphere on which he lived had a history of its own that preceded the arrival of Europeans. It may be crude to suggest this, but it is not hard to read in “The Writings of the God” a strangely labored justification for silence in the face of the genocide in which Pedro de Alvarado took part, a silence that would later echo through Borges’s quiet support for the military dictatorship that dominated Argentina in the 1970s and ’80s. How else to understand, in the hands of an otherwise so meticulous writer, the flimsiness of its construction? Why was it so important that this vision of the insignificance of human striving be voiced by history’s vanquished?
I went out for a run earlier, heading west along the boundary line of the park and toward the setting sun. I was maybe a half mile from the house when a coyote skipped across the road in front of me. I must have surprised him. If I hadn’t I’m sure I wouldn’t have seen him at all. He glanced at me sideways and jogged on without slowing, rendering himself invisible among the creosote and senna.
I was probably more surprised than he was. I hear coyotes every night, but I sometimes go weeks without seeing one. They’re around, of course. They’re just good at not being seen. Usually they start singing at dusk or a little before, a single yipping voice, then others join in, echoing one another and coming together in a chorus that rises to a frenzied, ecstatic peak and just as suddenly dissolves. If it’s still light and they sound close enough—sometimes they must be yards away—I go outside and look for them. I never see them. They blend into the desert too perfectly. After midnight their calls break through the darkness and I often wake and wonder what it is they’re hollering about: a successful hunt or a failed one, a jealous squabble, or something less dramatic. Maybe they’re like us and just need to hear themselves, and one another, to find some way to fill the hollows of the night.
I’ve been seeing them a lot lately. I saw one in my headlights just down the street last week, and the other day in the afternoon the neighbor’s dogs all began barking at once. When I looked out the window I saw a coyote trotting down the middle of the road. I find myself doing it again, putting myself at the center of this story: I flatter myself that they know I’m leaving soon, that they’ve been listening in on my phone calls or pressing their ears to the screens when I talk to L. on the phone, that they just know, and this is their way of saying goodbye. But there is no story here, or, what amounts to the same thing, there are infinite stories, with infinite centers, and coyotes surely have other things to think about.
Perhaps the least convincing thing about “The Writings of the God” is that the priest’s vision leads him into a dull quietism, as if he had seen that spinning wheel from the heights of a mountaintop and decided that the cosmos was populated only with the tiniest and most insignificant of beings, paramecia and plankton, and that his own death and the rise or fall of his or any people was of no more consequence than the fading of a spot of lichens from a stone. He wasn’t wrong about that, but he only looked through one lens of the telescope. The other side—the one that makes things bigger—is even more interesting, if more painful to take in. If you can blink through the tears and focus, you’ll see that secret words are written everywhere, on every hair and every cell and every star.
Borges was wrong. The gods don’t want us to lie down. They don’t want to watch us vacillating, blinking, stuttering. They like to see us dance and fight. They like to watch us act with grace and conviction. They want us to read what they have written. They want us to pronounce the secret words aloud.
Yesterday I read a warning that the Santa Ana winds would be blowing hard through L.A. I haven’t been back there for a few weeks, but firestorms have been raging for days in Ventura, north of the city, burning more than one hundred thousand acres, from the mountains to the sea. Wildfires are normal in Southern California. This is not. The rains are late. Usually they arrive in October, bringing the fire season to an end. It’s December now and it hasn’t rained since May. But there is no usually anymore. Except for the odd wet year in which the pendulum swings to the other extreme, the rains have been