Writing is Violence and we are the Victims
Writing is Violence and We Are Victims
Go to your local book store, community’s library, or an internet conglomerate, and look for ISBN 9781640094710. Buy it. Rent it. Check it out. Steal it. Read it, that’s your ultimate goal. To read the damn thing. Desert Notebooks: A Road Map For The End Of Time by Ben Ehrenreich is one of the most important books to be written this side of Transit of Venus and Counterpoint Press is the lucky publisher of the new messianic text (neat citation, I know). Hitting shelves in 2020, just a few precious months after the world’s favourite virus catapulted our species into the fresh decade, the book is documentation of a near forgotten pre-pandemic world that still mirrors the one we experienced then and experience now. I don’t think the book is intentionally in conversation with that idea, but it contained a facet I don’t think Ben knew he was carving: a demonstration of how the world was ripe and plum ready to burst. That the pandemic wasn’t the sole thing to blame for the massive shifts we’ve seen. But, that’s just one side of the gem; a side I think COVID scholars will gaze longingly into but one I only want us to peak at, because the book is so much more than a snapshot of how we got where we are sans several million preventable deaths.
The book stumbles around through time and space, loosely organised as an academia travelogue penned, in media res, by Ben as he leaves a beloved found home for a station assigned to him by the economic forces that play with us. Time shifts around, Joshua Tree, Las Vegas, Uruk, Palestine, The White House, Michigan, Egypt - space is consistent only in the position you choose to read this book in (mine was in bed, neck craned so that my reading light made a Newgrange pathway for my dimmed eyes to follow). This stumbling is where the true story starts to emerge, where I realised that the book isn’t just one hike through one wash, but a series of hikes through various deserts. It tosses you around, an analogue simulation of life, both Ben’s and ours, jumping between moments of doom-scrolling and something approaching contentment. But the book is obsessed with more than just how time and space play chess with our feeble bodies, but how we have played war with the technology that shoved us into a state of calling ourselves an “advanced species.
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Writing is the real obsession here. Ben admits to us that writing was created not to spread art, but to oppress a new working class. Painting himself as a Bob Ross confessing to a killing with a paintbrush. One that wasn’t a happy little accident. It has to be painful to realise that. To read the research and get your hands on the primary document that earliest piece of writing and not reading a poem. Not reading a meadow explored through enviable prose, but a list of taxes, debts, and slaves. A tablet of arcs slicing out violence on clay sitting in a lush desert amid the cradle of civilisation. We, us writers, are in conversation with that; the reality that all things stem from violence; the cynical epiphany telling us our blood boils from cry to rattle. We can fight for peace and write our pure thoughts, but trace the bloodline back and you’ll always be reading a list of slaves. People. Dead now, and not much better off before resting in the grave.
It hurts to discover the betrayal of a lover. I’ve been on both sides of that coin and Desert Notebooks tries to remind us of that. We always carry pain. The history and the potential. The accidental the informed.
The desert is the grounding plane the entire book builds off and a landscape that I kept in my head as I read. Physically, the sandy dry pages were pulled right off the ground of the deserts I’ve called home in my life, crisping my fingers with each turn having me reach for water, preciously available to me, more often that I normally would when reading a book. The light I use to read good ole fashioned printed media gives off a bit of heat, being one of those two-pronged twist-in lamps from Ikea mirroring how the sun twists into the sky on mornings that used to be chilly down in the Sonoran. I’m old enough to remember those mornings being chilly, but young enough to know I’ll never feel that again outside of my hand reaching to the twist knob and pulling a bit of heat from an electrical ether. The start and stop of the narrative, separated by a quaint dinkus, being modes of desert presentation: narrative prose about the life Ben is living, detached prose about the world Ben is watching, researched prose about the world Ben has read about. The desert in bloom after a rain shower, the desert dry under a sun baking brown, the desert in that rainstorm soaking up every drop to give us something to look at. A photo desert dwellers can point to and say, “See? More than cactus and rocks!” As if cactus and rocks aren’t beautiful enough to the right eye.
We’ll see these photos while scrolling through social media feeds. I’d like to say that I avoid social media, that I’ve deleted everything and live completely cut off from that side of the internet, but I can’t. I came close to being able to say that, but I had a healthy amount of time spent on YouTube and now I’ve dipped into Instagram and Threads, at first only to interact with one person. Now I spend too much time on both filling empty moments with content to drive thoughts away. Thoughts I could probably use here. Thoughts that hurt. I fill those empty moments with scenes comparable to Ben’s description in the book. He saw Trump dismantling our freedoms, I see Biden refuse to rebuild them. He saw missiles fired into Iran and Syria, I see missiles fired in Gaza and Ukraine. Stories watching each other through a mirror. All mixed in with whatever scam is being peddled with sex and photos of places none of us can afford to go, including the desert. Ben couldn’t afford to move back to Joshua Tree. I can’t afford to move home either. I can’t even afford to find a home.
These are all texts. Writings enacting a micro-violence on us just as these old men thrust their dick deep into tator using writing to enact their own violence. The orders to fire upon civilians is written just as orders for the de facto blacklisting of folks from affordable housing. Scribes like me sit behind some desk – fire missiles from launcher 223 into square E-4. Deploy newly brainwashed recruits into the Donetsk theatre. Erase the writing giving women the barest amount of bodily autonomy in favour of writing that strips even that away. E-4 hit. Make sure the journalists don’t notice we bombed the hospital we deemed an evacuation zone two days ago. I paint a bleak vision, as does Ben. It’s hard to focus on an optimistic view when we are hit with writing that breaks us and I hate to say it, but I’m not going to try and alleviate this despair with hope. Hope is important, but I’m not the person to give it to you.
Writing has been such as long as it has been staining history. Wars are started over books, assassinations planned on sticky notes, letters detailing invasion promises that turn into powers joining global conflicts. Even the generally true notion that history is written by the victor has a subtext that the ink used to write that history is blood. I don’t think any of us who want to study writing and gaze longingly into the depths of our art want to acknowledge the blood we inevitably smear on our jeans ridding our hands of stains we don’t want our fingerprints found in. Have you ever looked at a pool of blood before? During an extra long nosebleed? Or a cut that hit you in just the right spot? Maybe you’ve been witness or enactor to some violence yourself. Did you look at the blood? I have, quite a few times. Both mine and otherwise. Blood, all spiritual allegory aside, is quite beautiful. A crimson that is never captured well in the movies, slowly rusting into a bronze stain. A pool of blood has multitudes with the lighter shores lapping into new territory, pulling some of the colour of the surface beneath through a scarlet tinge, right down into the nearly black abyss of, well, blood red. Scarlet, crimson, red. Note how none of these will ever truly capture blood red. There’s a reason it needs itself to describe itself.
We write with this ink and the violence it implies makes it more beautiful. A peaceful history, a peaceful would be ideal. I wish the blood we write with hadn’t come from anyone beside the writer using it, but we don’t live in that world. No matter what we do, we can not change our catastrophic past and even a malleable future is questionable at this point. I know I said I’m not going to provide hope, and I’m not. But I will provide beauty. The light red stains of Rick Riordan, a darker shade of red from Gaiman, a blood red seemingly flowing from a vein of Cormac. It is all the same blood, all the same pool. Different depths, different colours. You could read that metaphor as suggesting we are all human. Valid even if I don’t like it. All of us benefit from the understanding that our greatest invention is just a giant well somewhere out in the desert full of blood harvested from those who died at the hands of the pen. Some of it is used to refill the pool, ensure we never run out. Some of it, admittedly, gets wasted (not much thankfully). Some of it gets turned into beauty.
Owls fly through the pages of Desert Notebooks, harbingers of change and evil. Historically speaking at least. Ben’s prose presents them with a different lens: proof that history is mutable and we need but reach in and fuck with the clay. While I refuse to invite hope into these pages Ben ends his own with just a bit of that. Solace found out in the desert night. New life on the lips of his friends a peace away from technology crowding out synapse bandwidth. An owl flies overhead. I don’t think Ben fully gives in to his own rhetoric. I think he wants to see beauty and wants to be wrong, but knows that he isn’t. Unless he is out in the desert. That place we depict as violent and wild being the only shield from our own sins against the Earth. When I lived in the desert I felt that. When I lived in the woods I felt that. When I lived in the city, I feel nothing but my resting heart rate resting above average asking if I need to take a gun out with me to walk my dogs after being threatened at work. The coyotes will leave me be unless their hungry. The cactus will leave me be unless I come at them first. The people can be fed and unprovoked and still want to see me bleeding beneath the tires of their SUV, kids in the back asking what mommy just hit. I don’t think we can get better.
I think I titled this wrong. Writing is violence. We are the violent.