In the Desert is another in a series of books that Zimmermann started in 2017 with the publication of Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene, followed by his 2023 book Melt. The title of this book comes from a famous poem by Stephen Crane, written in 1895. It is a dark poem often described as being about greed, human nature, and self-destruction. It seemed the perfect metaphor for the way the human race is ignoring the way we are slowly destroying our fragile and life-sustaining Mother Earth.
At the end of April 2024, Paul Auster died. He was one of my favorite authors and in revisiting some of the many books that I have of his, I remembered that I had purchased his monumental biography of Stephen Crane, Burning Boy, when it came out about three years ago. I had never gotten around to reading it. As it happened, a week or two after he died, Terry Gross re-broadcast an interview on Fresh Air with Auster. Listening to that interview, I heard Auster read Crane’s famous poem In the Desert. Listening to the poem, I remembered reading it in high school at the same time that our class read The Red Badge of Courage, and I recalled how struck I was by both the novel and the poem. (Sadly, neither seem to be covered in any high school English or literature classes these days, and I am again grateful for my 1960s Jesuit high school education, despite how much I hated it at the time.)
That incentivised me to sit down and read Burning Boy. The powerful poem In the Desert, located right at the beginning of the biography, seemed like a gift at just the right time. I had been looking for a text for a new book that I was working on, Accelerated Entropy, another in a series since 2017 on the subject of climate change.
As I worked on Accelerated Entropy, I realized that the Stephen Crane poem was not the right fit for that book, which had been planned without any text at all. I realized that the Crane poem text would have to be for an entirely new book. I see In the Desert as a companion piece with Accelerated Entropy, and vice versa.
I visualized pictures of the Southwestern desert as an obvious choice to go along with the poem, and I recalled a series of photographs that I had taken in New Mexico in 2003 when I was on sabbatical. I located them and determined that they would work well with the poem. They were taken at Lake Lucero, a dry gypsum lake located in the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces. It is in a restricted part of the missile range and open to the public only a few times a year when National Park Service rangers take visitors holding US Passports on closed busses in to visit the dry lake. The dry gypsum crystals from the lake blow to the northeast and are the source of the famous white dunes in White Sands National Park. The park is located, as is the entire Missile Range, in the great Tularosa Basin.
In the last 125 years, there has been much discussion about the meaning of Stephen Crane’s In the Desert. It is a dream-like parable that can be taken many ways, but the creature is most often interpreted as a primal version of mankind, located in a barren lonely landscape. Most analyses see the bitter heart-eating as a reference to man’s tendency to be self-destructive. Since the conceptual metaphor for this book is that humans have been short-sighted and self-destructive with how we have taken care of our planet, I prefer that reading to the one that some ascribe to it: that Crane is calling out his belief that human nature is “inherently sinful and corrupt”.
