Syrian Desert
Lorraine Field
PREFIX PHOTO: Issue 16, November 2007 (pp. 73 - 75)
Imagine a photograph, open in its possibilities, perhaps a landscape. It might be minimal in its elements - a desert, let's say - the foreground sparse and barren. Not a sand desert with soft and feminine shapes, but an arid plain with little scraggly rocks unpleasant to look at or walk on. Its middle ground is slightly murky or muddy in appearance, unwashed by the magnificent gold of midday or the lovely pastels of evening Sahara. In the background, ancient hills undulate, their edges sharp from shelf erosion. The sky is imbued with the pale turquoise of late afternoon, a thin film of clouds becoming denser toward the upper edge of the frame. There is little in this image to arrest the twenty first-century gaze, with its restless scanning and seeking.
Now imagine a story, told by a woman, her voice soft but animated and sometimes trembling with excitement. It might begin with an ending, the end of a day of photographing, sunlight gone, night falling. The woman approaches her hotel, deep in thought. A man in a small truck calls her name. She knew this man would come, as earlier in the day she had agreed to this meeting. But his voice interrupts her reverie and, for a brief moment, she mistakes him for another man, her guide from whom she has just parted. In the story, she is newly acquainted with the man in the truck, bur from where she tells it, she has come to know him well. The story is not complicated, for, after she rerurns to her room to wash, the man takes her to his garden in an oasis, where they talk and drink tea. His cousin arrives and sings an ancient song of the desert, made new with his singing.
Perhaps the woman's perception of everything that transpires that night is influenced by an oncoming fever. Unlike the photograph that depends on light for its existence, the story begins in the darkness of night before rhe moon rises. Much of what she comes to know that night is situated in physical sensations other than sight. Her experiences seem miraculous in nature because of their newness to her. She reflects on the suspension of her ''normal" state of consciousness in which she would question the logic of the night's events. She attributes her newfound ability to be fully present in the moment to the companionship of her desert friends.
The moon rises and brightens as it climbs the desert sky. The man's younger brother appears with horses saddled and tasselled, ready to ride, just like in the novels she read as an adolescent. The horses were intended for some other tourists, but there was a miscommunication and the tourists are not there. For these desert men, the horses are saddled and must therefore be ridden. Swiftly, she finds herself riding with the young man through the moonlit night. That this chance occurrence should lead to the fantastic experience of riding that dark horse across the desert toward distant ruins seems beyond her comprehension.
They ride through an ancient theatre, the marble seats almost translucent in the moonlight, the vacant spaces behind the ancient proscenium deeper and darker than possible in sunlight. Then, they traverse a great colonnaded road, its columns high and mrscerious. In the shadows between the upper columns, long-lost statues can be imagined in their niches once again. Ultimately, they come to a turn in the road where four enormous pillars form the centre of a crossroad. They swing their horses ro the right and ride with the moon at their backs away from the ruins.
Finally, her hotel comes into sight, and it is hard for her to determine how long they have been riding. Throughout the night, time seems to have become fluid, beyond measurement, beyond the camera with its calibrated fifteenths or thirteenths of a second. Sometimes, as in the photograph, there was little to mark that anything had taken place: the scent of jasmine, endless in its presence, frozen in her perception, for there is no time that can contain the heavy smell of these small white flowers on a still desert evening. At other times, such as the beginning of the ride, the speed with which she found herself propelled from the garden to horseback, riding through the desert night, seemed unfathomable, as if such an archetypal experience required preparation or foreshadowing.
At the hotel, the man in the truck again calls to her. He bas come to say goodnight, for he knows he will not see her again. His gentle courtesy seems to resonate from another era, now lost to global travel and the greed for tourist money. Her gratitude for the evening and her well wishes for his future seem graceless in comparison to what he has given.
She quickly falls asleep. The next day, she travels home, groggy from the illness that has overcome her. Later, she will note how this night and these events have a way of expanding in her memory. Like the sharp but undulating hills in the photograph, they take on some significance that deepens with the passing of time.