Hydraulic Engineering
U.S. Route 6 in mid-December is surprisingly hot. Well, not enough to matter. Sweat tracks the ridge of my spine, gathers at the ends of my hair, then releases itself ub slow ticks down my back that the corduroy drinks in until the seat feels like a second skin. I’ve lost years of water weight in this car, to the point that I no longer know the difference between the smell of salt and my own car’s leaks.
There is nothing. Seriously, nothing, out here.
Towns that primarily exist as gas traps, dispensaries, casinos, or buildings that are all three at once. This is a lonely, lonely road, made worse by the fact that I do not entirely expect my car to survive this trip (some things never change).
Exhibit 1: The car will not stop accelerating. It’s in a mood where the transmission won’t decelerate past 1.5k rpm, and the entire premise of survival hinges on the possibility of riding the brakes—hence the choice of driving one of the flattest engineered roads in the country.
Exhibit 2: The accelerator and the brakes are in a deathmatch, and the brakes are losing. I tried to run my car up a hill to break it out of its stupor (it’s stupid, and the accelerator didn’t even break a sweat). Each brake application converts mechanical energy into thermal energy, which means I’m essentially performing a controlled self-immolation of my brake pads and the warping of my manifold intake gaskets.
Exhibit 3: The engine is angry. When my little hill experiment failed, I tried placing my car in neutral, which made it angrier. The engine revs to 3000 RPM because the transmission fluid, having achieved critical temperature, has decreased its viscosity to the point where the impeller and turbine achieve perfect coupling. Thus the thermostat, is stuck closed, creating a closed hydraulic loop where pressure builds until the weakest hose becomes a rupture point, a sudden decompression that may serve to leave me stranded in this casino-gas-station quantum superposition.
“You’ve got a V6 and it sounds like that? Dude.”
“It’s just in one of its moods. It will be fine tomorrow.”
This is mostly true; if fine means the car won’t lurch across the basin when I turn the key over tomorrow, then it will be fine. I’ve still got enough brake padding to circle back a few times over.
Route 6 has all sorts of characters. Many who inquire find Salt Lake to be some paradisiacal utopia; plainly, I agree. It must be. You can learn a lot from people who stare at a different type of screen than you. For example, a simple solution made from borax and water is a cure-all for inflammation. The woman swears by it, and has evidence too, she scrolls through photos of her ankles swollen like grapefruits, and then ones where they are not. Don’t bother cosplaying the 22-year-old prophet, even if it’s in the nature of the times (you’ve probably fallen for worse propaganda unleashed by the Chinese AI spam-bot agenda, anyways). Just nod and listen and smile stupidly.
Before I learned Didion’s discipline of withholding, I was a very devoted user of Tumblr. Yes, my chronic onlineness is not a recent development. It was like a repurposed journal of sorts (like this?), published online because I’m quite self-absorbed even when I pretend not to be. But I like to think that this practice is better, in the sense that if I wrote in a private journal for “myself”, I would still hold some stupidly sincere belief that, even after my death, these articles and tiny notes would be discovered in my belongings, read, and understood prior to the universal kiln of time melting the language into a useless sludge, and they would be highly regarded as some text or artifact of importance rather than the despairing, primal sniffling of a privileged young adult woman. So, I would like to think that my practice of hiding behind various pseudonyms and identities online is the choice of humility. Still, I know my cowardice well enough to indict myself with these sentences anyway.
The pseudonymous dispersal operates as a distribution network rather than centralizing the waste product of my consciousness in a single reservoir. This engineering is useful for the state but not personification. I’ve engineered a sprinkler irrigation system of identity that maximizes evaporation rates. In simpler terms, I don’t really exist anywhere at all. I attempt to be an escape artist of the flesh, but find that, in my complacency, I’m all too eager to drop the knife. Or maybe I believe if I excavate myself thoroughly enough, this will be some approximation of bodily escapism. This only seems to collapse me into further abstraction of whatever I am, and whether that’s just synonymous with becoming something completely different, I do not know. It’s like the people you see who are addicted to cosmetic surgery. We often view them as incredibly self-absorbed and narcissistic even when their obsession is often rooted in becoming someone else entirely.
This is all, in fact, a playbook of emotional pick-up artistry. The faux self-deprecation, the smashing of the mirror, the assertion that this is some philosophical speculative realist experimentation, the breaking of the fourth wall, the confession of cowardice, the inability to state anything in plain terms, the third verbiage of breaking some linguistic norm, the act of not saying anything directly about my physical self (the self that actually exists in the world but often doesn’t), the rejection of time as Forward, continuous spiraling, continuously endeavoring to SMASH!, to break something, so I can feel, so you’ll feel. What is this, some bad 2014 Tumblr shitposting picking human nature apart? Which self exists, really? The one that hides behind LinkedIn banners and carefully constructed Google Calendars and email forwards, or the one speaking to you right now, in the most convoluted methods of linguistic abstraction that may as well be howling LOOK AT ME in parentheticals? Or the one that plays in niche theoretical poetics? Or the one that finds herself lost in the middle of nowhere and writes in fragments and cannot be seen at all?
(Have you met this one, for example:
Everyday I find every method of closeness intolerable. I consider it a violence. I do not believe myself to have a body at all. Anything that asserts my embodiment in the world terrifies me. This proof of my occupying space is utter violence. A lonely one too, as the mirrored version of myself often reminds me, how I see myself is not an honest reality. A hand against my cheek reminds me of the curve my cheek takes and the knowledge the hand will eventually leave, taking with it the inaccurate cartography. The only counter-strategy is to demolish the map by first cutting off the hand and then resculpting the territory, even if it’s disgusting and unbearable to be witnessed. Then whatever memory the hand holds, no matter its distortion, is utterly irrelevant, because that hand no longer knows the real and present cheek. Whatever you think you saw was already obsolete. That was not me; that was somebody else.
It is 5:20 PM, and I am hidden away, and I have to stay here until 6:30. My brain is not operating well at all. I have to go to the gym later, for what, for what, considering the obsolescence, or near-future obsolescence, of language. I must maximize most of my attention into the appearance of wellness, of attractiveness. This disgusting, gendered, embodied performance (that I must pretend I’m like, spiritually invested in). And I’m sure these rituals will become obsolete in just a few years too, when we realize what we’re all doing is quite ridiculous and that we may as well just do it faster in a cloud server or the like, like some solution to the Rawlsian thought experiment. Maybe all of humanity will spend a few years writing op-eds about the soul and authenticity of the flesh, wah wah wah embodiment is so moral and authentic and necessary actually, these meaty decaying bones are all we have and the only real thing separating us from oblivion, and that closeness between everything and nothing is what makes anything mean anything, wah wah wah. And I have my own sentimentalities to this sort of argumentation, so I will probably write one too, but I must reconcile it with my rational understanding of the necessity and inevitability of our further migration away from whatever the hell all of this is. It makes me nauseous. This dizziness of contradiction. I fear I am in a factory farm for cognition. This is my own schizo-Rawlsian thought experiment. I want out.
If this reads like unbearable Tumblr emotional pick-up artistry, well, you must have gotten it wrong. The real me, the significant one, sits in glass boardrooms and behind well-timed, all-knowing smirks and snipey comments and quick-witted responses. If you don’t like that one, it doesn’t matter; the real me exists in a prior iteration. She is vulnerably soft and spiritually observant and gentle. If you don’t like that one, there is also this person, that doesn’t really exist at all, that says whatever she means and says it loud behind a screen. If you don’t like her, then I can assuage you by offering you a calendar invite and a LinkedIn handshake. At least you can accrue some professional interest in this exchange. And if you want none of that, the last thing I can offer you is my body. It will likely be a gruesome experiment for you, as the body and the brain often do not act in agreement and the brain will largely be dissociated from the experience; perhaps you are into that.I hope, for your sake, you are.)
Rhyolite is a ghost town just outside of Death Valley. The first thing that can be seen is The Last Supper by Albert Szukalski, a famous Belgian artist. The sculpture is an imitation of Da Vinci’s work. Rhyolite used to be a roaring mining town, until the San Francisco banks pulled out their funds and the gold ran dry. Now the buildings are collapsing into Amargosa. Literally, there is a building being pulled three-quarters underground, from flooding and time and gravity, dépense without the erotic charge. You can find traces of the rock it’s named after all around. If granite is the slow heat-death of sodium-enriched magma, rhyolite is the fast free of rapid quench-crystallization, sudden and sharp, like the kidney stones of the valley.
The drive into Death Valley is the most inconvenient thus far. I’m essentially riding my brakes the entire way into Furnace Creek, and by the time I get in, parked next to some non-native palm trees doing their little performance of oasis, the stink of metal-on-metal is in the dry heat air. It really fits the whole furnace situation. This place makes even a V6 feel ashamed.
“The entire history of the desert concerns the possibility of its becoming the encompassing element, and also of being repelled, rejected by the center, as though in an inversion of movement.”
The thing about a basin is that it is not a destination; it is a trap with better marketing (a deadly trap too, as the name implies). “Basin” sounds soft and smooth, like a bowl, something you wash your face in, a domestic lineage of washing and baptism. But this basin is endorheic, the water arrives only to die and leave itself. Rain falls on the Funeral Mountains or the Panamints, or whatever ridges are holding themselves up against collapse, and then plunges in flash floods that demolish roads and sewers down channels that look like nothing until the rivers and creeks resurrect. It runs onto alluvial fans; some of it spreads, loses track of itself, then steeps itself into whatever little organics there are, or evaporates. If it makes it far enough, it ends at Badwater. It comes here to become salt, 282 feet below sea level.
This desert’s drainage system doesn’t work like the East, where water is obligated to keep moving and build and nourish something, routing into the roots of trees and the veins at the heart of a forest. Here, everything runs downhill into enclosure. A quirk of the Mojave is that the washes and arroyos are like veins with no heart. You can trace them on maps like thin blue lines, but on the ground they’re dry scars that betray the definition of aquifer; they are nothing but a flashing exhibition of the most base laws of physics. The air is too dry to support anything resembling a vibrant ecology.
The salt flats of the Mojave have a way of making me immediately aware of my body in a resentful manner. Not in the way of the hand coming to caress your cheek, or the way we desire some “other” form outside of us to map our own embodiment, but in the complete absence of the living, the flatness of the nonliving; the air that dries my lips; sweat on my limbs trying and failing; the dry crackle at the back of my throat. Flesh is a membranous container for the liquidity of life pretending to be a wall, and out here the porousness of tear ducts and sweat glands fails into jerky. Which should be useful, in the sense that Bataille would say modern people get sick when confronted with the rawness of slaughter. Bataille says the violence of transgression is organized deliberately, a chosen trespass into forbidden territory, that flesh is extravagance and the unruly excess inside us pushing against decency and its laws. The desert doesn’t need flesh, and it doesn’t operate indecently, though it doesn’t have to, just by necessity. It doesn’t even need water, not often. We’d like our meat to be inanimate and already food. But whatever ends up out here is already translated into remains. The basin is Bataille’s continuity as geography, and the place where the large body swallows all the little separate bodies, just in a faster montage of time. It is the communal grave of runoff. You can’t even begin to think of it as a cemetery when its base state was effectively dead “already.” Even the beauty is merely a remainder of what once was.
“In the Mediterranean basin there is a shortage of water, and he who harnesses water rules. Hence that world of physics in which the conduit is essential, and the clinamen seems like freedom because it is precisely a turbulence that rejects forced flow. Incomprehensible to scientific theory, incomprehensible to the master of the waters.... Hence the great figure of Archimedes: the master of floating bodies and military machines”
The hydraulic engineering of the self operates on principles both geological and libidinal. Crying is the body’s most pathetic hydraulic project, some little spillage that doesn’t solve anything. I don’t really cry ever, but here my eyes water from the wind, and I take that it’s the same thing as Badwater. The body leaks some little evidence of life and the world takes it. If I were more honest with myself, or here, I’d say I’m envious of the desert for its clarity and intentionality. I have no idea what to do with anything.
This leakage (mine and the valley’s) is just a victory by gravity. The act of leakage is already an admission of defeat and an acknowledgement of submission to science and biology, to let the world carry its will. Archimedes was the one to harness those forces to master, the water and the echoes of displacement of the centers chains to a calculus of strata and law. It’s easy to accept the read of this desert as the smooth space and the domestic little bowl where water run and dries out. The Archimedean screw is here, too however. The desert ecology is hard to see but complex as well, which makes it easier to read as neutral (just covert in its quiet enforcement).