the mountain slopes and
punctuated the sides of the
trail. An air of death hung
over the Davis Mountains.
The soil was dry as dust.
On closer inspection, how-
ever, most of the burned
trunks were still alive. Out of
thick black stumps, there
sprouted little heads of green
leaves. The sight was so mov-
ing that I decided to come
back the next day, with my
camera, to take a few pictures.
This I did, but with what
quickly turned out to be a mal-
functioning camera. It was
new, but kept giving me error
messages. I hoped that at least
some of the photos I took
would remain intact, but—no
luck. Back in Dallas, I found
the images on the faulty SD
card had all been erased.
It took another trip a year
later to capture the life that
had come back after the big
fire. At that point, while the
damage to the sotol stems was
still very evident, each root
was already green with many
new leaves. Destruction, it
turned out, had only been a
phase in nature’s larger
rhythm of life and death.
Reduced to ashes by the fire,
the mountains had come back
to life. Like I had.
I plan to use one of my pho-
tos of the resurrected sotols on
the cover of a book that I was
The price we pay is that we
become incapable of hearing
those eccentric voices that
continue to murmur, inaudi-
bly, amidst the noisiness of our
world. We have killed these
voices; silencing them was the
first step we took in our jour-
ney toward Reason. This is
what the “charred root of
meaning” means for Foucault:
for modern life as we know it
to become possible, we first
had to burn that with which it
is not compatible.
That is to say, things like
mourning and melancholy.
Professional
psychologists
allow us a period of time for
mourning after the
loss of a loved one.
Exceed that time
frame, and you are
depressed, in need
of counseling or—
most
likely—of
medication.
But
what if melancholy
had a place in every-
one’s life, all the
time, and actually
alongside joy? Such
a complex state of
mind would only
reflect reality: the
fact, namely, that
there is always an
interplay between
life and death.
There is always
something
to
Ty lo o king o ver the Rio G rande fro m the River Ro ad.
mourn, and always
something to cele-
brate. The two are insepara-
of a language which would
ble, like two sides of a coin.
speak on its own—without
This is the lesson that we
speaking subject and without
can learn from the charred
interlocutor, folded in upon
sotol plants. Death and
itself, a lump in its throat,
destruction are real; but so is
crumbling away before having
life. Life without a realization
reached any formulation and
of the death from which it
returning without much ado
comes and to which it will
to the silence from which it has
return
is
shallow.
never broken off. Charred
Occasionally, we need to take
root of meaning.”
the time to escape from the
The History of Madness
busyness of everyday life,
attempts something like a
where we are urged to be ever
rehabilitation of madness. In a
more rational and efficient.
world in which we pride our-
The quiet and peace of the
selves of being ever more
mountain desert allow us to
rational, Foucault argued,
listen to the murmuring of a
there is a price to pay for sup-
different reality that the noise
pressing all that seems mad,
of industrial civilization has
crazy, and strange—that ques-
tions us in our emphasis on
drowned out.
efficiency, progress, and profit.
finally able to complete recent-
ly, after years of gestation. The
book is entitled, Charred Root of
Meaning. The title takes its
inspiration from a passage in
the works of the great French
philosopher Michel Foucault
(1926–1984). In The History of
Madness, Foucault wrote these
words, in his inimitably lyrical
and dense style:
“The plenitude of history is
possible only in the space, at
once empty and populated, of
all those words without lan-
guage which, to everyone who
lends his ear, make heard a
muted noise from beneath his-
tory, the obstinate murmuring
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