Kathleen Muenzen
MLA

The Emergence: Pueblo Cultural Narrative in Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire According to an ancient Pueblo legend, passed down through generations of oral storytelling, all life emerged at once from the interior of the Earth into the “fifth world,” the habitable Earth, in an event called the Emergence. Leslie Marmon Silko, a nature writer and member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, examines the natural world through the Native American cultural lens in “Landscape, History and the Pueblo Imagination.” She characterizes the human-nature relationship as one of partnership and integration, justified by the communal Emergence into being, and emphasizes that survival in a natural world rife with danger relies on eternal respect for and connection with all other elements in an environment. The opening and closing chapters of Edward Abbey’s autobiographical narrative, Desert Solitaire, parallel the Pueblo Emergence as they recount the experiences of a man who spends a summer in Arches National Park in Moab, Utah, and finds companionship in a non-human setting. Abbey’s odyssey from a separate world dominated by human civilization, through the metaphorical door of the Earth-worn arches, and into an ancient wilderness controlled by the collaboration of each composing element marks a “re-emergence” into an original state of existence. As Abbey migrates alone between the cold, dark material world that characterizes the human reality and the warm, colorful and illuminated wilderness that represents the original state of being, he finds companionship and solace in his re-discoveries; at the same time, Abbey is troubled by the same greed and vanity that caused humanity to stray far from the natural union in the first place, and his desire for a kindred “clan” obfuscates the true place were his loyalties lie. Abbey’s emergent journey begins in the dark underworld of man-made machinery and metaphorically brings him back in time into the “fifth world,” filled with natural light and vitality. In the opening chapter of Desert Solitaire, Abbey’s drive from the town of Moab, Utah, into Arches National Park is described as dark and stormy. The “black clouds” and “snow falling like confetti” obscure his vision for the entire twenty-mile drive to the park, and he is guided only by the artificial illumination of his headlights (Abbey 2-3). This overwhelming darkness represents the “underworld” that is the modern human world, much like the “four worlds below” the fifth world from which all life emerged (Silko 271). Upon entering the park, Abbey’s vision is still obscured by darkness and he can only catch “glimpses of weird humps of pale rock…like petrified elephants, dinosaurs, stone-age hobgoblins,” signifying his progression into an environment that is both ancient and foreign to him (Abbey 2-3). Thus, the pickup truck is a modern mechanism that relays Abbey to his second and most direct portal into the natural world: the Park Service trailer. The trailer, though it provides him with modern conveniences and shelter, is cramped, “cold as a tomb, a jail, a cave…an iron lung.” Every aspect of the trailer suggests discomfort and artificiality, including the butane heater, which “warms up fast, in a dense unhealthy way” (Abbey 3). The images of these artificial discomforts thus contrast with the beautiful, open environment Abbey finds upon stepping out from the trailer “into the center of the world, God’s navel, Abbey’s country, the red wasteland” (Abbey 4). This exact moment is Abbey’s re-emergence, his first exposure to natural light since the beginning of his journey: “Lavender clouds” with bases of “fiery gold” greet him as the clouds from last night’s storm “[fade] into nothingness before the wind and the sunrise” (Abbey 4). This natural radiance guides Abbey into his spiritual journey through Arches, the metaphorical fifth world. Following this very moment of emergence into the natural world, the entire surrounding landscape fills Abbey’s vision and he is drawn to the striking image of the arches, signifying his spiritual migration to a destined “home.” The arches themselves are symbolic doors into the natural world, the destination of Abbey’s “migration” and the focal point of light in his new world. Abbey describes the arches as “holes in the rock, windows in stone, no two alike, as varied in form as in dimension” (Abbey 5). With openings big enough to walk through, the arches are metaphorical doors into the natural world, all representations of “Emergence Places” that give rise to new life (Silko 272). The arches themselves are made by the gradual “wedging action” of the elements, nature’s tendency to create dust from its touch. Silko attributes immense power to dust because life propagates from the remains, or dust, of anything that once had a spirit. In the case of the arches, the windows and doors formed from the removal of dust metaphorically propagate the life of Abbey into their world. As Abbey observes a particular balanced stone near the first group of arches, he expresses a will to confront the “the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us” and to see every element of nature “as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities” (Abbey 6). Abbey’s mode of thought corresponds with the Pueblo emphasis on the individual spirit. He speaks of a “naked self merging with a non-human world” that somehow remains individual. This paradox, which he coins “paradox and bedrock,” is the aggregated truth Silko describes, a reality that exists only because each separate and essential part exists within it. As the sun rises over the hoodoo stone, Abbey is enveloped in these ponderings, in the sunlight and in a feeling that he is “not alone after all.” He has emerged from a place that is broken by artificiality and miscommunication into a place where the “terror [of] facing the world alone” is extinguished by concrete understanding and simple harmony.
While the individual arches stand out as striking features of the landscape, Abbey’s vision is also all encompassing, allowing him to understand both the individual components of the landscape and the larger concept of an integrated natural world. From where he stands, “the view is open and perfect in all directions” and the Colorado River, the Moab Valley, the Roan and Book Cliffs and the “sea of desert” to the east are all visible at once. The U.S. 6-50, “invisible from where [he stands],” is no longer a part of Abbey’s visual or mental consciousness (Abbey 4-5). This all-encompassing vision of the landscape primes Abbey for a deeper understanding of nature’s unity, both in a physical, spatial sense and a spiritual sense. After Abbey surveys the entire 33,000 acres of Arches National Park, he turns his sights towards the individual arches that are all unique in shape and size, yet reminiscent of each other in form. In Abbey’s specific Emergence narrative, Arches National Park is a microcosm of the entire natural world, the arches a specific example of a composing element. This simultaneous consideration of the bigger picture, the entire park, and its individual components, the arches themselves, approaches the crux of Silko’s argument that the separate parts of any system are equally as important as the entire aggregation of those parts. In Pueblo culture, viewers of a landscape are “immediately part of all that surrounds” and to be “within” nature is to understand each component as “itself,” both unique and “intricately connected with a complex system of relationships” (Silko 266). Abbey himself asserts that he is “now the sole inhabitant, usufructuary, observer and custodian” of Arches, his entire consciousness enveloped by the landscape and every component of it (Abbey 5). Abbey has individually realigned with nature and now understands the need to serve the natural community and preserve its delicate balance. While Abbey finds solace and companionship in his natural surroundings, his satisfaction is only temporary in the absence of a kindred “clan”; his distinctly human tendencies cause him to long for the home he left, leading to an “anti-emergence” into the human world that strayed irreversibly far from the ancient, Earthly union between the elements of nature. Silko asserts that “human identity is linked with all the elements of Creation through the clan,” suggesting that humanity is its own, distinct clan with a “precise cultural identity” (266, 272). She celebrates this distinctly human clan, assuming these cultures take the initiative to respect all other clans and remain part of the larger natural family. However, the human culture that Abbey describes is one that has strayed too far into its own direction of identity, one that remains out of balance in “all [its] millions jamming the freeways, glutting the streets, horns bellowing like wounded steers, hunting for a place to park” (Abbey 264). After experiencing true wilderness, “where all that is most significant takes place,” Abbey sees the full intensity of the human race’s misguidance. Yet this prolonged isolation from the culture where he was born and raised also makes Abbey realize that he is inherently one of the misguided and will always long for “the wit and wisdom of the subway crowds…the cab driver’s shrewd aphorisms, the genial chuckle of a Jersey City cop” (Abbey 265). Abbey is one of the human clan members, and with this particular identity comes the burden of natural greed and the desire to be elsewhere. Evidence of Abbey’s human flaws can be traced back to the moment he emerged from the trailer, proclaiming that the land was “Abbey’s country,” and more so to the moment he decided he wanted to “possess [the entire landscape]…as a man desires a beautiful woman.” Silko asserts that the greed of one being has the “effect of threatening the survival of all life on Earth,” and Abbey’s flawed, human tendencies thus lead him to turn toward the world he entered from and head back into a pre-emergence phase. Once again, the sun becomes “buried in clouds” and Abbey races back to civilization “through a world dissolving into snow and night” (Abbey 269). Abbey thus “de-emerges” into the dark underworld of human civilization.
Abbey’s inherent connection to the human clan leads him back to civilization, yet his newfound connection to nature leaves a trace of spiritual fulfillment within him. Greed and the “insane compulsion to be gone” indeed lead Abbey out of Arches for the winter, yet he performs a final act of submission to nature that indicates that there maybe hope yet for Abbey and humankind. After making a final tour of the arches, Abbey “[surrenders] them all to the winds of winter and the snow and the starving deer and the pinyon jays and the emptiness and the silence unbroken by even a thought” (Abbey 267). Abbey himself leaves the arches, the metaphorical dust, “where other living creatures may benefit,” and thus performs the ultimate act of submission to a greater natural cause (Silko 264). Abbey’s emergence into the natural world is a spiritual journey of awareness and imagination that transforms him into a being who is one step closer to reaching the natural equilibrium that humans were once an integral part of. Abbey’s concluding thought on the final page of Desert Solitaire, “if I return,” is a hopeful suggestion for a new beginning, a flame of revival that may one day spread through the human clan and return us once again into the realm of natural harmony and community.

Work Cited
Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. Print.
Silko, Leslie M. "Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination." The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens, Ga. [u.a.: Univ. of Georgia, 1996. 264-75. Print.