The skin — the eyes, the ears, the nose — these organs that we rely on as sensory frontiers between inside and out, between Us and Other, between self and the void begin to misfire in the desert of Saudi Arabia. They are deprived of stimuli, starved by dryness, addled by heat, overwhelmed by the absence of scale. The pores gape. Out flow sweat, oils — all the lubricants of an overheated interiority. In pours pure blue distance. Walking across the Hejaz, the shady thorn tree that I aim for — perhaps a mile away — turns into a foot-tall tuft of scrub about two hundred yards away. The tall and craggy Sarawat Mountains, meanwhile, seem to ramble, to dance backward. I can never reach them. I am ensorcelled by open space.
In his book The Forest People, the anthropologist Colin Turnbull describes driving a BamButi Pygmy named Kenge to the edge of Congo’s Ituri rainforest for the first time. They spot distant buffalo on the broad savannah:
The desert yanks us inside out. This is why we go there.
Digital Postcard: These micro-stories about the walk are designed to add narrative context to the project’s Twitter feed between Nov. 15 and Dec. 1. Ethan Zuckerman and Nate Matias at the MIT Center for Civic Media are curating @outofedenwalk during this time to test how to engage the public in storytelling using this medium.
