3.

Driving home the other night I saw a shooting star, huge and green and straight ahead of me, streaking so low across the sky that it seemed to hang there for a moment before it faded. I thought for a second that it must be a stray rocket from the marine base just off the highway in Twentynine Palms, and perhaps it was. Hegel, the German philosopher who wrote a great deal about history and the nature of change over time, also wrote about strange things that fly through the early evening sky, and about owls. It’s one of his catchier lines, and certainly his most famous, from the preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right: “The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk.” Minerva being the Roman equivalent to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, weaving, and war, who at times took the form of an owl. What Hegel meant is that wisdom comes too late. Always. (“It is only when actuality has reached maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm.”) At any given moment the froth and swirl of events can only blind us and confuse us. There is no way to get above them from within the confines of the present. Only after the fact, when night is already falling, are we able to look back and understand.

We might now look back, for instance, to 1820, when Hegel first published those words, when coal-powered steam engines were beginning to replace water wheels in the busy textile mills of northern England. (Germany and the United States would not turn to coal until after the transition in Great Britain was complete.) But for that owl and its nocturnal habits, we might, with all the smugness of hindsight, insist that the black smoke that spilled from their chimneys and filled their lungs should have given early industrialists a potent clue that this would not end well. And we might remind ourselves that the owl will fly again tonight, and again at dusk tomorrow, and that none of this has ended yet.

Hegel, in any case, looked back and saw something like God, which he called Spirit. Human history was for him a rational process, and also a divine one. Subjected to the vigilance of philosophy, the logic propelling it would reveal itself, but only after the fact. History was the very thought of God as it developed over time. It formed a single epic narrative, the story of the growing self-consciousness of Spirit, of God coming to know himself, through us, in time. The trajectory was clear: from slavery to freedom. (Not incidentally, this could also be expressed geographically: “World history travels from east to west; for Europe is the absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning.”) The latter arrived, for Hegel, in the perfection of the modern state, which, he wrote, “is the realization of Freedom, of the absolute, final purpose, and exists for its own sake . . . The state is the divine Idea as it exists on earth.”

One hundred and twenty years later, Walter Benjamin, a different sort of German philosopher, saw things differently. Months before he ended his life in a hotel room on the French-Spanish border, despairing of an escape from the Nazis, he wrote twenty paragraph-length fragments on “The Philosophy of History.” In the ninth, the most famous of them, Benjamin described “the angel of history” being propelled blindly into the future, still facing the past: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel is pushed onward, Benjamin wrote, by a terrible storm. “This storm is what we call progress.”

Yesterday the Rhino—the perfection of the modern state—recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and promised to move the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv. The announcement was condemned by pretty much every government in the world except Israel’s. I spent the morning trying to figure it out. Surely there was some rationale for his recklessness, if not a strategy then at least some sleight of hand. As far as I can tell there wasn’t. To please his most rabidly right-wing and pro-Israel donor (the Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson) the Rhino had made a promise during the campaign. He was convinced that keeping it would please not only Adelson but the evangelical Christians who form a large part of his base. He is said to have refused to explain his decision to the Palestinian president, telling him only that “he had to do it.” Unnamed aides told The Washington Post that the Rhino “did not seem to have a full understanding of the issue.” So we race into the abyss.

I record this not as evidence that the Rhino is particularly stupid, shortsighted, addled, deluded, demented, arrogant, venal, and vain, though he is all of those things. And night is dark, the sun hot, and bright. The Rhino’s election and the recklessness with which he rules are not potential causes of global chaos but symptoms of a breakdown that is already under way. A healthy, confident nation would not have elected such a man. This one is sick to the bone, stumbling everywhere it steps, knocking things over, making a mess. Empires do not go down quietly. Usually they take the whole world with them for a while. The last great hegemonic handover, from Great Britain to the United States, followed two world wars and the loss of many millions of lives, most of them neither British nor American.

The Rhino, with his vituperative, uncomprehending eyes, his puckered lips and painted orange scowl, is the face of this collapse. He’s what we look like now. Every buried crime and contradiction on which the American polity was built sprawls in the open over the sidewalks and the streets and the endless crawl of cable news. The Klan is out of hiding. The dumb ones wear swastikas. The rest, in suits and ties, strut the soft-carpeted corridors of power. The rich are stealing everything. They don’t bother to hide the graft or to disguise the contempt in which they hold us. All the sexual horrors are spilling out, hungry priapic wraiths with sticky palms and iron grips haunting every workplace. This is what we look like. Nothing remains concealed. The past is returning. The unconscious won’t stay un. And into this cauldron the hurricanes and fires blow, one after another.

Or think of it this way. Hundreds of millions of years ago, our distant cousins—various phytoplankton and zooplankton, cycads and ferns—lived lives as full of passion and drama as any, and then went ahead and died. Buried in mud or water and deprived of oxygen, they were compressed over the centuries by layer after layer of sediment and stone. Slowly, pressure and heat transformed them into a black and viscous goo, into gas that stinks of flatulence, and into strange, hard, oily lumps. Cut to the early nineteenth century, when British industrialists found a use for these otherwise unpleasant substances, the transformed bodies of the earth’s early dead. They burned them, and made things move, and turned that motion into money, which could be turned into more money to mine more ancient fuels from the earth and make more things move and make more money. The carbon that had for millennia slept beneath the planet’s crust in vast and oozy subterranean cemeteries was suddenly spat into the air through smokestacks, chimneys, exhaust pipes. It stayed up there and commenced absorbing more and more of the radiant heat of the sun, causing the earth to precipitously warm, the ice at its poles to melt, its oceans to rise, their currents to shift. You are no doubt by now familiar with this process. What is it, really, though, but a haunting—the ancient dead disturbed from slumber, punishing us for our greed and blindness, our restless lack of reverence? What is it but the past come back, and time unhinged, collapsing?

Walter Benjamin attributed the failure of the social democratic politicians of his day to reckon with the threat of fascism to their “stubborn faith” in progress. If mankind was destined to advance, how could the fascists, with their crude and backward-looking talk of blood and soil, be taken seriously? But they were serious, and so are their descendants today.

The problem for Benjamin was not simply that faith in progress was mistaken. It was that the entire idea relied on a concept of time—a time that was “homogeneous” and “empty”—that was itself illusory, and dangerous. The opportunities and hazards of the present, Benjamin argued, could not be understood unless time itself was reconceived.

If this was true then, how much more so is it now, when fascism is not the only peril that we face?

Last night, by a hair, and against the wishes of nearly 70 percent of the state’s white voters, Alabama failed to elect to the U.S. Senate a man who spoke nostalgically of slavery and who was banned from his local mall for preying on teenage girls. Time is not moving smoothly forward. It’s circling back, getting knotted up in oblong loops, stopping, stuttering, plunging on.

In the summer of 2014 I was living in Ramallah. It was a very bad year. War didn’t break out until early July, but for most of June Israeli troops had been flooding the West Bank. The days were long, the nights even longer. I don’t remember sleeping much, only lying in bed, listening to the dogs bark, waiting for the call to prayer to announce the arrival of the dawn. The clashes at the checkpoints started in the afternoon and stretched late into the night: boys and young men throwing stones at soldiers who fired back with tear gas canisters, rubber-coated bullets, live ammunition. No one flinched at the blasts. The young men took breaks from throwing stones to direct traffic and smoke cigarettes, trying to keep the city flowing. Later, when everyone but the kids standing watch outside the refugee camps had gone to sleep, the soldiers came into the city to raid houses and make arrests. Shots and explosions shattered the night. Each morning’s news was worse than the last’s. Then the war started. Too much was happening, all of it bad.

Time seemed to have changed its shape. The clocks behaved as they always had, ticking away, counting off the hours. They seemed to mock us. Time no longer proceeded evenly and sequentially, but according to a strange logic of dread. It curved and bent, revealing pockets inside itself, pockets and holes in which it was easy to get lost. Sometimes time rushed forward, then something happened—usually death—and it stopped, melted, and recovered. It lurched off, racing once more, zigging and zagging before dissolving again and somehow, from nothing, reconstituting itself and limping on.

I had felt this before in other countries on the verge of collapse. I’ve felt it since, not quite so acutely but nearly constantly, in the year since the Rhino’s election. I don’t know what to call it. The Time of Crisis, Vertigo Time, the Time of Collapse, Black Hole Time. The days and hours lose their shape, their uniformity, the confidence with which they once marched forth. Time appears to fall apart.

For the Romans too, and the Greeks before them, owls were messengers. Better put, they were a glimpse of the goddess herself. Sometimes symbols are the very thing. Athena’s human form was no less a mask than her owlish one. She was the patroness of Athens, so Athenians, proud inventors of democracy, stamped owls on their coins and branded them on the faces of slaves captured in battle. (That’s a lot of owls: per the classicist Moses Finley, slaves accounted for as much as one-third of the population of Classical-era Athens.) Throughout the Mediterranean, the goddess appears on pottery and in sculpture standing beside an owl, or holding one, or with an owl on her head. Wisdom takes some funny shapes. Sometimes she had an owl’s wings and talons growing from an otherwise human female form, or an owl’s body and a human head, helmeted and ready for war.

Over the centuries and throughout classical literature, owls meant one thing—trouble—unless you were lucky enough to be from Athens. Plutarch wrote of an owl alighting on the mast of an Athenian ship before the battle at Salamis, lending the Greeks the courage to defeat the Persians. The tyrant Agathocles is said to have released owls over the ranks of his army to convince his soldiers that the goddess was with them. In Aristophanes’s The Wasps, an owl flies over the Persian troops just before the fighting commences, a sign that the Greeks would triumph. So complete was the association that the bird became a proverb: according to the British classicist Arthur Bernard Cook, to observe “there goes an owl” meant that victory was close. But, Cook cautioned in a footnote, “The bird which portended victory to friends naturally portended defeat to foes. Consequently the owl also had a sinister significance.”

The owl is always ambiguous. Archaeologists have dug up pendants in southern Italy showing Athena with an owl’s wings and human hands, which she uses to spin wool into yarn. Weaving, wisdom, war: How can one deity oversee such disparate charges? In “The Writing of the God,” Borges also described that whirling wheel of time as a fabric embroidered with impossible complexity. (The words text and textile are both from the Latin texere, to weave: writing is, perhaps first of all, woven, a fabric of overlapping threads.) His imprisoned priest glimpsed the entire weave at once without any of the comforting lies of narrative, without cutting it down to a single and seductive swathe that, once chosen, negates all other possibilities and obscures the remainder of the cloth from which it’s spun. But it’s all still there, even when we fail to see it. Pull any thread and you’ll tug another that you didn’t mean to move. You’ll find entire worlds. In some of them gods could be birds and birds gods. Homer depicts Athena as a pigeon, a swallow, a hawk. In the Iliad, she and Apollo appear as vultures perched high in an oak tree to watch the Greeks and Trojans battle. They like to watch us fight.

The archaeologist Marija Gimbutas saw in Athena an incarnation of a much older divinity, which she called the Snake and Bird Goddess of Old Europe. Gimbutas, who was born in Lithuania and had to hide during the war from succeeding military occupations by the Russians and the Germans and the Russians again, had a brilliant but fairly conventional career until the early 1970s, when she began to write about goddesses. In 1974 she published The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe and first laid out the hypothesis that she would continue to elaborate until her death twenty years later. It began by proposing that there was such a thing as Old Europe, a distinct and sophisticated Neolithic culture that stretched from what is now Ukraine and the Czech Republic to the northern shores of the Mediterranean, one that did not owe its achievements to the more storied civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Levant. The societies of Old Europe, Gimbutas was certain, were matriarchal, egalitarian, and pacifistic, and centered on the worship of a nurturing goddess. All that was destroyed, she argued, by invaders from the east: fierce, equestrian Indo-European nomads who replaced the earth-oriented and goddess-centered pantheon with cruel male gods of sky and storms, and who brought with them patriarchy, hierarchy, exploitation, and war. What little of Old European culture was able to survive would be forced into subterranean channels.

All this was widely dismissed by archaeologists at the time, many of them making the sort of complaints—that Gimbutas’s conclusions were irrational, sentimental, and insufficiently rooted in empirical evidence—that men tend to make when women say something they don’t like. (“Most of us tend to say, oh my God, here goes Marija again,” Bernard Wailes of the University of Pennsylvania told The New York Times.) But feminist archaeologists would also find much to criticize in Gimbutas’s ideas, which were most wholeheartedly embraced outside of the academy, by New Age feminists hungry for alternatives to the patriarchal and militaristic society in which they lived. In which we still live.

Looking back, it’s hard not to find something sinister in the narrative of a lost utopia that she imagined—a genteel and gentle Europe assaulted by brutish outsiders invading from the East. If only structurally, it too closely echoes the primitivist fantasies of the latest generation of purity-obsessed ethnonationalists. And Gimbutas surely gave too little credit to the goddesses, and to actual women, stripping them of all but the most stereotypically maternal aspects of human personality. Athena would not have easily forgiven Gimbutas for suggesting that she had been transformed by corrupting foreign influences from a nursing, protective mother god into a goddess of war, and that she only became capable of ferocity and wrath after being “Indo-Europeanized and Orientalized during the course of two millennia of Indo-European and Oriental influence in Greece.” It’s a bit like Botox: Athena’s youthful beauty is restored here, but she’s no longer able to scowl.

Still, I can’t help but find myself circling back to Gimbutas. However loopy the details, in broad outline much of what she wrote seems right. They may not have organized themselves into model feminist communes, but for many, many centuries and until quite recently, humans all over the planet did worship goddesses, and then they stopped. Most of them anyway. Implicitly if not explicitly, under both monotheist and rationalist conceptions, the cosmos is gendered male. This shift seems worth thinking hard about: what it means, what was lost, what might be worth recovering. Someone else can take that up.

What keeps drawing me to Gimbutas is her combination of the darkest apocalypticism and an optimism that, though it is only two decades distant, feels at once difficult to salvage and, in some basic sense, essential to our survival. In her telling, time has a different shape. It’s not a vector pointing upward that is suddenly, cataclysmically collapsing. The disaster already happened. It came in hordes from the East, on horseback, carrying cruel gods and weapons of bronze. Nothing was left standing. Doomsday came and went. It happened so long ago that we’ve forgotten it, repressed it, hidden it from our collective memory. This notion—perhaps more than any imaginative overreaching and selective marshaling of archaeological evidence—may have been what put Gimbutas on the outside of the academic mainstream: she is saying that we got it all wrong. Civilization as we know it is not an achievement, but a tragic defeat. Most of what we recognize as history was founded on a catastrophe that has only been compounded with the accretion of the years. But this also means we are not damned to this, that there are other ways to live, that we have far less to lose than we thought we did, and a great deal still to learn.

“We’ve reached the end of the world,” Gimbutas said in a 1990 lecture. “We’re starting to create another. I expect we shall become a healthier society. We shall worship the earth—well, not in the same way, nothing returns from the past. We cannot repeat the whole thing from the beginning, we can only transform ourselves and use our knowledge about the past and apply it for creating the future. This is my feeling.”

Long after the era that obsessed Marija Gimbutas but more than a millennium and a half before James Watt patented his steam engine, propelling the mills of Great Britain into the feverish consumption of coal and the planet into the current era of cataclysmic climate change, the island’s Roman occupiers were already, on a far smaller scale, digging that miraculous, slow-burning black stone from the coal beds of England and Wales. They used it in smithies, to forge the weapons and armor that allowed their empire to advance; they used it to keep warm through the wet English winters; and they used it to fuel the eternal flame that they kept burning in Bath, in a temple erected there to Minerva, the wisest of the gods.

Athena was not always admirable, but then gods are notoriously proud. Arachne, a common girl from Lydia, now somewhere in western Turkey, was a weaver like Athena, and grew famous for her talent with the loom. In Ovid’s version of the story, Arachne was also proud. She did the unthinkable and challenged Athena, whom Ovid calls Minerva. The two competed, the goddess and the girl. Athena wove an image of the gods arrayed in all their majesty, and embroidered in, as a reminder, the fates of various mortals foolish enough to challenge them, transformed into birds or trees or icy mountaintops. It communicated all that power ever wishes to, seamlessly, at once propaganda and threat. (Ask Hunahpu and Xbalanque: the messages of the powerful are always invitations to submit.) Arachne, defiant, wove the gods as she saw them, as deceivers, rapists, thieves. The beauty of her tapestry exceeded even Athena’s, and it achieved something the goddess’s could not: truth. Athena tore it from the loom and thrashed her. Arachne, despairing, would not consent to be humiliated. She would not kneel. She hanged herself instead. The goddess, unyielding, turned her into a spider, that she might forever weave, and hang, in warning.

L. is home. She flew in yesterday. In June she got a job overseas. Since then we’ve been apart far more than we would like to be. Friday afternoon I drove into L.A. to pick her up. The sky was yellower than usual. The fires are still burning, and spreading. I spent the night at S. and D.’s. The timing was good. When I got there they were making tamales for the holidays. Their daughters hadn’t shown up yet, but D.’s mother was over, standing by the stove, monitoring one pot of chicken and another of pork. I helped for as long as they let me, taking a position on the assembly line, spreading masa onto corn husks, smearing the corn paste with a dollop of meat and sauce or a sliver of cheese and a couple of rajas, tying them shut. When I left for the airport, D. sent me off with a dozen.

L.’s flight got in late and it was nearly midnight by the time we made it out of the airport. I drove straight to the desert, L. dozing beside me, KDAY on the radio keeping me awake. When we had left the interstate I opened the windows and let the cold air fill the car. It smelled of creosote. L. woke up grinning. There was no moon. The desert was dark and the stars were bright. L. stared up through the windshield, pointing and calling out the names of the constellations as she spotted them, like old friends she hadn’t seen for years. I tried to lean over the steering wheel to see them too but the highway was twisting as it climbed up through the hills and she punched me in the leg so I kept my eyes on the road until at last we turned onto our street and passed the barrel cactus at the end of the unpaved driveway. I remembered to swerve to avoid the anthill and we got out of the car and stood in the cold, necks craned back, shivering a little, our eyes adjusting, holding each other when we got too dizzy to stand.

My grandfather, in his later years, developed an interest in astronomy. He bought a roll-up screen and a slide projector and whole carousels of images of the planets and the galaxies. He was a big, lumbering man. I remember him, well into his evening gin, shouting at my sister and me to shut up and sit still during a mandatory after-dinner slide show. Was he the one who bought me that little blue paperback astronomy primer that I have carried with me every time I’ve moved for thirty years? I still have it in a box somewhere. I never read it. He gave me a poster too, of a supernova remnant in the constellation Vela, wisps of brilliant pink and blue folding over and into one another, giving the blackness space, volume, and depth. As a kid it looked to me like a man, broad-shouldered, tall, and slightly stooped. Like him. It’s up on the wall of the office I still rent in L.A., faded, its corners scarred by the thumbtacks that have held it to other walls in other cities where I’ve lived.

I did wonder a lot, as a teen, when he was at his worst, how it was that he had let his world narrow so precipitously while at the same time directing his gaze to the outer expanses of the universe. As if there were a balance that had to be struck. After the last and worst of several drunken car crashes, his decline was quick. Within a couple of years he could not perform the most basic cognitive tasks. He couldn’t recognize his own children, or at least not the only one who still spoke to him, and couldn’t access the words he needed to ask for the simplest things. My mother lost him once at Denny’s and found him in a corner, pissing in a potted plant. Dementia eventually cured his alcoholism. He forgot that he drank, forgot that he had smoked two packs of Camels every day for the previous half century. When paranoia and confusion did not propel him into rages, he was gentler and more affectionate than I remember him ever having been before.

He had once been a man who valued intelligence above all other qualities. The greatest, grudging compliment he had known how to pay was to describe someone as “pretty smart.” Toward the end he took to sketching out the solar system—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto, which had not yet been demoted—labeled, in order, and to approximate scale, with a spot on Jupiter and a ring around Saturn. At one of the homes in which he spent his final years they must have had an arts and crafts room because he gave me a stiff sheet of cardboard painted in tempera with the planets in their orbits against a light blue background. It’s possible that I still have it somewhere. But even when he couldn’t name them anymore, he kept drawing them in their concentric ellipses, in ballpoint or pencil on napkins or envelopes or whatever scrap of paper he could find, Saturn always with its ring.

For most people on the planet, for thousands of years, owls have meant only one thing. In The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser called the owl—though he called it an owle—“deaths dreadfull messengere.” Two centuries earlier, Chaucer had written, “The owle al nyght aboute the balkès wonde, / That prophete ys of woo and of myschaunce.” Balkès being a Middle English word for the beams that stretched from one wall of a house to another. Six centuries after that, the association between owls and ill fortune made it to suburban Long Island. I don’t remember ever hearing it from a reliable adult, or an unreliable one, but I grew up with the superstition that if an owl roosts on a house, someone within will die. Not that I ever saw any owls on Long Island.

Only once have I seen an owl roost on a building. It was in 2003, at an artists’ residency in the hills across the bay from San Francisco. One afternoon I spotted an owl perched on a dormer above a second-floor bedroom in the house where I was staying. I saw it there again a few days later. I remember feeling mildly alarmed for a moment, but that I know of, nothing out of the ordinary has befallen anyone who was living in the house at the time. Or nothing so ordinary as death. A little more than a year later, though, I got a phone call about a woman who had been staying in precisely that second-floor bedroom a week or two before the owl appeared. Perhaps it had been there then as well. She was in her thirties when I met her, healthy and strong. She was the girlfriend of a close friend of mine. They were planning to get married. He called me, distraught, from overseas. She had come down with what seemed to be a simple flu. Quite precipitously, her fever grew worse. She died before he could get her to a hospital.

The daily spiral. The Rhino’s ambassador to the United Nations held a press conference at a military base in Washington, D.C. She stood in front of a cylinder of rusting metal. It was, she claimed, an Iranian missile that had been fired by Yemeni Houthi fighters at an airport in the Saudi capital. “When you look at this missile,” she said, “this is terrifying, this is absolutely terrifying. Just imagine if this missile had been launched at Dulles Airport or JFK, or the airports in Paris, London or Berlin.”

Her performance was a shabby reenactment of Colin Powell’s 2003 speech to the UN about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, as if we had all forgotten that one, and that the Bush administration had lied us into a catastrophic war. This time it read more as satire than sequel. “You’re going to see a rapid flow of other things,” she promised. It would be funny if it weren’t so frightening.

Another new study, this one predicting that the oceans will rise 1.5 meters by the end of the century, submerging “land currently home to 153 million people.” The same researchers published another report three years ago. Their worst-case estimate that time was the same as their midrange estimate this time. Yesterday’s panicked fears are today’s sober expectations.

Marija Gimbutas was not the first one to spot the shadow of an older goddess hanging over Athena. In the third volume of his Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, the British classicist Arthur Bernard Cook proposed that Athena may in fact have been “a pre-Greek mountain mother of the Anatolian kind,” by which he meant something like the goddess Cybele, whose cult lasted into Roman times. Cook found what he believed to be “a curious confirmation” of this claim in a four-thousand-year-old Babylonian clay tablet, of which he had seen a photograph in the newspaper. This was in 1936. The world was about to explode, but it hadn’t yet, and Cook, who taught at Cambridge, didn’t have to travel far to see the original. A century of imperial looting had its advantages: The tablet was in London, in the private collection of a Mr. Sydney Burney. Nineteen and one-half inches high and “in a state of almost complete preservation,” it depicted a nude, winged goddess flanked by two owls, an apparent forebear of Athena. She had talons for feet and stood atop two crouching lions. The expression in her eyes was knowing, and defiant.

Cook was puzzled. The nudity of the goddess, he conjectured, suggested Aphrodite or perhaps Ishtar, also known as Inanna, the Mesopotamian goddess of eros and war. The lions, though, hinted at Cybele. Cook had received a letter from a colleague, the Assyriologist Sydney Smith, who speculated that the goddess on the tablet was more likely one of the nocturnal spirits associated with storms and wind that the Babylonians called Lilitu and the Hebrews called Lilith. With that latter name she would have been known to any educated Englishman of the era: Lilith had made an appearance in Goethe’s Faust as Adam’s first and disobedient wife, a beautiful deceiver, and was later taken up by Victor Hugo and by Browning and Rossetti. She was the bad girl of nineteenth-century painting and verse, and a very bad girl indeed: longhaired and lovely but a seducer of men, murderer of infants, sower of miscarriage, death, and disease. She would make a brief appearance in Joyce’s Ulysses too, as “patron of abortions.”

By then Lilith would have come to stand in for every conceivable evil that men could think to pin on female sexuality. Dark, irrational, and corrupt, she was the fetid, tangled underside of bright, right-angled, Apollonian modernity. The Assyriologist Smith was troubled: Could such a creature truly be an antecedent of Athena, whom the Greeks, inventors of philosophy, logic, and rationality, had venerated for her wisdom and virtue? “To establish a firm connection between Athene and the goddess of the plaque,” Smith worried, “will it not be necessary to show that the goddess was not originally, as later, representative of Law, Liberty, and Reason, but a local demon who fell upon the transgressor (witting or unwitting)?”

It’s funny, isn’t it, how much we cannot see? By 1936, after one world war and on the cusp of another, and after centuries of imperial slaughter in the colonies, it should not have been difficult to imagine that daylight might be bound to night, that reason, law, and liberty were also forces of great and chthonic violence. Walter Benjamin saw this with a clarity that must have been excruciating when, three and a half years later, just before fleeing Vichy France and taking his own life in desperation, he wrote those twenty short “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” It would be his last completed work. “There is no document of civilization,” he wrote, “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” That line is on his tombstone now.

But delusions are often dearly held, and nowhere more than in empires that have not yet fully crumbled. Were not the British, as the Greeks had been—and as Americans have been—the globe’s sole legitimate possessor and exporter of law, liberty, and reason? Could such treasures be inherited from a mere local demon?

Yesterday and the day before it was quiet, but about an hour ago the crinkled yellow leaves from the chinaberry tree outside the house began chasing each other across the ground in angry little circles. Now the wind is screaming and all the creosote bushes are thrashing about, rioting. Sometimes at night it sounds almost human, keening in the dark, drowning out the coyotes and every other noise. It can be unsettling, but hearing it and beginning to understand it—how the wind pushes the sand and carves the rocks and shapes the land over long millennia—has been one of the joys of living here, some awareness of those slow processes, the intimacy of geologic time.

It’s nearly Christmas and it still hasn’t rained. The fires are still burning outside L.A. The big one up in Ventura has spread to 272,000 acres, an area larger than that of Berlin, Bangkok, Madrid, or Seoul. After more than two weeks it’s only 60 percent contained. The winds are picking up there too, the same hot, dry winds that blow through the deserts here.

Perhaps Lilith can help explain how we got here. Or at least give us a better idea of where here is. The first mention of her name appears in the ancient Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest human story preserved in writing that we are able to read. Specifically in the Akkadian language preserved in cuneiform script, pressed with a wedge-tipped stylus into clay tablets that have been dated to the eighteenth century B.C. Lilith’s appearance in the epic is brief. She has made her home, we are told, in the trunk of a Huluppu tree. She is not welcome there. (Huluppu is usually translated as willow, though it is not, presumably, Chilopsis linearis, the fragrant variety that grows in the washes of the Mojave Desert.) The goddess Inanna, also known as Ishtar, wants the tree for its wood, to build herself a throne and a bed. The story ends badly for the tree, and for Lilith. The gallant Gilgamesh cuts down the Huluppu. Inanna gets her furniture, and Lilith flees into the desert.

She shows up much later in the introduction to the first volume, published in London in 1903, of Reginald Campbell Thompson’s The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia: Being Babylonian and Assyrian Incantations Against the Demons, Ghouls, Vampires, Hobgoblins, Ghosts, and Kindred Evil Spirits, Which Attack Mankind, the title of which is unfortunately more exciting than the actual text. Its author, Dr. Thompson, was a British archaeologist–cum–intelligence officer who would later be stationed in Iraq and reassigned to archaeological duties when that country and all its ancient riches fell into English hands after the First World War. War and wisdom, a single deity. Thompson’s writing is as good an example of Orientalist prejudices as one can find, citing anecdotal evidence from contemporary Malaysia, Syria, and Sudan alongside ancient Mesopotamian texts, as if they were all emanations of a single culture of universal primitivism, unvisited by the Western gods of history except as passive objects of observation. I’ll come back to him.

But Thompson does talk about Lilith, an otherwise obscure figure who by the turn of the century had already been woven into the new mythologies of modern Europe, the tales Europeans were telling themselves to reconcile themselves to the unprecedented and contradictory realities with which they lived. Specifically, Thompson mentioned two more ancient forms of her name: Lilîtu and Ardat Lilî. He says little of the former, only that she is a “night spirit,” and a bit aloof. Ardat Lilî has more intimate relations with humans. She is, Thompson suggests, “a restless ghost that wanders up and down, forced by her desire to roam abroad,” bringing illness and misfortune to the men with whom she lies. This is likely anachronistic, a layering on of the Victorian-age preoccupation with Lilith as femme fatale, a demonic incarnation of all ills associated with female desire. Other and more reliable sources suggest that in her earliest Mesopotamian incarnation it was women who were endangered by this early Lilith, not men, that she winged into houses in the night, causing miscarriages and killing infants in their beds. She was the female spirit on which otherwise incomprehensible evils could be blamed. Her name was invoked on tablets and amulets hung on the walls of homes: “O you who fly in darkened rooms,” read one, “Be off with you this instant, this instant, Lilith, thief, breaker of bones.”

It is perhaps as this sort of demon that she makes her sole appearance in Hebrew scripture, in Isaiah 34:14, in which the prophet describes the vengeance that God will take on the enemies of Israel. The stars will fall from the heavens, Isaiah promises, and the sky will roll up like a scroll. (To update the metaphor, it will slam shut like a book, or vanish without a sound like a closed tab on your browser.) The land of the Edomites will burn and lie desolate forever. It will be populated by jackals, ostriches, hyenas. Wild goats will bleat at each other in the ruins, and “Liliths will settle, and find for themselves a resting place.” Most English-language Bibles translate Lilith’s name with other terms: “night birds,” “night creatures,” “night monsters.” The King James Version went with “screech owl” as the closest approximation. Whatever we call her, there she’ll be, after the stars fall, among the ruins.

For post-exilic Jews in the first century A.D., residing in what is now Iraq, the already-ancient Lilith persisted as a baby snatcher, and something worse. She appears repeatedly in the Babylonian Talmud, which advises the pious not to sleep alone, lest Lilith slip into their beds and seize them. Archaeologists have unearthed ceramic bowls inscribed with spells in Aramaic to ward off Lilith, “Hag and Snatcher.” Around the end of the first millennium, an anonymous satirist (or, more likely, satirists) composed The Alphabet of Ben Sirach in Aramaic and in Hebrew. Written in part as a series of lewd and farcical interactions between Ben Sirach, the son of Jeremiah, and the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, it includes a new backstory for Lilith, who appears as the first wife of Adam, made not from his rib but out of earth, just as he was. Immediately they begin to fight. In bed, Lilith wants to be the one on top. So does Adam. It doesn’t occur to them that they might enjoy taking turns.

“We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth,” Lilith insists. Adam won’t hear it. She rebels, flying off through the air and, in her rage, speaking God’s forbidden name aloud.

Adam runs to tattle. God takes his side, announcing that all will be forgiven if Lilith submits. If she does not, he threatens, one hundred of her children will be killed every day. Lilith, proud, refuses. “Leave me!” she tells the angels who convey God’s offer. “I was created only to cause sickness to infants.”

The story was most likely meant as a joke, but the lure of a female demon who could be blamed for all manner of ills was too powerful to laugh off, and it was gathering momentum. This Lilith, the rebellious bride, will show up again in the key medieval texts of Kabbalistic Judaism, shorn of satiric intent. In the Zohar she begins in unity with Adam, prior to the differentiation of male and female. Adam falls asleep, and God hacks the feminine aspect from his side, and “adorn[s] her as they adorn a bride.” But Lilith does not want to be wed. She flees. Untamed by the bonds of marriage, she can only do ill: “And she is in the cities of the sea, and she is still trying to harm the sons of the world.”

Elsewhere in the Kabbalistic literature she appears as the consort of Samael, the archangel of death also known as Satan, and as a seducer of fallen angels, and of Jacob, to whom she came bedecked with jewels, “her words smooth like oil, her lips beautiful, . . . sweet with all the sweetness of the world.” Sweet, at least, until she and Jacob have spent themselves in love and she reveals herself as a fierce warrior “in armor of flashing fire.” Elsewhere she is accused of seducing Adam after Abel’s death and with his seed bearing all “the Plagues of Mankind,” elsewhere for causing men to ejaculate in their sleep or for scooping spilled semen from the beds of married couples to impregnate herself with ever more demons and plagues. There she will remain, just your average sheet-sniffer, obscure and cast aside like thousands of other forgotten figures of myth, until the nineteenth century when, suddenly, she would become useful again.

It was Christmas yesterday. L. and I went for a hike on a path that looped up through the rocks in an area of the park that was unusually lush with junipers and pinyon pines and even oak trees, the bare rocks heaving with life. At this time last year the mountains to the west, the San Bernardinos, were covered in snow, but they’re still bare. The rains haven’t come. Not on the coast, where the fires are still burning, and not here. More than three months have passed since the monsoons fell, but the bladderpod bushes were nonetheless in bloom, bursts of brilliant yellow up and down the trail.

For a long time white people didn’t think much of this place. In 1853, five years after the United States annexed half of Mexico, U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, later to become president of the Confederacy, dispatched surveyors to scout out “the most practicable and economic route” for a railroad to the Pacific. The demands of science, conquest, and capital cannot be easily parsed. One of the surveyors, Lieutenant R. S. Williamson of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, wrote that “nothing is known of the country” between the Mojave River and the mountains stretching south and east from the San Bernardinos: “I have never heard of a white man who had penetrated it. I am inclined to the belief that it is barren.”

But people lived here then and had for a very long time. Until the 1860s, the area surrounding the desert spring known as the Oasis of Mara was the home of the Serrano people. The Cahuilla ranged through the desert to the south and west, the Chemehuevi and the Mohave to the east. They knew where to find water, and lived well off of jackrabbits, cottontail, bighorn sheep, deer, pinyon nuts, acorns, and mesquite beans. Two years before her death in 2000, a Serrano elder named Dorothy Ramon published a book recording as much as she could of her people’s language and traditions. She described a landscape that was anything but barren: “Their Lord was living here, with them, he was alive, not dead. He was like us, alive here. And he would speak to them. He would explain to the people about how to live, about how to get along here on earth . . . He asked them whether they would allow themselves to be transformed to make medicine, so that medicinal plants would grow.” Some people became plants. Others, at the request of their god, became deer.

The Serrano creation epic, like the K’iche’ Maya’s, involves two twins, Pakrokitat and Kukitat. In a version told in the early twentieth century by an elder named Benjamin Morongo, then eighty years old, to the anthropologist John Alden Mason, Pakrokitat labored to create the first humans, but Kukitat, ever mischievous, didn’t like the way they looked. He thought they should have hands like duck feet and eyes and bellies in both front and back, and that they should die. The brothers quarreled, and Pakrokitat decided to leave, to create another world that would know neither death nor decay. Kukitat kept this one and lived on among the people, inciting them to fight one another until they grew tired of his taste for destruction and conspired with a frog to poison him. When Kukitat died, they burned his body, but it was too late. The people kept fighting among themselves, as they had when Kukitat lived.

Dorothy Ramon recorded a different story. Despite her efforts to preserve it, she was the last fluent speaker of Serrano, the last person on earth to think and dream in a language that had once been spoken from Los Angeles County almost to the Nevada line. The tale she told involved another world, a planet, once bountiful, that had been ruined and exhausted. The Serrano, according to Ramon, “used to live somewhere else. They were living on some planet similar to this one.” It got too crowded, and the crowding caused trouble. People began killing one another, so “their Lord brought them to a new world . . . This was to become the new planet. It was a very beautiful world. The Serrano talk about this in their songs . . . Coming from that other planet they started over,” at the oasis they called Mara.

It didn’t last. Worlds die all the time, and new worlds are born. By the early 1860s, the Serrano had left the oasis. Most historians blame smallpox. Ramon grew up with another version: White people arrived and “hunted them. They did all kinds of things to them. They killed a great many of them. They were lost.” Most of the survivors moved about fifty miles to the southwest, to the Morongo reservation at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, which was by then functioning as a catchall refugee camp for the displaced tribes of the Southern California desert: Serrano, Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Cupeño, and Luiseño. Ramon was born there in 1909.

The few Serrano who remained at the oasis were soon joined by the Chemehuevi, who had been displaced in a war with the Mohave, who were in turn being displaced by white settlers. In 1860, after several years of resistance, the Mohave had come to terms with the U.S. Army. According to a Mohave account recorded in 1903, the Chemehuevi, with whom the Mohave had lived in peace, continued to sporadically ambush settlers, miners, and soldiers until 1865, when the Mohave, with the army’s encouragement, took up arms against them. Some fled to the Oasis of Mara and learned what the Serrano already knew, that whites had begun to settle there too.

These were my people. I don’t mean directly—that I know of, none of my kin made it this far west until later in the twentieth century, but they were of European stock, as I am. They were hungry people, the landless offspring of generations of the landless and despised. Their own gods had been killed off centuries earlier and they were raised, as I was, to regard nothing in the universe as sentient other than themselves and perhaps somewhere an unseeable deity who demanded of them mainly a rigorously abstract faith, which is to say, submission. Surely, though, they felt some awe or fear at the limitlessness of the land, at the absence of anything in it that they could recognize as past, and at the enormity of the future bearing down on them, the apparently endless possibility that it contained.

They called the area around the oasis Twentynine Palms, after the trees the Serrano had planted there. Their cattle ate and trampled the plants on which the Serrano and the Chemehuevi relied for food. They shot the wild animals, leaving few for anyone else to hunt. In 1875, the state claimed the land around the oasis and gave it to the Southern Pacific Railroad, which was building a second transcontinental route across the South. The tracks themselves would be laid miles away, but the Southern Pacific wanted the water, and denied the land’s earlier inhabitants access to the spring. Nothing says progress like a railroad.

By the early twentieth century, nearly all of the Chemehuevi and Serrano who had not succumbed to malnutrition and disease left the high desert and moved to the Morongo reservation, where an earlier wave of Serrano had taken refuge before them. By then the Southern Pacific tracks had cut the desert in two just down the grade from the reservation. There’s a casino there now, with a hotel twenty-seven stories high. You can see it from miles away. At night its LED display is so bright that it’s blinding. When L. and I drove back from L.A. last week, it was blaring the words ALL YOU CAN EAT SPAGHETTI AND MEATBALLS for all the desert and the mountains to see. We are still hungry, apparently. The Chemehuevi have their own casino, smaller and blessedly dimmer, on the tiny parcel of land allotted to them in Twentynine Palms.

The park service took over the oasis in 1950. By then the spring had run dry: the water table had fallen as the population grew. Water is flowing there again these days. The park service pumps in thousands of gallons each week to keep the oasis green and the few remaining palms alive.

That conviction—that man alone is sentient and the universe just dead, dumb matter and all other animals little more than animate machines incapable of intelligence or emotion let alone something so precious as “consciousness”—would become a point of pride, a badge indicating the superiority of Europeans over peoples deemed “primitive.” In an 1885 lecture entitled “From Savagery to Barbarism,” John Wesley Powell, director of the U.S. Geological Survey and of the Smithsonian Institute’s Bureau of Ethnology, identified the belief in the vitality of natural and celestial objects as a defining characteristic of “savagery.” “Superimposed on this,” he said, “is found an exalted conception of the wisdom, skill, and powers of the lower animals.”

By the late nineteenth century, this was an established commonplace of Western thought. Progress could be measured as maturity or whiteness, on an axis of time or of space. It amounted to the same thing: an ascent into the solitude of a sterile and lifeless cosmos. Only once we imagined the world as dead could we dedicate ourselves to making it so.

It is also in the nineteenth century that Lilith comes to life. After her appearances in the Zohar, she was allowed to doze for six long centuries before being torn from sleep in 1808, by Goethe. It was hardly worth waking for: he gave her a flashingly brief part in Faust, Part One, her first appearance in the secular literature of the West. Or anywhere. Blink and you’d miss her: Mephistopheles takes Faust to a witches’ orgy on Walpurgis Night. Among the many wraiths and spirits gathered on the mountaintop, the good doctor notices one. He asks Mephistopheles who she is.

“’Tis Lilith,” the devil answers.

“Who?” asks Faust.

Mephistopheles explains: she was Adam’s first wife and these days traps young men with the beauty of her hair. That’s it. Faust is distracted by the sight of two witches, one of them young and lovely. They join them on the dance floor. All goes well until a red mouse emerges from the mouth of Faust’s dancing partner. Faust is sorely discouraged, but by then they have moved on from Lilith.

That one quick mention was enough to thrust Lilith into literary currency—for the next hundred years, few texts would be more widely read than Faust. In the middle of the century, she would receive a more expansive and less flattering treatment in Victor Hugo’s unfinished epic poem, La Fin de Satan. Here she is no longer the mere patron demon of wet dreams and sticky sheets that the Kabbalistic authors made her out to be. She is Satan’s daughter and representative on earth, the very embodiment of evil. Hugo fuses her with the Egyptian mother god Isis, goddess of wisdom, mourning, and the moon. “I am Lilith-Isis,” she declares, “the world’s black soul. / Tremble!” This Lilith is decidedly hideous, a veiled “monster woman that Satan made out of shadow.” Hugo blames her for corrupting the world after the cleansing of the flood and for providing the cross on which Christ would be crucified. Worse, he makes her the half sister and archenemy of Liberty, the most beloved virtue of the French.

Satan, with Lilith’s help, has nearly triumphed. His only obstacle is France, but France, Hugo crows, is “more than a people. It is soul.” France is “Man himself.” France is Adam, “chasing Night and Death before him . . . all progress is made with his steps.” Lilith, in Hugo’s telling, is the tyranny of destiny, “the unknown being, baleful and unlimited / that quivering man names Fate.” She is a specter, “the fierce eternal blackness of the nights,” the enemy of progress and of freedom. Unfortunately for Lilith, and lucky for the French, Satan is sleepy. While their father slumbers, the angel Liberty destroys her.

A few years later across the English Channel—around the time that the Chemehuevi were forced to take refuge at the Oasis of Mara, when the mills of Manchester were just beginning to burn enough coal to cause global carbon emissions to rise—Dante Gabriel Rossetti was painting Lilith, and writing poems about her, casting her in a more alluring if only mildly less monstrous role. On one canvas he elevated her to the aristocracy, titling her Lady Lilith, and depicting her as a contemporary Victorian beauty. (He used his mistress as a model.) She sits combing her long, red hair, her full lips pursed, gazing at her reflection in a mirror. John Collier, Rossetti’s younger colleague and fellow member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, painted her too, making her a pale and longhaired beauty, at once lethal and voluptuous. He posed her in the thickets of Eden with a shining serpent coiling around her leg and low across her waist, its head resting lovingly above her naked breast.

Why did the poets and artists of nineteenth-century Europe see the need to resurrect her, and to frame her for all the evils of the world? What spurred them to retell the biblical creation myth, to alter it, to draw it into the web of narratives that modernity was weaving around itself? Perhaps there was something that threatened them (“Tremble!”), something in the primitive depths of the past that they needed to summon only so that they might again banish it, punish and destroy it for good and all. Perhaps they intuited that, in the great rush of progress, something had been left out, and not just neglected but trampled and violently suppressed. Something important, crucial even, at once seductive and deadly, or deadly at least to those who attempted to evade it. Perhaps modernity had left an irrational remainder, something that would continue to haunt them.

In Rossetti’s poem “Eden Bower,” Lilith is easy on the eyes and irredeemably corrupt: “Not a drop of her blood was human,” Rossetti wrote. “But she was made like a soft sweet woman.” The poem is ambivalent to the core: an indictment of the dangers of female sexuality that is at once intensely and bizarrely erotic. Like Hugo, Rossetti exceeded the Talmudic and Kabbalistic sources, laying the full blame for the fall from paradise in Lilith’s demonic hands. This is myth at work: European modernity needed a scapegoat, a receptacle ample enough to hold its own insistent ghosts, the vast and savage violence on which the bright, right-angled future had been built. It needed something that would allow it to shed the irrationality that hounded it, to deny that “the world’s black soul,” in Hugo’s words, was its soul too.

Despite their undying popularity, scapegoats never work. At least not as they’re intended to. They do not exculpate the guilty, but compound their guilt, creating the need for additional scapegoats, and further crimes. This can and does go on forever. Perhaps Rossetti intuited this: to pin any blame on Lilith was to condemn himself too, and not just him. So he did her a courtesy that Hugo had withheld: he put much of the poem in Lilith’s voice, allowing her to tell her own story, albeit in his words.

Lilith addresses them to the snake, also known as Satan, her lover and her only listener. This puts the reader in an unorthodox position, archfiend as well as audience, seducer and seduced. From there it is possible to empathize with Lilith’s rage and at the same time to despise its consequences. Spurned by Adam, she beguiles the serpent into letting her take over its body so that she can tempt Eve and wreak revenge: “Bring thou close thine head till it glisten / Along my breast, and lip me and listen. / Am I sweet, O sweet Snake of Eden?”

She is sweet, and thus does Eden fall. Rossetti could lay it all on Lilith and at the same time implicate his reader. The results are the same: The springs that water the garden go dry. The earth hardens. Abel is born, and Cain. “The sword turns this way and that for ever.”

There’s a marine base north of the Oasis of Mara. At night, from my driveway, I can see the glow of its lights behind the hills. Early in the Cold War, the marines decided they needed a large and uninhabited area for live-fire artillery training. Almost a century after the Williamson expedition, most Americans still understood the desert primarily as waste: a lifeless land without use unless it could be profitably mined or otherwise destroyed. Hence the Nevada Proving Grounds, where the United States detonated more than nine hundred nuclear bombs between the 1950s and the 1990s, and the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, where the first atom bomb was tested on July 16, 1945. And hence the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms.

The latter, which covers more than nine hundred square miles of desert, contains several mock-Afghan villages and, for urban-warfare training, a prefabricated city the size of downtown San Diego. If I climb the rocks behind my house I can see the fake city, a blur of white structures at the base of a hill across the basin to the south. For years, every marine unit headed for Iraq spent a month in Twentynine Palms. A musician I used to know here paid his bills for a while by hiring himself out as an extra in the training exercises, until the marines, for added verisimilitude, stopped hiring local actors in favor of actual Arabic speakers. Most days I can hear and feel the thudding of the artillery concussions as the soldiers train on the far side of the mountains. The windows shiver in their panes, a reminder that, however peaceful the place may seem, a machine out there is constantly at work, readying itself for slaughter. Some weeks are worse than others and though I know the marines’ training schedule follows its own bureaucratic mandates and does not immediately reflect the state of the world outside the base, it’s hard not to feel the menace building and imagine that it means something, to try to read the explosions like the stars. This year the marines took Christmas off. I’ll take it as a good sign. The desert was still. Even the wind let up.

I tried to stay away from my phone and my laptop but I couldn’t help myself and found, among the holiday recipes and end-of-year lists, North Korea condemning new UN sanctions as “an act of war,” the English freaking out over Russian warships patrolling just outside British waters, and Russian submarines prowling around the undersea data cables beneath the north Atlantic—one little snip could sever Europe from the internet. The commander of the U.S. Marine Corps visited Norway, which shares a 120-mile border with Russia, to address the marines stationed there. They should be prepared, he warned them, for “a big-ass fight.”

“I hope I’m wrong,” he said, “but there’s a war coming.”

I hope I’m wrong, but what I am calling the Time of Crisis, Vertigo Time, etc., is also the time of war. Of the war that hasn’t started yet. Or that has without our realizing. Or the war that never ended, to paraphrase the poet Natalie Diaz, and that somehow keeps beginning again. Things start spinning. Events whistle as they circle past. The hiss is deafening. Nothing is new that isn’t repeated as catastrophe or caricature or farce. I read today’s news last month but this time it’s worse. The cycles grow shorter. They accelerate and slow and quicken once more. Things go still for a moment and the tension becomes almost unbearable. When they fly off again it’s even harder to take. It can be deafening, a high-pitched whine behind your thoughts. In the night it trills still louder. Like Lilith. And so it goes until everyone—right and left, black and white, pacifists and hawks—wants only for it to stop. So they can rest and hear their thoughts again. So that time can again slink forward. Unhurried, the way it used to. But it won’t, because that wish—for something to happen, anything, so long as the tension snaps—is a wish also for war. That is how we get there.

The Mohave too had a goddess of war. She was not so different, in some ways, from Athena. Her name was Nyohaiva. Born when the earth was young and wet still with newness, she wandered from place to place and everywhere she went people called her by a different name. She did not argue with them. She was the same, whatever name they gave her. “I teach you only singing,” she said. “I do not tell you what you are to do, but only how to sing.”

This was not quite true. She did teach them other things: how to paint their faces and their hair in preparation for battle, how to dance the war dance, and to take the heads of their enemies. She taught by doing, gathering one tribe against another, slicing her enemy’s head from his neck with nothing more than her sharpened thumbnail, tying his scalp by the hair to a branch cut from the willows that grow on the sandbars of the Colorado. Perhaps, as she saw it, all of that amounts to song.

“I wish all tribes to fight,” Nyohaiva said. “When there is a war and a scalp is taken, people will do as I have done. They will dance and enjoy themselves. All will be happy and play and sing.” Then, having delivered her message, she turned herself to stone.

Reginald Campbell Thompson, the aforementioned Orientalist, military intelligence officer, and aspiring demonologist, also wrote about owls. In Arabia, he claimed, they were believed to be bereaved mothers transformed by grief, calling out to their lost children in the desert night. In Madagascar, Malaya, and Sudan, Thompson wrote, their appearance was regarded as an ill omen. The ancient Assyrians reckoned an owl’s cry at night to indicate the presence of the Seven Spirits, who, per Thompson, are invoked in many surviving Sumerian incantations and poems and “reappear in various shapes and forms in the legends of other Semitic nations.” He quotes an ancient tablet:

They are the Children of the Underworld . . .

They are the bitter venom of the gods.

They are the great storms directed from Heaven,

They are the owls which hoot over a city.

Knowing no mercy, they rage against mankind,

They spill their blood like rain.

This, again, is from Thompson’s 1903 work, The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, which consists mainly of his translations of cuneiform texts written in ancient Sumerian, a language that he had not apparently studied. “His interpretation of them is apt to go astray,” his colleague G. R. Driver conceded in an otherwise laudatory obituary published in the Proceedings of the British Academy in 1944, three years after Thompson’s death.

Thompson was, by all accounts, a confident man, and not one to be inconvenienced by ignorance if it happened to be his. He was among that class of hardy Englishmen of good birth who took to the seas in the latter half of the nineteenth century, crossing the Mediterranean and the deserts to the east and south of it by railroad, caravan, and camel, risking death by exposure and disease in search of adventure, ancient wisdom, and whatever plunder could be had along the way. This, at the time, was science. No one called it theft. (Not in English anyway.) If Mesopotamia was, as the cliché has it, the cradle of civilization, its adulthood was without question lodged in London. Unearthing treasures in the deserts of Iraq and shipping them to England was, in a way, sending them home. They had simply been lost beneath the sands, waiting to be reclaimed by their rightful owners. “In the standardized orthodox textbook accounts of Middle Eastern history,” writes the scholar Zainab Bahrani, “Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian cultures can have absolutely no connection to the culture of Iraq after the seventh century A.D. Instead, this past is grafted onto the tree of the progress of civilization, a progress that by definition must exclude the East.”

Thompson had begun studying the Assyrian cuneiform tablets in the British Museum while still a boy. In 1904, when he was twenty-eight, the trustees of the museum dispatched him to Iran. Specifically to Bisitun, where Darius the Great had a monumental text carved in three languages on a high cliff face above the old caravan route between Baghdad and Tehran. All three languages—Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian—had fallen into extinction, but their presence together turned the inscription into a sort of giant Rosetta Stone. Thompson and a more senior Assyriologist jerry-rigged cradles out of packing cases strung from long ropes and had themselves lowered over the edge of the cliff “by natives stationed on the natural ledge above.” Hanging precipitously, their lives in the hands of these anonymous and quickly forgotten men, they photographed and copied the texts, which they published upon their return to London.

The names of many of the places Thompson passed en route will be familiar from the news—Deir az-Zour, in Syria, besieged from July 2014 to September 2017 by the armies of the Islamic State; Mount Sinjar, where IS massacred Yazidis by the thousands; Mosul, “liberated” from the Islamic State by U.S. bombers and reduced to rubble in the process, killing thousands more. The foundations for these conflicts were just being laid around the time of Thompson’s visit. He stayed in the region for a year, starting his own excavations in Iraq, sending home every artifact he could. In 1911 he returned to Syria, joining T. E. Lawrence, among others, at a dig in Carchemish that appears to have served as cover for a less scholarly mission: the archaeologists were there to spy on the Germans who happened to be building a railroad through the region, connecting Baghdad to Berlin. Nothing says progress like a railroad: the British and the Germans were racing to control the recently discovered, and massive, oil fields of the Middle East, and any potential distribution routes of the newly precious fuel to Europe. The age of oil had not yet begun, but the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, after a mere half century of largely coal-fueled industrialization, had already jumped by 5 percent.

The war that broke out three years later would be, in the words of historian Timothy Mitchell, “the first great carbon-fueled conflict,” in which coal-fired factories enabled the “mass production and deployment of the machinery of death,” including battleships that ran on Middle Eastern oil, allowing “European states to sustain a war of attrition that massacred millions.” Thompson was one of many British archaeologists, Lawrence the most famous of them, to enlist with military intelligence units. This sort of overlap was not new: the inscription at Bisitun had first been decoded by H. C. Rawlinson, a British army officer and political agent for the East India Company. In practical terms, these stalwart adventurers knew the lands and people of the Ottoman East better than any other Englishmen. The tablets and stelae that they sent back from Mesopotamia were not, for the most part, valuable in themselves. There was no gold on them, no gems, no hidden liquid core of oil. They were just carved stones and slabs of clay pecked with shallow notches. But they were believed to be the oldest written texts on the planet, and hence lay at the very root of “Western Civilization,” which, impelled by the great god Progress, moved like the sun from east to west, from the Tigris and Euphrates across the Jordan to the land of Israel, from there to the Greeks and Romans—whose treasures other Englishmen had looted—over the landmass of Europe and across one last lick of water to England. So the story went.

The rocks and hardened clay that Thompson and his colleagues had shipped up the mouth of the Thames were the building blocks of a narrative that was as crucial to empire as any mere material treasure. All those stone panels, bas-reliefs, clay tablets, the enormous sculptured lion wrested from the entrance of Ishtar’s temple at Nimrud that now guards the Assyrian galleries in the British Museum—all of it let them draw a straight line from what they understood to be the effective beginning of time, the supposed site of the biblical Garden of Eden and the home of the world’s first great civilization, the first one capable of recording its accomplishments for posterity, to their own, in Westminster and Bloomsbury, Oxford and Cambridge. By expropriating these objects and interpreting them, by owning them, they were taking possession of history itself. They were laying claim to time.

In a rare moment of concern for appearances, the head of the British Museum wrote to the War Office’s Mark Sykes to express his concern that the English might seem “to be merely plundering the country in the interest of England.” This is the same Sykes who would become known for his half of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the secret pact by which Britain and France agreed to carve up the Ottoman territories between themselves, determining the borders—and the resentments—that still define the modern Middle East. The caliphate envisioned by IS, you will remember, was intended to roll back the national divisions artificially imposed by Sykes-Picot.

In 1914, Thompson was assigned to Indian Expeditionary Force D. Having secured the oil fields of Basra, the troops were ordered to take Baghdad but instead suffered one of the war’s most humiliating defeats, at Kut. Tens of thousands of mainly Indian recruits were killed. Thompson saw little combat. He was charged with decrypting intercepted Ottoman and German radio communications, just as he had previously labored at deciphering ancient tablets. Plagued as ever by the restlessness of his intellect, he, Driver wrote, “spent many hours every day unostentatiously interrogating all sorts and conditions of men, sedentary shopkeepers in the bazaars and nomad Arabs from the open country and, whenever the chance came, enemy prisoners in the cages.”

At the close of the war, the director of the British Museum, anxious to take control of the region’s ancient past, asked the War Office to release men with archaeological backgrounds from their military duties. Thompson was “detailed to undertake a general supervision of antiquities, with power to conduct excavations.” Ottoman prisoners of war were put at his disposal as laborers. The military authorities saw to it that the antiquities they unearthed were shipped to England without the trouble of customs inspections.

In the years that followed, Thompson would publish broadly, penning several novels (“healthy robust tales in an Arabian setting”) as well as various learned works in the field of Assyriology, and his own translation, in hexameter, of the Epic of Gilgamesh. (The author of his obituary judged Thompson’s rendering “spirited, though somewhat unpolished.” It is almost unreadable.) He returned to Iraq in 1927 to run a dig at Nineveh. In the meantime, Iraq, now a British protectorate, had passed a law restricting the export of antiquities, which, though it was drafted by an Englishwoman, compelled archaeologists to share their takings with local authorities. Thompson wrote reassuringly to the British Museum that he would nonetheless be sure to get “as many tablets as we can.” That same year, the Turkish Petroleum Company, which was in fact controlled by the British and had been awarded a generous, seventy-five-year concession from the similarly British-controlled government of Iraq, drilled into what was believed to be the largest oil field in the world just outside Kirkuk, about 170 miles southwest of Thompson’s dig. Oil burst with such force from the earth that it rained down on the surrounding fields and villages for days.

When war returned to Europe in 1939, Thompson, too old to fight, joined the civil defense corps. He took command of the river patrol along the upper Thames. Two years into the fighting, his oldest son, a volunteer in the Royal Air Force, was killed in action while returning from a bombing raid. Thompson died six weeks later, of a heart attack, coming off a shift on the river.

Is it possible to write without plunder? Perhaps that is a more important question than whether any of this will last.

The New York Times took note today. Time is making headlines. The paper blamed the Rhino’s “tornado of news-making” for scrambling “Americans’ grasp of time and memory.” Has it really only been a year since Obama stepped down? Who can remember what happened in June, much less in February? The massacre in the Texas church (November 5: 26 dead), the massacre at the country music festival in Las Vegas (October 1: 58 dead, 869 wounded) already almost forgotten, the hurricanes that flooded Houston (August 17–September 1: 82 dead) and hobbled Puerto Rico (September 16–October 3: 2,975 dead), the Nazi march on Charlottesville (August 12: 1 dead), all of it seems like years ago. The Rhino’s talent for chaos and distraction—and, though The Times did not mention it, the media’s eagerness to play along, turning his every tweet into the tornados they blame him for—is surely part of it. He’s like a child opening every forbidden cabinet, shaking all the bottles marked with skulls and crossbones, serving it up as tea. But the Rhino can’t take credit, even indirectly, for the hurricanes and fires, mass shootings, van attacks in Barcelona, London, Nice, refugees dying by the thousands in the Mediterranean, war and famine spilling everywhere. It would be nice to blame him, cozy even, but the Rhino is only a rhino, and not even really that.

On New Year’s Eve, L. and I packed the tent, sleeping bags, food, a thermos of hot coffee, and as much water as we could carry. We left the car on the side of a dirt road deep in the national park, filled out a backcountry camping card, and walked off into the desert. The sun had set hours before but the moon was nearly full and bright enough that our bodies cast shadows, sharp ones, on the earth. After about two miles we set up camp in a clearing between two sudden outcrops of stone. We wouldn’t see them in their full weirdness until morning, but they were the otherworldly, rounded Krazy Kat lumps of orange monzogranite that bring visitors here from all around the world. In the moonlight we could make out, a few yards past our campsite, a giant spherical boulder balanced atop a pyramidal wedge of stone.

We ate bread that L. had baked with cheese and good tuna from the can and we stared up at the stars and the moon until we got too cold. It was long before midnight when we retreated to the warmth of the tent. My bladder woke me a few hours later and compelled me to shove my feet into my boots and stagger out into the new year. The moon, still giant, had sunk far to the west. The Dipper, which had been just above the horizon when I went to sleep, was almost overhead. Orion and all the familiar winter constellations had set, but two planets that I hadn’t seen for months—Jupiter and Mars—shined fuzzy in the predawn haze, so big and so bright that it was all I could do not to piss on my foot.

I don’t think I recorded it a couple of weeks ago when the Rhino’s secretary of the interior summoned the superintendent of Joshua Tree National Park to Washington. The park’s Twitter account had tweeted out some of the conclusions of the federal government’s own National Climate Assessment, which had been released a few days earlier. It was straightforward stuff, a very basic primer on climate change: “An overwhelming consensus—over 97 percent—of climate scientists agree that human activity is the driving force behind today’s rate of global temperature increase,” one tweet read. Others spoke to the likely effects of warming on specific desert ecosystems. The park’s namesake Joshua trees, for instance, are delicate creatures despite their charismatic spikiness. They can survive only at specific altitudes, within a narrow band of temperatures, and depend for pollination on a single species of moth, the larvae of which in turn depend entirely on the tree’s seeds. One tweet warned that the trees’ range will likely shrink by 90 percent if the climate warms by three degrees. For this indiscretion, the secretary called the park’s superintendent to his office in Washington, chewed him out, and sent him on his way. It’s as if Nero, bored with fiddling, forbade all mention of flames.

Also the Rhino tweeted that his “Nuclear Button” was “bigger & more powerful” than Kim Jong-un’s. If it didn’t mean taking the rest of the world with us, I would say that maybe this is how we ought to go out, puffed, bloated, raving, led by a cretinous clown.

It still hasn’t rained.

I came across another creation tale credited to the Chemehuevi people, who inhabited the oasis in Twentynine Palms, just east of Joshua Tree, at the same time that Rossetti was painting Lady Lilith. It’s no stranger, really, than Rossetti’s and Hugo’s stabs at myth, and in many ways more appealing. Certainly it’s funnier. The Chemehuevi divided time into two eras: the one in which they lived and a past inaccessible except through myth, the story time, when “the world was young” and all the creatures that we now recognize as animals were people, just as we are now. I am quoting a woman named Carobeth Laird, who was quoting her second husband, a Chemehuevi man named George Laird.

In her telling of his telling, “At first there was only water,” and the earth was made by Ocean Woman, the most ancient and revered of all the Chemehuevi deities who, taking the form of a worm, fell from the sky and sprinkled dirt over the surface of the water. She shaped and stretched the dirt to form land, then scraped mugre—dead skin and other grime—from her vagina, and with it made Coyote and his brothers, Wolf and Mountain Lion. Later, because gods can do these things, she took the form of both a mother and a daughter. The daughter, Body Louse, was young and beautiful and almost Lilith-like, but without all that weight of sin. She pranced about wearing only a tiny apron made from the skin of a single jackrabbit. It flapped up and down as she walked, singing as she went: “My jackrabbit apron flaps up and down, flaps up and down.”

Poor Coyote couldn’t resist her. After a series of trials—among other tricks, she tried to drown him—she finally allowed him to make love to her. This wasn’t easy, as her vagina had teeth, but Coyote, being clever, substituted the neck bone of a bighorn sheep for his own more fragile member. Once he had knocked out the teeth, the two were free to go at it all night, and night after night after that. Body Louse’s mother removed her daughter’s fertilized eggs, tied them into a basket, and instructed Coyote to bring them to his brother Wolf, who lived across the water, so Coyote transformed himself into a water spider and dragged the basket across the sea. By the time he reached the shore, though, his curiosity was too much for him. He untied the basket and took a peek. “Immediately people just boiled out of it.” In the end only “a few weaklings and cripples, together with the excrement” remained inside. Wolf took them out and turned them into the Chemehuevi and the other desert tribes. The dregs left at the bottom of the basket became the Europeans, who stayed across the sea.

In other contexts, Coyote’s manhood was not so delicate. He is said to have had four penises, the physical one plus three supernatural organs, the largest of which was called Tuguwi’api, or “Sky Penis.” It was so big that, in another myth, having killed and skinned two old women from the tribe responsible for his brother’s death, Coyote was able to pretend they were still alive by disguising himself with one of their skins and his Sky Penis with the other. It spoke, danced, and fought just as well as he did.

I don’t want to think about it, but I’m moving soon. In a week and a day. I got a fellowship in Las Vegas for a semester, at a literary institute attached to UNLV. That part is very good. The leaving Joshua Tree part less so. I can’t pay two rents so we’re giving up the house. L. will be going back to work soon and I’ll be in Vegas on my own. We’ve been packing all week. Saturday we had a yard sale and managed to get rid of most of the furniture other than the desk I’m writing at, a few chairs, a sofa and a bed. I could hear louder blasts from the base than usual that day, and the unmistakable crackle of heavy machine gun fire. I have to be out of the house on Sunday and have been trying not to get too sad about it. L. keeps telling me that we’ll find a way to live here again, but I’m not sure that’s true. Never has the future felt more uncertain. For the next five months I’ll be in the same desert, at least, a little farther east, with a few more people and lights around.

Yesterday we drove into the park for a run, not far from where we camped on New Year’s Eve. It was late when we got started, after four. The trail was long and straight, passing through a wide and sloping valley of Joshua trees and creosote and occasional clusters of boulders. The sky was overcast, the sun peeking out between the low clouds and the high mountains to the west. As we ran we kept startling the birds in the creosote bushes. Little warblers, I couldn’t tell what kind. When they took flight, darting low between the bushes and catching the sun on their backs and wings, they looked less like birds and more like shards of light, gleaming fragments of time racing away as we plodded after them.

The Rhino is melting down as usual, his courtiers attacking each other on TV. It’s good entertainment for all the people stuck indoors. The entirety of the United States is frozen solid. My mother, who lives near D.C., has been charting the spread of ice on the Potomac out her kitchen window. Yesterday she saw an animal, a fox or a dog, standing in the middle of the river. My father, in rural Connecticut, sounded shaken when I spoke to him on Saturday. Temperatures there had dropped to zero, with strong winds and a foot of snow. A single fallen branch could take out the power lines, and with them his heat and running water. In Australia the freeways are melting in the heat.

Boxes, boxes, boxes. The house is nearly packed. It feels like a lifetime, but it was only a little more than a year ago that I moved here. Before that I lived in Los Angeles for nearly twenty years, not counting a few breaks. My last home there was an old house on the edge of Chinatown, built in the 1890s, ancient by L.A. standards. The floors and ceilings were made of thick redwood planks. There was no heat, the paint was peeling, and the few windows that opened didn’t close, but I loved it. I would have stayed forever, but the landlady sold it and the new owner was planning to renovate and then move in, so I had to go. It was about a quarter mile from the spot where the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco converge, where an expedition led by a Catalan officer named Gaspar de Portolá camped one August night in 1769. They were the first Europeans—and Africans, though the latter rarely get much credit—to explore the interior of what is now the state of California. They paused long enough to say mass, admire the wild grapevines they found growing there, and give the river a name that the city still bears: el Rio de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula.

There were people living there, of course, the Tongva. A village of some size stood about a mile away, within sight of the bluff on which the Portolá party camped. It was called Yaangna. The Hollywood Freeway passes over it now. Juan Crespi, the Franciscan monk accompanying the expedition, did not ask the Tongva what they called the river. It’s not clear that he spoke with them at all. They were, for the Spanish, outside the web of language and the power that names hold. (Ursula K. Le Guin: “One of our finest methods of organized forgetting is called discovery.”) The name Crespi gave the river was taken from a tiny church in central Italy, in Umbria, outside Assisi, where Saint Francis had been visited by a vision of Christ. It seems worth mentioning that the church in question, and hence the river, and later the city, was named for the Virgin Mary, Our Lady Queen of the Angels, who was, Marija Gimbutas would hurry to point out, none other than the Old European goddess made up in Christian drag, or, if you prefer, the Egyptian goddess Isis, whose worship in Rome would be transferred to the mother of Christ. And that worship of the Aztec mother god Tonantzin and of Ixchel, the Maya moon goddess, would after the conquest be folded into a properly Catholic adoration of the Virgin, who is often depicted standing atop a crescent moon.

Grapes grew wild in my backyard. My landlady told me they had been planted at the beginning of the last century by the priests at St. Peter’s on Broadway, back when the neighborhood was still Italian. But who knows? Maybe they were the same ones Juan Crespi praised in his diaries. Old vines ran along the fence that separated my driveway from the neighbors’ yard. If I didn’t trim them back or if I went away for more than a few days in the late spring or early summer, their tendrils would quickly cover my car, winding into the wheel wells and over the mirrors and the wipers. When the grapes ripened I gave away bag after bag to friends and neighbors and to Nancy, the security guard at the office around the block. They were sweet and plump and slid off the tongue.

Behind the house, the yard climbed the base of Radio Hill, a little stump of green space that had been amputated from Elysian Park by the construction of the Pasadena Freeway. People lived up there beneath the oaks and eucalyptus, in tents and under ragged tarps. I would see them pushing shopping carts filled with empty plastic jugs past my house every morning, on their way to fetch water. The grapes spilled over the back fence. They ate them too. Every time I walked up that hill, there were more people living there, new dwellings badly hidden among the trees.

The neighborhood was changing. It had become cool, and hence dangerous to those who lived there. Time was speeding up. Old buildings were being torn down and reborn as high-priced condos. The city was pouring money into the park on the other side of Broadway, a sure sign that developers already had their plans in place. The Spanish conquest or the Anglo-American one replayed as speculation-driven flood. House-flipping conquistadors in Volvos spinning six-guns. Every city I have ever lived in has suffered some version of this fate. Money crushing everything, erasing entire neighborhoods, which nonetheless lived on, fashionably undead, grotesque quotations of themselves. Most of my friends in L.A. are artists, writers, musicians, or activists of one sort or another. The ones who had the resources and foresight to buy a home ten or fifteen years ago are doing okay. The rest are holding on to rent-controlled apartments, terrified that their landlords will sell. L.A. had never been an easy town, but it had never been so hard. It’s the same in all the other major cities, in the United States and abroad. They’re becoming homes for money in which people cannot live.

So I left. I was sad but I was ready. Worlds end all the time. I was up in Joshua Tree visiting a friend and found a place through Craigslist, a sprawling house on an acre of land, a five-minute walk from the national park boundary. It rented for less than a cramped one-bedroom apartment in L.A. The decision was easy. Just before I moved out, the neighbor asked me why I still bothered to water the grapevine if I was leaving. I didn’t know what to say. “It’s a living thing,” I told her.

In the desert I had more space than I knew what to do with. Inside and outside, and inside my head. I could watch the sun rise from my living room and watch it set from the bedroom. Most days I do both. L. had a different job then and could join me for weeks and sometimes months at a time. We learned to slow down. We learned how distracted we had been. We learned the names of the birds and the plants and the stars. But no escape is possible. Capital shrinks space, compresses time. Joshua Tree might as well be on another planet but it is nonetheless an extension of the L.A. housing market, and of financial capitals continents away. Prices were leaping and long-term rentals disappearing, bought up as investments by people in L.A. and New York and rented out on Airbnb, homes for money in which humans sometimes slept.

A friend told me yesterday that my old house in Chinatown was on the market again. The new owner never moved in and never did the renovations. The house had sat empty since I moved out. She is asking for almost $300,000 more than she paid for it a year and half ago. Whoever buys it will almost certainly knock it down and build something bigger, something they can sell at an even greater profit. It’s hard to imagine that the grapevine will survive.

For years I lived a mile or two to the west, in Echo Park, which has been long since decimated by the same rolling tide of amnesiac greed. Once, standing outside a bar on Sunset Boulevard at dusk, I looked up and saw an owl, enormous and white, swooping low across the street before it soared off above the rooftops. I stood beside the bouncer, gawping.

“Does that every night,” he said. “Soon as the sun goes down. It’s the only thing that keeps me from losing my mind out here.”

In the Old Testament, the image of an owl roosting among ruins appears repeatedly as a token of desolation. Owls remain where everything else has been destroyed. They’re there in the books of Jeremiah and Zephaniah, and in Micah and Job, where the devastation occurs in the first person. “I will howl like a jackal and moan like an owl,” Micah laments. “I have become a brother of jackals, a companion of owls,” bemoans Job. Nine chapters after the mention of Lilith, owls make an additional appearance in Isaiah. This time God is speaking through the prophet. “I am doing a new thing!” Isaiah enthuses. And he is. This is the one place in the Old Testament in which owls and the desert are mentioned not as signs of barrenness and punishment, but of the generosity of creation. “Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” God asks. “The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”

Then there’s the 102nd psalm. It is a prayer of woe, for vengeance and resurrection. The author blames his suffering on God—“for you have taken me up and thrown me aside”—but he does not appear to hold a grudge. “Do not hide your face from me,” the psalmist begs. “My heart is blighted and withered like grass.” Too distressed to eat, he is nothing but bones and groans. We’ve all been there. “I am like a desert owl,” he says, “an owl among the ruins.”

The psalm ends with an avowal of faith. Everything will perish, the psalmist avers. Even the stars will die. Like God’s old clothes, they’ll fade and wear out, to be discarded and replaced. But you, the psalmist says to the divine, “you remain the same.”

I only just learned that the armored figure on the Great Seal of the State of California is in fact the goddess Minerva. In other words, Athena, the wise. In most versions she is seated. In one hand she holds a spear, in the other a shield embossed with a female head, swarming with serpents in place of curls. In some versions all you can make out are two snakes, crossed and facing one another like an ouroboros, symbol of eternal recurrence and the cyclical nature of time. In others the snakes have morphed into horns and the head is winged, or has been transformed into an owl. A grizzly bear, strangely diminutive, crouches at Athena’s feet. Behind her are the glories of nature, the mountains and a wide river or a bay, and four ships at sail on its waters, symbols of commerce and discovery. A miner labors in the near distance, his pick swung back over his head, standing in for industry and extraction, for the wealth that can be wrestled from the earth. The seal’s designers could not in 1849 have appreciated the allegorical weight of that bear, reduced in size as it was. It was originally a symbol of Anglo rule: the white settlers who rebelled against the Mexican government of Alta California in 1846 were known as Bears; their uprising was called the Bear Flag Revolt. In the quarter century that followed California’s annexation to the United States, at least 80 percent of the state’s native population would die—to disease and to a swift and systematic genocide. Within three-quarters of a century the grizzly would be hunted to extinction in California—none have been seen here since 1924—but it remains nonetheless the state’s official animal and unofficial ghost. It’s on the state flag too, a haunting, the fierce and cuddly emblem of all that had to be destroyed for this polity to live.

It finally rained.

Carobeth Laird, born Carobeth Tucker, was in her teens and still bearing her father’s surname when she fell for a married man and had a child. She did not write about this relationship in any of her books except to say that she had to leave high school but spent every moment that she could, first in Texas and later in San Diego, in the public library, reading anthropology, paleontology, everything. “I had come to believe that there were those who spent their lives in pursuit of absolute truth,” she wrote in Encounter with an Angry God, her memoir of her life with the linguist and ethnologist John Peabody Harrington, “and I wanted above everything to belong to that elite band.”

Harrington—who whatever his many faults may have been was without question a member of that tribe—arrived in San Diego in 1915 to teach a summer school linguistics class in which Carobeth Tucker had enrolled. She was still nineteen and desperate to break out of the narrow strictures to which life appeared to have consigned her. He was handsome and scowling and already, at thirty-one, “in the grip of his grand obsession, his compulsion to record all that could be recovered of the remnants of the cultures, and most especially the languages, of the Indians of Southern California.” She was an excellent student. They married within a year.

The romance was brief. She soon understood that Harrington had little energy or attention to spare for her. The native cultures of the American Southwest were dying off, and dying fast, the languages disappearing, the gods and myths dispersing into the mountains and deserts in which they had been born. “The house is AFIRE,” Harrington wrote to an assistant in 1941, “it is BURNING.” In he raced, salvaging whatever valuables he could grab. He accomplished more than most mortals could. The archives of his work at the Smithsonian Institution are immense—over one thousand boxes containing hundreds of audio recordings, more than thirty-five hundred photographs, and nearly a million pages of notes, most of them unpublished. It took decades just to catalog it all. The guide to Harrington’s papers published by the Smithsonian in 1986 is ten volumes long. (It’s online. In volume three I found a photograph of Carobeth Laird. She is standing beside a sad-faced Chumash woman identified as María Solares and shielding her eyes from the sun.) In the end, Harrington documented more than 130 languages, including Chemehuevi, Mohave, Serrano, Paiute, even K’iche’. Many of them are no longer spoken anywhere on this planet. They are preserved only in Harrington’s careful records and perhaps in the fading childhood memories of the descendants of their last surviving speakers.

All this labor had a cost. Carobeth Laird bore much of it. “Harrington was a man obsessed and driven,” she would write many years later, “and he demanded that I share his obsession at the expense of all normal human relationships, even the most intimate, and all the amenities of life.” The young couple lived abstemiously, to be kind about it. Laird recalled Harrington scolding her for discarding eggshells without first scraping out the white with a spoon. They quarreled often, moved a lot, and lived always in harsh conditions. The privations were not just material: Harrington regarded physical comforts and emotions alike as unnecessary and expensive distractions. In Carobeth’s telling, he was largely incapable of empathy. He was paranoid, and took baroque measures to conceal his activities, his sources, and even his whereabouts from his employers at the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, D.C., writing his notes in a code that even his wife could not decipher. He expected her to cook for him, type for him, drive for him, and, increasingly, as he gained trust in her resilience and the formidable powers of her intellect, to do fieldwork for him too. She traveled on her own, identifying and interviewing sources, freeing him to double his efforts elsewhere.

In 1919, Harrington was called back to Washington, “but he saw no reason why my time should be wasted,” Laird wrote. “He needed a complete vocabulary and something on the structure of a language definitely recognized as Uto-Aztecan.” He dispatched her to Parker, Arizona, to learn everything she could about the Chemehuevi. She was furious. It was May, nearly summer, and she hated the heat. She arrived “sullen, rebellious, totally lacking in enthusiasm.” Almost immediately, she was directed to a man who spoke English and Chemehuevi as well as Spanish and Mohave, and who, just as importantly, did not mind interacting with whites.

His name was George Laird. He was forty-eight, “with a handsome, ageless face wrinkled more by sun and laughter than by the passage of the years.” His father was “Scotch with a dash of Cherokee,” and his mother Chemehuevi, the daughter of a legendary chief. George Laird had grown up with his mother’s people but spent most of his life working for whites as a watchman, miner, cowboy, blacksmith, whatever he could find. He was “remarkably at ease” in both worlds, Carobeth wrote, “firmly rooted in neither, but with deep, psychological ties to a doomed and vanishing past” that tripped him at times into crippling bouts of depression. There’s a photo of him too in the Smithsonian’s guide to Harrington’s papers, six pages after the image of Carobeth. He is wearing a suit, resting his hat on his knee, and smiling. Unmistakably, there is love in his eyes.

“By late July, or early August,” Carobeth wrote, “I had become proficient enough to begin writing down the Chemehuevi which George dictated. In September we became lovers. The two events were not unrelated.” In October, Harrington wrote to suggest that they join him in Washington to speed the work along. Laird agreed to go. The three of them would live there together that winter in a small and shabby apartment, with George sleeping on a cot in the kitchen a few feet from the bed that Carobeth unhappily shared with Harrington, anguish and desire leaking through the gap between the rooms. Harrington was somehow able to blind himself to what was occurring. In Carobeth’s telling, he made no attempt to intervene. He kept to his routine, returning from the Smithsonian in the evenings and working with George till night. “The days,” wrote Carobeth, “were ours.”

Eventually they left him. “I have no recollection at all of telling Harrington goodbye. I cannot say whether we parted courteously or on bad terms,” Carobeth wrote. “Somewhere in my memory a ghostly figure of a man stands looking after me, but that may be sheer imagination.” She and George drove to California. Carobeth moved back in with her parents until the divorce came through. George found a hotel room nearby and earned money digging ditches. In the years that followed, they continued to record George’s memories of Chemehuevi language and lore, but “there seemed to be little prospect of ever publishing our work, and generally other interests, increasing family cares, and the mounting pressure of poverty turned us from it.” George Laird died, of pneumonia, in 1940, in Poway, California.

Had he been born a generation earlier, Carobeth speculated more than once, George might have been a revered shaman or a chief. Had the society in which he did live not been so fettered by its own genocidal urges, he might have been almost anything. He would not, at least, have had to dig ditches to stay alive. Carobeth was not bitter about this, and neither, apparently, was George. Despite the difficulties of their life together, she recalled the years they had as happy ones. The books that she would later write are suffused with tenderness for him and with a grief at his loss that had softened but not lessened with the years. This was a different way of knowing, and of telling.

If he did not love them, John Peabody Harrington was without question fascinated by the people he studied, or at least by the structures of their languages and the parallels, echoes, and overlaps of the stories they told to understand the world. His hunger for knowledge was profound, and destructive in its voraciousness. In a 1941 letter to an assistant whose source, the last living speaker of Lower Chinook, had just suffered a debilitating stroke, Harrington wrote: “JUST KEEP AT THE PURE CHINOOK WITH HIM TILL HE KEEPS DICTATING MORE AND MORE, ANY OLD THING, for he will die and what you don’t get now he will die with . . . DON’T TAKE NO . . . pester the life out of him till he finds it easier to dictate than not to dictate and he’ll do it just as the easiest way out.” Harrington collected and conserved with doggedness and brilliance, but knowledge for him was no less madly acquisitive an urge than Cortés and Alvarado’s lust for gold, or Reginald Thompson’s for cuneiform tablets. He gave nothing back. Some of the communities whose languages he documented have since discovered his archives and used them to recover some part of what they lost, but this outcome was incidental to Harrington’s intentions. He hid and encoded his findings, and rarely published. He was, by Carobeth Laird’s judgment, “at heart a racist, a great believer in the doctrine of ‘racial purity.’” This does not set him apart from many anthropologists of his era, but it did set the terms of the relationships that structured his work, between enlightened observer and primitive observed, scholar and subject, collector and object of collection. He did not believe that any more equitable exchange was possible or desirable.

Carobeth Laird did not begin to write until nearly three decades after George Laird’s death. She remained, she wrote, “for some years in a state of shock.” She was eighty when her first book, about her marriage to Harrington, was published by the same tiny press that put out Dorothy Ramon’s book about the Serrano. Tom Wolfe praised her work in Harper’s. Larry McMurtry raved about it in The Washington Post. In her next two books, she published the bulk of the Chemehuevi stories that she and George had meticulously recorded along with her observations of the Chemehuevi language, kinship arrangements, and sacred rituals. Despite her lack of formal education, they are works of extraordinary depth and analytical rigor, possessed with a modesty that would be hard to imagine in an academic context. “The anthropologist,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in one of her novels, “cannot always leave his own shadow out of the picture that he draws.” Carobeth Laird did not try. She did not pretend to write from “an impersonal standpoint.” What value her writing might have, she suggested, was not its impartiality but the passion that guided it, the love, affection, and respect that she bore for George Laird and for the culture that created him. Much of what she recorded, she admitted, came only from him, and had not been independently verified.

“But does this impair its value?” she asked. “Dreams, fantasies, and childhood memories are the stuff of which legend is formed; and legend is surely as important as fact in revealing the soul of an individual, a people, or an era.”

The moment the rain begins to fall, the smell of creosote spreads across the desert. The air is crisp and cold now, the mountains white at last with snow. Creosote is a spindly, inelegant plant with silvery, segmented branches and tiny, slightly oily leaves. You can coax out their scent by picking a sprig and crushing the leaves between your fingers if you want, but the oils that coat them are volatile and the merest drizzle, even the moisture in your breath, is enough to excite them into releasing their odor without further mutilation. When it rains here, even when it’s pouring, I stand outside and suck it in.

Not everyone is as fond of the smell as I am. L. laughs at me when we’re out walking and I lodge a sprig in my mustache so I can sniff it as we hike. A friend visiting last week from the coast cringed when I held some to her nose. “Smells like pee,” she said. She wasn’t entirely wrong, but she wasn’t right either. How do you describe a smell without comparing it to other smells? I want to say creosote smells like the ocean but it doesn’t, except in its hint of vastness, and its funk. It is simply what the desert smells like: musky, ancient, sharp, eager, patient, and alive.

One of the oldest living beings on the planet is a creosote bush. After a few decades, the individual branches of any given creosote begin to lose their leaves and die, but new stems, clones of the original, sprout from the roots that extend around the plant in a circle underground. What appears to be a ring of separate bushes is hence a single organism and though any of its visible branches may only be ten or fifty or eighty years old, the plant may have been alive for millennia. The wider the circle, the older the creosote. The one that is believed to be the oldest on earth, which is here in the Mojave, in Lucerne Valley about forty-five miles to the northwest of my house, has been around for nearly twelve thousand years. They are hardier than the Joshua trees, and thrive in the heat. Whatever happens to us, they will almost certainly be here for a while.

This is perhaps a more useful way to think about the shape of time—not as a line or an arrow or a circle or a spiral, but something living, a circle that expands out of sight, invisible roots that grow and grow even as the parts we can see die off. “The world is always new,” wrote Ursula K. Le Guin, “however old its roots.”

In volume three of his monumental Black Athena, Martin Bernal mentioned the surprising discovery, in 1978, at Knossos, of ceramic pots, likely more than thirty-six hundred years old, containing the dismembered remains of children. Their bones were scarred with knife marks. The children had been butchered and, apparently, cooked. Nearby, archaeologists found pottery and amphorae decorated with shields and the head of a Gorgon, images associated with Athena. Others would be more cautious, but for Bernal the find confirmed that “Athena was associated with human, and especially child, sacrifice.” So much for our “representative of Law, Liberty, and Reason.”

In that volume, which is largely concerned with presenting linguistic evidence for the African and Asian heritage of ancient Greece—Classical Greek, by Bernal’s estimation, owes as much as 40 percent of its vocabulary to the Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic languages—Bernal also argued that Athena was a descendant of the Egyptian goddess Nēit and a near cousin to the Canaanite deity ’Anat. All three were powerful figures, bloodthirsty warriors “of renewable virginity,” as Bernal put it. All three were associated with weaving, and with birds of prey: Nēit with vultures, ’Anat with eagles, Athena with the owl. Plato and Herodotus both attested to Athena’s identity with Nēit. Inscriptions in Cyprus, where Athena and ’Anat shared a temple, equated the two deities.

“There are no simple origins,” cautioned Bernal. It was never a question of a direct and singular genetic inheritance, of roots leading up a trunk and bifurcating into branches. Human history, he suggested, was more like a river, splitting off into tributaries, merging and diverging again and again. Or perhaps like a crowd, joining arms and letting go, splitting into smaller groups that at times clasp hands with one another. Or like creosote, cloning itself for thousands of years, the roots living on and producing new shoots yards away even as one bush or another died or seemed to die. The worship of Nēit would be largely subsumed by a cult to Isis, the veneration of whom would in turn be transferred to the Virgin Mary. ’Anat, whose worship may have involved the sacrifice of virgins, was in northwest Syria regarded as the sister and sometimes the consort of Ba’al, the primary god in the Canaanite pantheon, who was alternately adored and rejected by the ancient Israelites. Archaeological evidence uncovered on the Nile island of Elephantine, in the contemporary Egyptian city of Aswan, suggests that an isolated community of Jewish mercenaries living there in the fifth century B.C. worshiped ’Anat as the “Queen of Heaven” and wife of Yahweh, who was regarded by other contemporary Jews as the one and only god. Behind and beside any One there is always an other, and behind each of those wait many more.

Bernal’s larger argument was not about ’Anat or Athena or even language, but about the making of history itself. Which is to say that it was about time, and how and why we conceive it the way we do. And about the violence and power locked up in those notions, a violence that always spills out. Black Athena, it should be said, sparked a furious controversy. Many of Bernal’s etymological claims have been discredited, but his broader historiographical argument holds up well. Until the early nineteenth century, Bernal proposed, there was little controversy about the debts Greek culture owed to Africa and to points farther east. During the Renaissance revival of Greek thought, “no one questioned the fact that the Greeks had been pupils of the Egyptians.” In the early Enlightenment too, European intellectuals were openly fascinated by Egypt.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, though, a new paradigm took hold of Europe. It arose, not coincidentally, as European economies reconfigured themselves around the by-then-steady flow of wealth from the Americas, most of it procured thanks to the labor of African and indigenous slaves. This wealth, and the quicker pace of technological change that followed it, brought an ever-deeper conviction in the superiority of European civilization. All that exploitation had to be justified somehow. Or if not justified, disguised. History was reconceived, in Bernal’s words, as “the biography of races,” a narrative subject to the laws of something called “progress.” This extraordinary notion would prove convenient in more ways than one. As an ideology that put European culture at the pinnacle of human history and consigned everyone else to time’s lowland wastes, it functioned at once as an explanation of European dominance and a rationale for the slaughter and pillage on which it depended, and continues to depend.

If Europe represented the mature stage of human development, it would need a lineage. Since the genealogically obsessed tend to favor purity, it would help if its ancestry suffered as little admixture as possible. Greece—the people of which were unquestionably European, famously clever, and passably fair-skinned—would be elevated. Hence the subtitle of volume one of Black Athena: “The Fabrication of Ancient Greece.” The Greeks would be reinvented to match the most flattering self-image that Europeans could muster: a people supremely rational and wise, with the stubborn and inborn independence of a noble race, uniquely capable of self-governance, mercilessly strong when justice and necessity demanded it. That this image would not have been recognized by either the Greeks’ contemporaries or by the inhabitants of the continents being mowed under by “Western Civilization” is another matter. Plato and Aeschylus became the heritage of the English, the Germans, and far-flung white Americans. Greek joined Latin as an indispensable part of the education of the European elite. Classics emerged as a discipline. By the early nineteenth century, wrote Bernal, it had become “increasingly intolerable that Greece—which was seen by the Romantics not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood—could be the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites.”

Egypt, until recently the object of so much admiration and awe, would be “flung into prehistory to serve as a solid and inert basis for the dynamic development of the superior races, the Aryans and the Semites.” Recall Hugo’s otherwise bizarre conflation of Lilith with the goddess Isis: Egypt had been by then recast as a stagnant mire of corrupt and monstrous superstition. This is the morass that Lilith would stand in for: the terrifying irrational that the nineteenth century propped up as the foundation on which civilization’s anxious heights were built, a demon conjured only so that it could be exiled into the wilds of racial difference and female sexuality. By the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud would be attributing an analogous structure to the human psyche: the rational ego teetering above the dark unconscious, the latter conceived as a roiling stew of archaic myth and violent, primitive desire.

The Semites too would soon be tossed out in a hurry. All Phoenician and Canaanite influence on Greece, and all evidence of substantive cultural exchange with the cultures of Mesopotamia and the Levant, which had until recently been considered uncontroversially obvious, would become suspect. Except to the undeniable degree to which Christianity was inconceivable without them, the Jews too would be crowded out. (And Freud among them: the esteemed doctor fled Vienna in 1938, not long after his daughter was arrested by the Gestapo.) Thus was established what the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand calls “the mythology of white continuity.” And thus, finally, we can understand the confusion in that 1936 letter from the Assyriologist Sydney Smith to Arthur Cook. Once again: “To establish a firm connection between Athene and the goddess of the plaque,” Smith wrote, referring to the carving of the still-unidentified nude, winged Sumerian goddess with her owls and lions, “will it not be necessary to show that the goddess was not originally, as later, representative of Law, Liberty, and Reason, but a local demon who fell upon the transgressor (witting or unwitting)?” Only thanks to such a thorough bleaching could the European present—and the Greek past—have become so unrecognizable even to those who lived it.

One more thing about Athena. Homer customarily followed her name with the adjective glaukopis, which is usually translated as either bright-eyed or gray-eyed and holds a range of meanings from bright and flashing to blue, light gray, or even green. The word cements Athena’s association with the little owl—that is the name of the species, not a description of it—that the Greeks called glaux in reference to the brightness of its eyes, and that is currently known by the Latin name Athene noctua. “Owl-eyed” might thus have been closer to Homer’s intention. The point would likely have been lost on most early-twentieth-century lovers of the classics, for whom fair eyes were an indicator of racial superiority. For the Greeks, Bernal wrote, blue eyes were associated with ferocity, and with misfortune. The glass evil-eye amulets still produced and sold around the Mediterranean—I have one hanging by my door—are a light blue inside a darker blue. “The paleness of Athena’s eyes,” Bernal concluded, would have “added to the terror she inspired.”

Of course, my eyes are also blue.

She didn’t record the year, but it must have been late in the autumn of 1848 when Sarah Winnemucca’s father accompanied his father, a chief of the Northern Paiute, to fish the Humboldt River in what is now northern Nevada. He came back with news of a curious sight: white settlers living near the dry lake bed of the Humboldt Sink. European colonization had likely been affecting the people of the Great Basin Desert for a century or more, but only indirectly, as more distant tribes acquired guns and horses and began raiding their less fortunate neighbors and selling them as slaves to the Spanish. These whites, though, Winnemucca remembered thirty-five years later, in 1883, “were the first ones my father had seen face to face. He said they were not like ‘humans.’ They were more like owls than any thing else. They had hair on their faces, and had white eyes, and looked beautiful.”

The first time she saw them herself, she did not find them beautiful. “I only saw their big white eyes,” she wrote, “and I thought their faces were all hair.” She hid, terrified, first beneath a pile of robes, then behind her mother’s back. “Oh, mother,” she cried. “The owls!”

Last night I stayed up reading another Ursula K. Le Guin novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. This one was set on a wintry planet that worships a god who is understood to occupy “the Center of Time,” in which no time exists and all times do: past, present, and future, all ends and all beginnings, a great and radical simultaneity from which everything is spun. In the eye of this god, Le Guin writes, “are all the stars, and the darknesses between the stars: and all are bright.”

What caught my attention was this line, spoken by an envoy from a future planet Earth: “It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.”

That seems a little easy, but maybe so. Unless he burns everything down.

I made myself get up before dawn this morning so that I could watch the sunrise through the bedroom window one last time. It was a particularly gorgeous one, the sky streaked with dark, blue-gray clouds lit pink and orange as the sun came up behind the rocks. L. left a few days ago and I’ve spent the last week engaged almost entirely with objects—which to be sold, which to be stored, which to be given away? Which can I fit in my car and into the small studio apartment waiting for me in Las Vegas? Yesterday I made sure to give myself time for one last walk.

I headed up the wash where K. and A. and I had encountered the owls. It’s hard to believe that was just two months ago, a little more. I felt sure I would see them again. When I reached the willows I scoured the rocks. I saw a few phainopeplas guarding their crops of mistletoe. (Phainopeplas live entirely on the berries of the desert mistletoe, a parasite that grows in the branches of cat’s-claw acacias. If you watch one for a little while, you’ll see it fly a circuit from one cat’s-claw to the next, eating mistletoe when it’s present, shitting out the seeds when it’s not, helping the mistletoe to spread to new acacias. The birds are farming.) Quail fled before me like nervous old ladies dressed for church, their little plumed heads bobbing as they scuttled off into the brush. No owls. I even hooted. It echoed a little, but nothing answered.

The wash rose into a canyon with steep stone walls. I paused and sat on a boulder and stared at the lichens on the north-facing rocks. Even in the dim, afternoon light it was an almost neon yellow-green. I think it was A. who told me that it can take one hundred years for lichens to cover a single inch of stone. The patch I was staring at might easily have started growing before my ancestors arrived on this continent, before the Serrano fled the Oasis of Mara, before Juan Crespi renamed the river that flowed past my old house, before Pedro de Alvarado marched on Guatemala.

It was quiet in that canyon. There was no wind and no birdsong, no buzzing bees. Until I heard, above the wall behind my back—it couldn’t have been more than fifty yards away—barking, loud, aggressive, fearful. Like a cornered dog rearing up. And then a response, not a bark but a yowl, high-pitched and frightened or in pain. Coyotes, two of them. My first thought was that they were confronting some larger predator, perhaps a mountain lion, that it had injured one of them and that the other, terrified, was attempting to scare it off. But it continued, first the barking, then the yowl, in conversation. Sometimes they would pause for a moment and then one of them would pick it up again and the other would join in. Perhaps there was no mountain lion, just two coyotes fighting over a kill. Or over something of concern to coyotes. Maybe one was injured and the other scared, and calling for the rest of the pack. They didn’t come.

At dusk and in the night, coyotes usually go silent after a minute or two. These ones didn’t. Three doves flew by in a panic and landed on a rock above me. Eventually they calmed, and cooed. Five minutes passed, ten. The barking continued, and the yowling. Despite the high walls of the canyon I could tell the sun had set. It hadn’t gotten darker but the clouds above me had gone pink. Somewhere out of sight, the drama continued. The barking and howling gradually grew softer, losing urgency, until finally they stopped.

I walked back in the fading light. Tiny bats flickered through the air above my head. The willows, when I reached them, were thick with birdsong and the flutter of invisible wings, songbirds bedding down for the night. The walls of the canyon receded. I was in the open wash again, trying not to crash into a cholla or catch my arm on the barbed thorns of the cat’s-claws in the dim when I saw it, just ahead of me, silhouetted against the sky. An owl, wheeling low in utter silence, searching for prey on the desert floor.