6.

I keep planning to drive outside the city just to see the stars. I’m afraid that I’m forgetting them, not only their names and relative locations but the sense of perspective that they force on you. I’ve lost that already, or most of it. I wouldn’t have to go far. Thirty of forty miles should be enough to escape the lights. An hour in the car round trip, less time than I spend driving to Trader Joe’s and back at rush hour. Instead I stand in the yard, sticking to the concrete because in the dark I can’t tell where the dog turds are on the Astroturf—the neighbors’ dogs roam free, and every day brings fresh deposits—grumbling up at the few lone blurry lights up there, cursing the Luxor and its stupid, giant light beam, complaining on the phone to L. that I don’t know if I’m looking at Spica or Arcturus, Sirius or Capella. And then I go back inside, and shut the door, and read, and write some more.

For the astronomers of ancient Mesopotamia, the stars that crossed the sky each night were not just distant lights of fixed path and varying brilliance. They were letters, words, writing, a script that could be read. Babylonian inscriptions from the first millennium B.C. referred to the star-filled sky as “the heavenly writing.” (And how bright its verses must have been, unmarred by smog or the glow of a single neon bulb, no Luxors anywhere on earth.) In the Sumerian language, the same word that meant “star,” mul, also referred to cuneiform signs inscribed on tablets of clay. Stars were writing and writing was stars. Astronomical observation—the tracking of the paths of the stars and planets and the prediction of celestial events—was not an abstract science but a form of reading, an attempt to transcribe and interpret the scribblings of the gods.

This conception, of course, could be no older than writing itself. Which is to say no more than about five thousand years old. So the consensus has it. The most ancient archaeological evidence of what most scholars recognize as writing—petroglyphs don’t count—is a cache of inscribed clay tablets dated to about 3100 B.C. and unearthed in the ruins of a temple to Inanna, the goddess of love and war later known as Ishtar. They were found in Uruk, possibly the planet’s first city, in what is now southern Iraq. (The name Uruk is the ancestor of the modern Iraq and derives from a Sumerian word meaning simply “city”—it was likely the largest human settlement in the world at the time, with a population in the tens of thousands.) Most of the Uruk tablets appear to have been something like receipts: lists of goods and expenses, tallies of slaves, sheep, wool, prisoners of war, textiles, and grain. One is a list of ranked professions, from king and high officials down to gardeners and cooks. If these tablets count as the earliest form of writing, then the roots of written literature are not only unromantic but repressive: writing then emerged as a means of record-keeping, the contrivance of a society that had grown sufficiently bureaucratic and hierarchical to require a storehouse of memory that would transcend any of its individual members, a tool of social and economic control for a state eager to extract labor and tribute from its subjects.

But it was these finds, and others like them—later tablets would record the names of kings, the deeds of gods and mythic heroes, astronomical, medicinal, and botanical knowledge, instructions for the interpretation of dreams and omens, a creation myth very similar to the one that would open the book of Genesis—that convinced Europeans of the last three centuries that the origins of civilization, their civilization, must lie in Mesopotamia. This is what sent adventurers like R. C. Thompson scrambling through the deserts of Iraq, snatching up every tablet they could find.

History, we are told, begins with writing, a convenient sleight of hand that eliminates most humans who have ever lived from inclusion in the grand parade. People without writing—or something Europeans could recognize as such—“remain involved in the obscurity of a voiceless past,” said Hegel. “Not partaking of this element of substantial, veritable existence, those nations . . . never advanced to the possession of a history.” Narrating the development of writing would become another way for Europeans to imagine the world as a vast mirror in which they could watch their own supremacy take shape. If human progress could be measured in the three-step ascent from savagery through barbarism to civilization, each stage had its analog in the development of writing: from pictogram to ideogram to the perfection of alphabetic script. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, “The depiction of objects suits savage peoples; signs of words and propositions barbarous peoples; and the alphabet civilized peoples.”

More than the rise of cities, codified laws, or even monotheism, phonetic writing, and particularly the alphabet, would become the measure of human progress. Rousseau may have had mixed feelings about the latter, but he would not have argued with the general frame or disagreed when Condorcet declared that it was the development of alphabetic script that marked the border between savagery and civilization. Only when words were spelled out in letters that represented nothing more than sounds did thought become sufficiently abstract that Europeans could recognize it as their own. Only once the linguistic sign was thus unchained from its object could representation and reality be distinguished as separate realms. Exploring the gulf between them would become the task of Western philosophical inquiry from Plato onward. It’s a funny thing to boast about, that it was this gap, this wound, this fundamental alienation inserted into the very possibility of knowledge, that made the West self-consciously the West.

The cuneiform script that developed in Mesopotamia over the course of more than three thousand years—it remained in use into the early centuries of the first millennium A.D.—included aspects of all three of Rousseau’s stages. Those earliest tablets from Uruk were pictographic. The sign meaning “head” looked like a human head in profile, with recognizable eye and nose and chin. The sign meaning “bread” looked like a wedge of pita, and the sign for the verb “to eat” combined the signs for “head” and “bread.” Not all of them were quite so literal. Meaning extended outward. A sign based on an image of a foot came to represent not just the physical limb but the act of walking and standing as well as something you might stand on: the ground, the earth, even the generalized notion of a foundation or a place. “By these various shifts, each character could be enriched by an entire constellation of meanings,” wrote the French Assyriologist Jean Bottéro. With time, the signs simplified until they were no longer recognizable as images. They became ideograms, characters rather than pictures, and increasingly included phonetic elements, signs that represented sounds as well as things, tying writing to spoken language as an intermediary between the sign and the object it strived to represent. By the end of the third millennium, cuneiform had become fully phonetic: each sign represented the sound of a spoken syllable, which could be combined with others to represent any word or name that could be pronounced aloud. It was syllabic rather than alphabetic and, by Rousseau’s and Condorcet’s schemata, more perfect, but not quite there.

This, though, is where things get interesting. The newly phonetic cuneiform signs retained their older pictographic and ideographic meanings. Each sign henceforth represented both a sound and a thing, and not just one thing, but the entire web of meanings that orbited the original image, the “semantic constellation” that it still carried within it like a chain of ancestors, or a crowd of ghosts. Or like the branches, leaves, and roots of a creosote, splitting off from the lost-but-still-present original. “Even after the invention of phonetism,” Bottéro wrote, “the cuneiform writing system never abandoned its original, deep-seated habits of immediate reference to things . . . The name was inseparable from the thing.” Written language was not distinct from but contiguous with material reality. The “written name, equal to the thing, constituted a material given, which was concrete, solid, and comparable to a substance of which each portion, even the smallest one, contained all the faculties of the total, just as the smallest grain of salt has all the characteristics of the heaviest block.”

It was in this sense that Mesopotamians understood the universe as written: not just the stars, but everything in the observable cosmos was buzzing with meanings, whole constellations of them inscribed there by the gods. If the multiple and overlapping meanings of a name could be exhaustively unraveled, the past and the future—the destiny—of the thing so named would become clear. It was just a question of reading it well. Professional diviners deciphered the messages hidden in the entrails of sacrificed animals and in the shapes that oil made when poured over water, but also in the patterns and anomalies of the weather, the appearance and behavior of animals and men, the contours of the earth, the plots of dreams, of course the stars. As the archaeologist and art historian Zahrab Bahrani put it, “Their whole world was seen as ominous.” Not ominous as in inauspicious or threatening, but ominous as in thick with omens, with meanings woven into the fabric of things.

The entirety of existence was a text waiting to be read. Which means there could be no line between the reader and the written. You, who are reading this, you too are written, you too can be read. And I, a writer, am already written through and through. Everything between us, everything that separates us, mountains, stars, years, shimmering thoughts and dreams that die with waking, all of it is a single chain of signs that do not point to another reality, only to this one, all at once.

There’s a new mattress outside. It’s smaller, just a twin-sized foam pad, the egg-carton kind, with those little peaks and spikes. It’s right where the old one was, pushed up against the fence opposite my patch of yard, beneath the bamboo. I noticed it this evening as I pulled up from the alley because there was a man sleeping on it, or getting ready to sleep. It was early. The sun had just set. It’s after ten now and he’s still there, less than forty feet from the bed in which I’m sitting, propped up on pillows, typing this.

Obliquely, at least, Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote about Sumerian tablets too. In a much-quoted aside to Tristes Tropiques, the famed anthropologist halted the meandering flow of the book’s narrative to take up, and just as quickly drop, a surprising argument about the activity in which he was engaged. Which is to say, writing. Lévi-Strauss pointed out that all the radical changes traditionally ascribed to the Neolithic Revolution—the domestication of animals, the rise of agriculture, and the establishment of settled villages—took place well before the development, in the fourth century B.C., of what most scholars recognize as writing. “The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant,” he asserted, “is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes.” It thus appears “to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.”

Condorcet, in other words, had the causality reversed. Writing was a step backward. It had made us less happy, and less free, and perhaps continued to do so. “The primary function of written communication,” Lévi-Strauss went on, “is to facilitate slavery. The use of writing for disinterested purposes, and as a source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it may even be turned into a means of strengthening, justifying, or concealing the other.”

It is a curious digression, and a funny one, to find three hundred pages into this most literary of anthropological texts. It comes just after an anecdote about the Nambikwara people, whom Lévi-Strauss was studying in the Brazilian Amazon in 1939. He wanted to get an idea of how many had survived the various epidemics that had decimated the indigenous tribes of the Amazon over the previous two decades, so he asked his “friends,” as he described them, to take him to their village. Their chief was not pleased with this request: Lévi-Strauss’s presence could spark a deadly conflict with other Nambikwara who had very good reasons to dislike Europeans.

If Lévi-Strauss questioned the wisdom of risking his hosts’ lives in order to better document their numbers, he did not mention it. Instead he recorded the discomforts of the journey. The group got lost and soon ran out of food: they had been counting on Lévi-Strauss and his colleagues to hunt with their rifles en route, but the anthropologists shot nothing, and were unwilling to share the provisions they had brought. “The next morning, there was widespread discontent, openly directed against the chief who was held responsible for a plan he and I had devised together.” The chief and his wife spent the day gathering enough grasshoppers to feed the rest of the group. Lévi-Strauss did not say if he partook, observing dryly that “crushed grasshopper is considered rather poor fare.” They plodded on.

Things did not improve when they reached their destination. The chief’s “edginess” and the “surly attitudes” of the Nambikwara gathered there “suggested that he had persuaded them to come rather against their will. We did not feel safe. Nor did the Indians.” To defuse the tension, Lévi-Strauss distributed paper and pencils, as you might try to pacify unruly toddlers with crayons and colored paper. To his surprise, they all drew the same thing: “wavy, horizontal lines.” They were imitating writing, he realized. But the chief, whose authority was already in jeopardy for having acceded to the anthropologist’s requests, took the game one step further. He called the group together, held up a sheet of paper scribbled with wavy lines, and “made a show of reading it, pretending to hesitate as he checked on it the list of objects I was to give in exchange for the presents offered me: so and so was to have a chopper in exchange for a bow and arrows, someone else beads in exchange for his necklaces.” He was reminding his people of the wisdom of his leadership, and how much they stood to gain from sticking with him. “This farce,” Lévi-Strauss wrote, “went on for two hours.”

Recounting it years later, the anthropologist’s irritation with this “piece of humbug” had not run dry. He had unwittingly introduced writing to the Nambikwara and they had taken it up, but not as they were supposed to. Writing for the chief was not a means of recording knowledge or representing beauty, “but rather of increasing the authority and prestige of one individual . . . at the expense of others.”

It is at this point that Lévi-Strauss, disgusted, begins his disquisition on the unavoidable violence of writing and its origin as a tool for the maintenance of the repressive hierarchies of early states. The “extraordinary incident” of the chief’s performance of literacy becomes the occasion for a theoretical reflection on the relationship between writing and political manipulation. His conclusions are sufficiently bold that it is easy to miss that he is changing the subject. It was not only the chief, after all, who had attempted to subdue his restive followers with the sorcery of the written word. Lévi-Strauss is the one who handed out the pencils and paper, and it was Lévi-Strauss who brought the crisis on by pressuring the chief into bringing him somewhere where his presence could cause potentially disastrous trouble. And Lévi-Strauss, in a final, unanswerable display of mastery, wrote the incident into Tristes Tropiques.

Lévi-Strauss does not say if he ever followed through and distributed the items the chief had promised he would give to the Nambikwara. Presumably he did not. Only at the end of the aside, and then only in parentheses, does he mention that the chief’s ruse did not work: “After my visit he was abandoned by most of his people.” A few lines later we learn that they “went off into a more remote area of the bush to allow themselves a period of respite.” The anthropologist’s arrival caused the break-up of the group that he was studying. Lévi-Strauss did not reflect on this, nor on the fact that his own text too was written, and was itself part of a long line, dating back to Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and to Columbus himself, of European writings about indigenous Americans that were at every step accompanied by conquest and destruction—“leaving descriptions of what we wipe out,” per Ursula K. Le Guin.

If his presence, and his writing, caused harm to his ostensible subjects, Lévi-Strauss did not wish to dwell on it. Better to highlight the violence of all writing, shrug, and move on.

One of the things I am trying to do here is not ever shrug.

He was gone when I woke up, or at least when I first opened the door and looked outside. It was about seven. The mattress was gone too, though I suppose it’s small enough that he could have folded it and taken it with him.

I didn’t run today. It’s windy. There’s dust blowing everywhere and trash skipping through the yard and my allergies have been terrible. The Rhino was up early, tweet-ranting. He called Bashar al-Assad a “Gas Killing Animal” and responded to a warning from a Russian diplomat that not only would any U.S. missiles that endangered Russian soldiers stationed on Syrian bases be shot down, but “the sources from which the missiles were fired”—meaning U.S. planes, warships, or submarines—would also be targeted.

“Get ready Russia,” the Rhino tweeted, “because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’”

“Smart.”

Sometimes it feels a little late to mourn the written word.

When Sarah Winnemucca’s grandfather, the Northern Paiute chief who would be known to history as Truckee, returned in 1848 from fighting in California alongside one John C. Frémont, he brought his people many gifts and told them of “the many battles they had had with the Mexicans, and about their killing so many of the Mexicans, and taking their big city away from them.” Stranger and more marvelous than anything else he brought back, or any of his stories, Winnemucca wrote, was a piece of paper, “which he said could talk to him. He took it out and he would talk to it, and talk with it. He said, ‘This can talk to all our white brothers, and our white sisters, and their children. Our white brothers are beautiful, and our white sisters are beautiful, and their children are beautiful!’”

Whenever Truckee and his people came across settlers or soldiers, the chief would ride ahead and show them the paper that he called his “white rag friend.” He held it to the sky and kissed it, Winnemucca wrote, “as if it was really a person. ‘Oh, if I should lose this,’ he said, ‘we shall all be lost.’”

It didn’t always help. In his absence, the settlers still raped and murdered his people, and the diseases they brought nearly wiped out the tribe. But even after “all these things had happened,” Winnemucca wrote, “my grandfather still stood up for his white brothers.” He died in 1860, a few months after the conclusion of a war against the whites that he could not stop his people from fighting. Sarah Winnemucca was by his side at the end. The old chief closed his eyes, she wrote, and she and her mother and everyone else gathered around him began to cry, thinking he had died, but he opened his eyes once more, and spoke. “Don’t throw away my white rag-friend,” he said. “Place it on my breast when you bury me.”

Then he died.

The Rhino seems to be backing down. This morning he spat out: “Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!” So maybe a full-blown world war won’t break out this weekend. Which is good, because L. is here with me. I picked her up at the airport last night. Music was blasting all through the arrivals hall and giant LCD screens blared advertisements for Cirque du Soleil and David Copperfield and J. Lo’s shows at the casinos and Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant. There were banks of slot machines between the baggage carousels and everywhere else there was room for them, plus a Lamborghini that you could rent for $1,999 a day parked beside the elevators.

L., who had never been to Las Vegas before, couldn’t stop laughing, as much at the thought of me living here as at any of the particulars.

Saturday morning we drove northeast on Interstate 15 and watched the desert shift from the bajadas and playas of the Mojave to sudden red sandstone buttes and high, flat-topped mesas as we crossed through a corner of Arizona into Utah. We stopped first outside the town of St. George and hiked through red dunes dotted with sage and thin-spined yuccas until almost by chance we found what we were looking for—a narrow slot canyon covered in petroglyphs. Its walls were straight and dark, maybe twenty feet high and so close that with my backpack on I couldn’t turn sideways. A tree grew in the middle of the canyon, its trunk twisted and gnarled. The glyphs were old and faded but, once my eyes adjusted to the dim, startlingly clear: bighorn sheep in profile, wavy lines like rivers or serpents or the surface of a stream, six-fingered hands and circles bisected by vertical bars just like the ones I’d seen in Sloan Canyon, 150 miles away.

We camped that night off a rutted backcountry road somewhere off the Virgin River several miles from nowhere. We set up the tent, lugged the food and water bottles from the car, and went for a walk, climbing down the soft dirt cliffs. Somewhere above us a shot rang out. And then another, and another. High at the top of a butte we could just barely make them out, three silhouetted figures with long-barreled guns, aiming into the setting sun. They kept at it until they had killed it, the crack of each shot rumbling like thunder through the valley in the night.

The next day we climbed a mountain, lay in the shade of the cottonwoods that grew on the banks of the river, and dragged our feet through its cold, fast water. On the drive home we watched the sun set and Venus sink behind it. L., in the passenger seat, tracked the rising stars until the glow of Las Vegas began to dull the sky. Finally the darkness broke and the city slouched beneath us, that golden net tossed over the valley with as much care as a dirty shirt flung on the bed at the end of the day. I got off the freeway just north of downtown. The sidewalks beneath the overpass were crowded on both sides with people camping there in blankets and sleeping bags, their belongings stuffed into carts beside them. It wasn’t late, maybe nine o’clock. Only a few of them were sleeping. The rest sat upright on their blankets, staring in silence at the concrete walls on the opposite side of the street.

For how many people today does the very idea of writing provoke first of all anxiety—not the almost erotic thrill of a sentence that shimmers with its own perfect movements, but the dread that meets a certified letter from the bank, a stranger at the door with a clipboard, cops with a warrant, a man in a suit flipping through the pages to find the dotted lines—signature here and here, initials there, there, there, and there, and one more there—the memory of gazing down at an impenetrable black maze of letters, your thighs squeezed between the chair and the desk and sticking to both, words swirling, the teacher’s voice echoing your name? Writing is love letters too, a postcard from a friend that makes you laugh from far away, sexts from someone you want to sext with, your child’s name tattooed above your heart, a brave, forbidden slogan on a wall. Hell, it’s poems and novels and it’s whatever this is too and it’s the all-but-lost art of speaking truth to power but it’s also an audit, a foreclosure, a notice to appear. It’s the columns in the newspaper that inform you that you’re broke because you’re lazy and defected, that the rich glow like that because they’re virtuous and brilliant and sacrificing another country is not too high a price for rooting out terror wherever it spawns. It’s an all-caps tweet from the Rhino. SAD! It’s all the bad news of the state.

The anthropologist and political theorist James C. Scott picked up where Lévi-Strauss left off. Writing first appeared, Scott wrote in 2017’s Against the Grain, at about the same time that the early cities of Mesopotamia were becoming sufficiently complex that we might begin to call them states: “Thousands of cultivators, artisans, traders, and laborers were being, as it were, repurposed as subjects, and, to this end, counted, taxed, conscripted, put to work, and subordinated to a new form of control.” All this sorting required greater powers than mortal memory could manage on its own. “It would not be too strong to assert,” Scott wrote, “that it is virtually impossible to conceive of even the earliest states without a systematic technology of numerical record keeping,” i.e., some form of writing. For its first half millennium, writing remained a form of bookkeeping, a “massive effort through a system of notation to make a society, its manpower, and its production legible to its rulers and temple officials, and to extract grain and labor from it.” Only after hundreds of years did anything like literature appear.

In this vision, the appearance of writing, and of civilization itself, functioned primarily to curtail the freedom and happiness of the onetime hunter-gatherers whom Rousseau was not alone in calling savages, who until then lived with more leisure, spiritual connectedness, and easy collective joy than we repressed and exhausted urbanites will ever know. (Smohalla, a Wanapum prophet from the Pacific Northwest, exhorted his followers to abandon all the ways of the white man and not to plough or harvest or work in any way, “because men who work cannot dream.”) This runs precisely counter to the various narratives of progress that declared Mesopotamia the “cradle” of civilization, placed the invention of writing at the very beginning of history, and traced the stages of its advancement as if it were a child passing through an awkward ideogrammatic adolescence into the full flowering of alphabetic wisdom, which, not incidentally, could reside happily only in the more prosperous districts of the cities of northern and western Europe, and perhaps in a few enlightened households in the northeastern United States.

This counternarrative has tremendous liberatory appeal. If once we were free, perhaps we can be again. If the current arrangement has consigned the species to massive inequality, endless wars of conquest and extermination, and environmental devastation and doom, we are not fated to it. Humans are not ineluctably flawed. We’ve just made some bad choices (like agriculture), and over the millennia our sensibilities have been muddied, our priorities confused. But if we take this as a judgment on all writing since and conclude, as Scott appears to and Lévi-Strauss quite explicitly did, that writing cannot be severed from its origins as a tool for exploitation, we’ll end up with a narrative that shares all the worst flaws of its antagonists. It accepts their rigged definitions—that any writing that does not use written symbols to represent elements of spoken language, and hence fails to sufficiently resemble the system used by Europeans, does not count as “true writing”—and reflects the shape of their arguments in reverse. Rather than inscribing a very particular present, one among many, into the past and projecting it forward, as the inheritors of Condorcet and Hegel did, it carves a single past—the earliest one legible to us—through all of intervening time and reads it, with equal parts satisfaction and dismay, into another particular present. But how much do we know about what we do not know? How many pasts, scratched or traced or smudged in less durable materials than stone or clay, are lost to us? How many do we refuse to see because they fail to align with our desires for the present? How many other presents do we similarly neglect?

What evidence exists includes only those forms of early writing that were sturdy enough to survive the millennia and that archaeologists have been lucky enough to unearth. Scott mentions and quickly skips over the fact that the first evidence of writing found in China had nothing to do with counting reserves of sheep or captured slaves but consisted of questions etched into animal bones and tortoise shells for divinatory purposes. The bones and shells were heated until they cracked so that the cracks could be interpreted, read there as answers from the spirits and the gods, as legible as inscriptions carved by human hands. Scott does not mention any of the clay vessels, tablets, and tiles found in southeast Europe inscribed with glyphs that remained consistent over centuries—the so-called Vinča symbols. Some of them predate the oldest Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets by more than two thousand years, but most scholars dismiss them as “proto-writing.” Marija Gimbutas argued that they were fragments of a “true writing system,” now lost, an Old European Script “developed to communicate with divine forces.” The earliest writing in the Americas—if we discount the many thousands of far more ancient carved and painted petroglyphs—appears on a slab of green stone found in the Mexican state of Veracruz and scratched three thousand years ago with sixty-two Olmec glyphs. Only a few of them depict recognizable objects—ears of corn, torches, an insect or a spider, brass knuckles worn in ceremonial combat—or resemble glyphs used by later cultures. Some archaeologists speculate that the text may represent a “list or some type of register,” others that it is “eminently religious in nature.” For now we have no idea.

And what of the texts—perhaps even whole systems of writing—that didn’t survive? Ceramics inscribed with the Nsibidi script used in the Cross River region of what is now Nigeria and Cameroon have been dated back more than twelve hundred years. As you might expect, considering the tilt of the whole enterprise, scholars of early writing have taken little-to-no notice of this autochthonous African script, but given that Nsibidi symbols are still printed on textiles, carved into wood, traced in the earth, painted and tattooed on human skin, and waved in the air as gestural signs, it should surprise no one if Nsibidi turned out to be far older than that. James Scott quotes the archaeologist C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, who suggested that if no evidence of writing appeared in the peripheries of ancient Mesopotamian cities until centuries after it was developed in urban centers, it was not because non-urbanites were any less sophisticated. “Perhaps,” Lamberg-Karlovsky wrote, “far from being less intellectually qualified to deal with [the] complexity” of state social structures, “the peripheral peoples were smart enough to avoid its oppressive command structure for at least another 500 years, when it was imposed upon them by military conquest.”

Perhaps he’s right. Or perhaps writing is larger than we’ve let it be. Perhaps they used and conceived of writing differently than the inhabitants of early states. Perhaps they drew signs on the smooth inner surfaces of tree bark or etched them in the dirt to convey messages that would last until the rains came and washed them all to mud. Perhaps they wove them on the seams of their scarves and gowns or painted them on walls with pigments that faded in a decade. Perhaps they used them to write about topics more profound or at least more entertaining than the contents of the royal storerooms, outstanding debts, and tributes paid. Perhaps not. Perhaps their brains had not been dulled by domestication—Scott points out that the brains of modern sheep and pigs are respectively 24 and 30 percent smaller than those of their untamed ancestors, and suggests that humans have been domesticated too in the process of taming them—and they saw no need to write it all down because they knew that everything was already speaking, and they could hear it. Perhaps they let their words hang in the air as they spoke them so that they might fall where they might fall, like rain or like stars, or any mortal thing.

Friday we drove across the city and out to Red Rock Canyon and hiked a trail that I had run once before. It was a lot easier to walk it. The trail zigzagged around the backside of a mountain, the vegetation shifting as we climbed from the sparse creosote and yucca of the basins to a near-forest of juniper, oak, and red-branched manzanita. Not much was in bloom, but gauzy white cocoons had appeared on the branches of the desert almond bushes, each one twitching with the caterpillars inside it. I guess it’s spring again. Last year in Joshua Tree the cocoons showed up as if overnight sometime in the middle of March, and only in the desert almonds. They didn’t like any of the other shrubs. If you looked close you could see the caterpillars writhing inside, crawling over one another to fatten themselves on the tiny leaves. As the weeks passed the cocoons got bigger and the caterpillars grew longer and plumper until one day all of them were gone.

We stayed out long enough to watch the sun set and Venus appear bright in the sky above it just as the light began to fade. On the way home we stopped for fish tacos and saw the news on the TV monitor above the counter: U.S. missile strikes hitting Damascus. Familiar footage of white lights streaking across the sky, the distant yellow glow of an explosion.

By morning, the Rhino was gloating. “Mission Accomplished!” he tweeted. Which of course is what George W. Bush proclaimed fifteen years ago, five and a half weeks into a war that would go on to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and that has arguably not yet ended. Time is knotted up. If this were fiction it would be too blunt, too obvious. The writers are getting lazy and recycling old jokes.

We left Las Vegas in the afternoon and made it to Joshua Tree by dusk. It’s good to be here. A lot is in bloom, far more than in Nevada: the delicate, almost papery orange flowers of the globe mallow, the showy, hot-pink blossoms of the beavertail cactus, the long, white trumpets of datura along the sides of the roads. Here and there you’ll find a creosote blooming, its branches bright with tiny yellow flowers. Yesterday the wind howled for most of the day and all of the night, screaming and shrieking and shaking the windows in their frames. It’s still singing this morning, making the creosotes dance, rising and falling but never letting up.

George and Carobeth Laird settled in Poway, California, in the hills north of San Diego, about fifteen miles from the coast. This was in the twenties and thirties, nearly a century ago. There were no suburbs yet. The area would have been sparsely populated then, rural even, and likely beautiful—low and rolling hills of coastal sage and chaparral, ecosystems that survive now only in scattered parklands. When they drove home from Escondido, the nearest town of any size, George would sometimes pull over to the side of the road in an area then known as Green Valley. There’s a subdivision there now: the Westwood neighborhood of the Rancho Bernardo planned community. He would leave Carobeth in the car, she wrote in her final book, Mirror and Pattern, scramble up through the thick brush, and disappear awhile.

Archaeologists have since discovered traces of a village there that they believe was inhabited for the better part of the last two thousand years. Most of its remains would have been underground, but George saw the pictographs painted in red on the east-facing sides of a few boulders. He told Carobeth about them. I haven’t been there, but I found some photos online. They were different from any petroglyphs I’ve seen in the Mojave, and entirely abstract: complex, rectilinear labyrinths without clear entry or exit points. They looked like maps to some internal landscape.

What did George Laird do up there? What did he think about as he sat or stood or crouched, staring at those labyrinths? Did he touch the rocks? Did he trace those red lines with his fingers? Did he pray? Grieve? Wonder? Did he figure out how to find his way out of this maze? Carobeth didn’t speculate. “I never accompanied him,” she wrote, “nor do I recall him asking me to do so.”

When she did ask him about the petroglyphs in Chemehuevi territory—the ones in Green Valley were on Kumeyaay turf—George answered only that they were indecipherable, and that they had not been carved by the Chemehuevi themselves but by the “doctors’ helpers,” the animal familiars who lent their healing powers to Chemehuevi shamans. She did not understand him to be speaking literally: “since the shaman’s helpers of the human era were themselves shamans in the story time,” his answer was a roundabout way of saying that glyphs had been painted and carved by the tribes’ ancestors, a very long time ago. So long ago that Carobeth gave up on guessing what they might mean.

Most scholarly attempts to interpret Southwestern petroglyphs have in one way or another functioned to cast them as meaningless, or at least as so elemental in their attempts at signification that they remain outside of any shared and complex system of signs that might be analogous to language. They are generally understood either as attempts at “hunting magic”—images of prey carved or painted to conjure actual animals—or records of shamanic visions induced through datura and other hallucinogenic plants. If the former, they represent a primitive confusion between signifier and signified, a superstitious belief that the image is the father of the thing. In which case they do not so much produce meaning as document an errant and primitive conception of how meaning works. If instead they were the records of visions, whatever meanings they may have once had resided only in the fevered minds of the shamans who carved them: they could not be understood by anyone who did not share the esoteric terms of the original vision or comprehend their ritual context. But meaning takes shape only in the interaction of complex structures of signification, which are always, necessarily, shared. As Wittgenstein put it, “A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it is not part of the mechanism.” Petroglyphs, by these interpretations, remain far outside the realm of the linguistic, and farther still from the abstract realm of writing.

In the 1970s, archaeologists began to speculate that at least some Southwestern rock art may have been tied to astronomical events. Glyphs at several sites appeared to record the appearance in A.D. 1054 of the Crab Supernova, which exploded with such brilliance that it was visible in the daytime and for nearly two years remained brighter than any star in the night sky. A little later, archaeologists sifting through John Peabody Harrington’s unpublished notes found links between rituals associated with the solstice and petroglyphs depicting the sun at sites sacred to the Chumash along the coast north of L.A. (Harrington’s source on this was an elderly Chumash woman named María Solares, with whom he had photographed Carobeth, shielding her eyes from the sun.) By 1979, scholars had identified ten sites in the southwestern United States where ancient rock art appeared to indicate the location of the rising or setting sun on the solstice. Researchers began camping out on the solstices and equinoxes to observe the play of light and shadow on the rocks and glyphs. Within a few years, dozens more sites had been identified. Whatever else they may have meant and done, at least some of the petroglyphs functioned to mark the cycles of the sun and the stars. They were calendars.

In 1980, Carobeth Laird received a letter from an archaeologist named Beverley Trupe. She and her colleagues had been studying the petroglyphs at a site called Counsel Rocks, in the Providence Mountains, midway between Las Vegas and Joshua Tree—the heart of the Chemehuevi’s territory. The glyphs were scattered over a few large boulders at the base of a rocky mesa. Trupe and a colleague named John M. Rafter had spent the winter solstice there and been astonished to see that the long, horizontal lines carved into one boulder pointed precisely to the spot where the sun was rising, and where it would rise only that one day each year. That evening, as the sun set, a splash of light appeared on the concave inner wall of a boulder the researchers had nicknamed Womb Rock. The light swept slowly across the rock, tracing a zigzagged path that had been etched into the stone centuries earlier. At the same time, in another recess in the same boulder, dots of fading light hopped along other lines pecked into the stone. “The lights followed the linear designs as if drawing them with a finger,” Rafter later wrote. The petroglyphs had turned the boulders into one giant timepiece.

It was more than that. On the wall of Womb Rock, the archaeologists had found an unusual glyph. It appeared to be an abstract drawing of a vulva—a stock symbol in Mojave rock art—but this one had straight lines radiating out from beneath it. A few inches away was a recognizable sun glyph: rays emanating from a circle. Another carving depicted another vulva, this time between what looked like a pair of outstretched legs, and above them a wavy line, perhaps a mountain range, and above that another sun. For Trupe, it brought to mind a Chemehuevi myth that Carobeth Laird had documented, one that George Laird had told her was “a very ancient telling.”

The tale is called “The Sun’s Dead Sons,” and it is as rich and strange as any of the Chemehuevi stories, a Jungian analyst’s dream, replete with rape and matricide, twins and a trickster, hidden infants, divine rage. It begins with a woman who lives alone in a cave in the mountains. Every morning she gets up and climbs to the highest peak to pee, until one morning the sun sneaks up on her and dips his whiskers into her vagina. The woman runs off and before long gives birth to twins. She hides them during the day, but whenever she goes out, the sun comes to visit his sons. He rocks them in their cradles and leaves gifts. When they grow older, they carve flutes out of reeds and, despite the warnings of their mother, delight in playing them loudly. Just as Hunahpu and Xbalanque disturbed the Lords of Xibalba with their ball playing, the twins’ music alerts Coyote of their proximity.

Coyote does not dispatch owls but sends the two most beautiful young women from his company, who happen to be the daughters of Owl, to search out the flute players. They soon find the brothers. At night the younger of the two boys—he could only be younger by a matter of minutes, but structurally it seems to matter here—sneaks into bed with Owl’s elder daughter. The sisters run home and tell Coyote that they failed and could not find anyone, but it soon becomes obvious that the older girl is pregnant. Coyote knows they lied. If she gives birth to a boy, he announces, he will kill it. Of course it’s a boy. His mother does her best to disguise him as a girl, tucking his penis between his legs, tying it down. Eventually, the two brothers show up. They find Coyote’s band and sneak into the house where the sisters are sleeping, but the four of them, happy to be reunited, laugh too loudly, and Coyote sends his men to investigate the noise. They find the twins there and kill them both. Owl’s daughter, still afraid for her boy, raises him as a girl, but as soon as the child is grown she tells him everything. The boy, now a man, fashions himself a war club and with it kills every member of Coyote’s company, including his own mother. Then he goes off in search of his grandfather, but by some twist of solar logic, or just a father’s grief, the sun blames the boy for the death of the twins and destroys him with the heat of his rays. “Thus ends the ancient telling.” I’ve skipped a few bits, but that’s the basic plot. By the end everyone is slaughtered. Everyone but the sun.

The glyphs that Trupe was studying appeared to illustrate some version of this myth, or perhaps its ancient core—a vulva penetrated by the whiskers, or rays, of the sun. Laird speculated that other characters may have had astronomical referents too: the sons of the sun were the stars Castor and Pollux, which the Romans and many other cultures also associated with twins. Coyote’s band formed the Pleiades—a clear image of that star cluster, which in another myth is associated with Coyote’s family, was carved into a nearby rock. The vengeful grandson of ambiguous gender may have been Venus, which sometimes acts as the morning and sometimes the evening star. Owl’s daughters surely had celestial analogues as well, perhaps the two dim stars that accompany Castor and Pollux. “The story,” Laird suggested, “dramatizes the march of the stars and planets across the night sky and their final extinction in the light of the morning.” All of them die, just as “all stars fade from the brightening sky until only the Morning Star remains,” and it too is shortly killed by daylight.

There’s one other myth George Laird told Carobeth that may be relevant. It’s also about two brothers with an unnamed single mother, perhaps the same boys. Exhausted and annoyed with them, their mother shoos them off to Snake’s house and tells them to ask him for a story. Snake gives them a riddle instead: “Under your mother, dark pulsates, pulsates.” The brothers don’t know what it means, but they know it’s “something bad,” so they run home to tell their mom. George explained to Carobeth that Snake’s riddle was difficult to translate but referred to female orgasm as well as to actual darkness broken by an intermittent glow. It appears to have been a poetic version of that most ancient and potent of insults: “I fucked your mom.”

Furious, the boys’ mother rushes over to confront Snake. “When?” she demands to know. “When did you ever make it pulsate darkly?” By way of an answer, he coils around her legs, lies her down, and causes a pointed house, open only from above, to take shape around them. The boys scramble up its side and, peering down through the hole at the top, see their mother and Snake beneath them, enraptured and entwined. They shoot arrows down through the hole, killing Snake and their mother at once.

In mid-spring, John Rafter returned to Counsel Rocks and observed the night sky through a hole in the overhanging rock. It was the same boulder that had been decorated with petroglyphs of the whiskered sun above a woman’s open legs, perhaps marking her impregnation by the sun. Through that natural window—like a house with an opening from above—Rafter watched Castor and Pollux, the twins, reach their zenith directly above him. The next day, when the two stars were due to arrive at their lower culmination (the farthest point they would reach beneath the horizon, that is), an arrowhead-shaped shard of sunlight passed through the opening above him and descended into a circle that had been carved into the stone floor, piercing it just as the arrows shot by the twins had penetrated the intertwined bodies of their mother and Snake. “It was like witnessing a secret unfold before me,” Rafter wrote, “a secret that had laid hidden perhaps for centuries.”

The idea then is that, whatever else they may have done, at least some Chemehuevi myths, which had roots more ancient than the people we know as Chemehuevi, encoded the motions of celestial objects into narrative, and that the petroglyphs, some of them at least, served both to represent those narratives and to indicate the movement of the planets and the stars. At the same time that the glyphs turned the bare desert rocks into calendars and clocks, they told, and even reenacted, the stories through which the Chemehuevi understood their world, and their place within it. Perhaps they’re writing, perhaps they’re not, but no alphabet that I know of can play so good a trick with such elegance and economy.

Friday morning we left for San Francisco. We drove east through the desert for I don’t remember how many hours until we cut through the Tehachapi Mountains, still green from the spring’s meager rains, and down into the San Joaquin Valley. We stopped for lunch in Bakersfield and if I am remembering properly and was not hallucinating a wild-eyed blond woman with her face painted blue danced past the windows of the taco shop. A man slouched on the pavement outside asked to use my phone. His arms were crusted with sores. He wanted to call his mother. He had to get a number from her, he explained, so he could get his money from Western Union. “I know it sounds like a hustle but it’s not,” he said. I let him call. The line was busy anyway.

We drove for nine hours that day, crossing the Bay Bridge at rush hour. We saw my mother, who was visiting San Francisco—the sidewalks around her hotel were crowded for blocks around with bedraggled people sleeping, smoking, passing the hours, the hills outside the city sprayed purple and yellow with lupine and mustard—and on Sunday we drove east to Sacramento to meet my nieces and their mom for lunch and ice cream. That afternoon we headed up into the Sierras, the temperature dropping as we climbed, Douglas firs and sequoias towering all around us. The road curved through the mountains, the American River burbling along just beneath the highway. Finally the high peaks gave way to rolling hills, browner and barer than on the other side. Desert again. We stayed in a motel in an old copper mining town called Yerington. I read later about the arsenic and uranium contamination in the water that the mining company, Anaconda, had never cleaned up. The same company once employed my grandfather and his father and brothers and uncles in the copper mines of Butte, Montana. This is the same grandfather who later became obsessed with the solar system. He was also named Ben. A year or two ago a flock of migrating snow geese landed in the toxic waters that have filled the open pit that Anaconda left behind in Butte. As many as ten thousand of them died.

In the morning we drove to the Walker River Paiute Reservation, where Wovoka is buried and the Ghost Dance was born. I parked outside the tribal administration building and asked the women at the desk how to find the cemetery. They dug around for a while and came up with a color-coded trash pickup map that marked neither our location nor the location of the graveyard, but they said to turn at the water tower, so I did, and there it was, dusty and almost grassless, the grave markers mainly wooden slabs and crosses neatly whitewashed, faded polyester flowers in pink and orange scattered by the wind over the bare dirt of the surrounding fields.

L. found Wovoka’s grave and called me over. There was a low metal fence around it and an archway above the gate onto which his name had been welded in rusting capital letters. I could hear birds chattering in the trees and the wind sighing through the leaves and the soft w’hoo-woo-woo-woo of a mourning dove. Geese were honking over the river to the north. Inside the fence were two graves, each one marked with a headstone of sturdy red granite: one for Wovoka and one for Mary Wilson, his wife. The words “Indian Messiah and Prophet” had been carved across Wovoka’s, “Wife of Wovoka” across his wife’s. He died one month after she did. There were a few pots of yellow artificial flowers on the bare dirt and some white and purple ones in pickle jars, a pine cone that someone must have brought down from the mountains, and four abalone shells filled with coins and crumbling cigarettes, offerings to the man who could light his pipe from the sun, call rain from the clouds, make ice fall from the sky on a hot summer’s day.

I had a couple of dimes and a few pennies in my pocket but it didn’t feel right to toss them in. I couldn’t bring myself to lift the latch on the gate or to step inside the enclosure. I knew I had no right to it. I wasn’t sure even that I had any right to the grief that I couldn’t help but feel, grief for the unburied and the buried dead and the land raped and ravaged all these years and all our unending foolishness and greed and the sorrows that it piles upon sorrows. Right or no right, I could feel the grief sitting in my gut and coursing up and down my spine into my shoulders and my jaw as I stood outside the gate and stared in over the steel bars of the fence, watching the mountains swirl around me in the distance as I tried to imagine the paradise that Wovoka had tried to summon, the white men washed away and, without me and my kind here to witness it, the hills and valleys teeming once again with deer and wolf and antelope and grizzly, the ancestors raised and the recent dead too, the sick and the crippled healed, all of them dancing, singing, no longer in longing and in mourning but with joy. I stood so still that two jackrabbits hopped right past me. They noticed me only when they were a few feet away. Panic froze their eyes.

We drove on to Walker Lake, the last shrinking remnant of a freshwater sea that twelve thousand years ago covered this whole corner of the state. It’s still shrinking, faster now than ever. It’s half as long and nearly two hundred feet shallower than it was in 1880, when settlers began diverting the river to irrigate their farms upstream. With so little water it became saturated with the salts that occur naturally in the soil and it’s now so saline that most of the fish that once sustained the Paiute here have died. Red DANGER signs in English and Spanish were planted a few hundred feet from the shore, but not because of the water. The beach was OFF LIMITS, the signs warned, due to the presence of UNEXPLODED MUNITIONS WHICH COULD CAUSE SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH.

A few miles down the highway we passed the massive army ammunition depot at Hawthorne, two-hundred-plus square miles of oblong concrete bunkers keeping thousands of tons of bullets and bombs ready for the next world war. After more than a century of my people’s presence here, most of us still see only two options for the desert: dig it up or blow it up. We drove on for a hundred miles and then another hundred, the sparse sage of the Great Basin giving way at last to the Mojave’s familiar creosote, passing here and there through dead or half-dead mining towns. The wind makes quick work of twentieth-century human housing, tumbling walls and caving in roofs, turning drywall to dust, shredding carpet and insulation, scattering them in the rabbitbrush and rocks.

Farther down, we passed Creech Air Force Base, where pilots in padded office chairs control drones half a world away, spying and surveilling and slaughtering people in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia, people redefined as “targets.” A gray Reaper drone circled the base like a huge, blind crane, the clumsiness of its flight almost touchingly awkward. It was five o’clock and a shift must have just ended. A long line of pickup trucks was leaving the base through the gate and heading south, toward Las Vegas, and home, just like we were.

At the very beginning of this, I suggested that the Popol Vuh may have been the only book that successfully records its own destruction. That’s not quite right. The text that we have, inked in parallel columns of K’iche’ and Spanish prose by Francisco Ximénez in the early 1700s, was likely copied from an older manuscript that had been transcribed into Roman letters in the mid-1550s and which was itself a transcription of another still-older text painted in Maya glyphs. It is the disappearance of that original book—the actual, preconquest, glyphic Popul Vuh—that the much-diminished alphabetic text appears to mourn.

If it was anything like the few Maya codices that escaped de Landa’s holocaust, the lost original would have been a different sort of book entirely: a single, long sheet of paper made from treated bark and folded, accordion-style, into individual sheets. Translated glyph by glyph it would have made little narrative sense, but it was not intended for the sort of reading we are accustomed to: a solitary, imaginative act of communing between a reader and an author distant in time and in space. All books are portals, but the original Popol Vuh would have had more doors than most. It would have included painted illustrations, ritual schedules, and precise astronomical and calendrical tables. In addition to the stories that it told, it would also have functioned as a sort of divinatory manual, or in the words of its English translator, Dennis Tedlock, “as a complex navigation system for those who wish to see and move beyond the present.”

The apparently straightforward events that it narrates—the flight of the messenger owls, Hunahpu and Xbalanque’s multiple descents to Xibalba and subsequent returns to the world of the living—would have been understood to describe astronomical cycles as well as mythic happenings. The owls’ journeys to and from Xibalba match the rising and setting of the planet Mercury; the twins’ ascents and descents track those of Venus. Other characters track the Maya equivalents of the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the Pleiades. The plot at once accounts for the mythical origin of the universe and describes the complex motions of the planets and stars in a manner that would permit a skilled diviner to peer into the future as well as the past. The original Popul Vuh would still have allowed for the more ordinary transports of narrative, albeit enjoyed in a more collective fashion than our books generally are: its heroes’ adventures and the sweep of its plot would likely have been performed for an audience. The book that remains to us, Tedlock speculated, may be less a direct transliteration than a summation of the events that would have been described over the lengthy course of such a performance. For all its liveliness, the surviving, alphabetic transliteration of the Popol Vuh would then be a shadow of a shadow, a flimsy, one-dimensional substitute for the multidimensional original.

In the version that we have, after interrupting its tale of the creation to recount Hunahpu and Xbalanque’s adventures in Xibalba, the Popol Vuh returns to the efforts of the gods to craft a being capable of praising them. This is why they made us: so that someone would speak their names aloud, praise them and pray to them, keep track of the days and the cycles of the heavens. They failed three times before they succeeded. First they made the animals, who cannot speak, but only moan and cry. They tried making men out of mud, but their creations crumbled and dissolved. They tried wood too, but the hearts and minds of the men they carved were empty and could retain no memory of their creators. Finally they made men out of corn. These ones were perfect. Too perfect. They could see through mountains and through oceans. They saw and understood everything perfectly and without obstruction. Just like the gods did. This made the gods anxious, so they dimmed our sight and dulled our understanding, as you might blow into a mirror, clouding its surface. Since then we have not been able to see very far, not without help.

In its final pages, the surviving text of the Popol Vuh suggests that the perfect knowledge our ancestors enjoyed had been partially restored. Or at least that a tool had existed that did the trick. Those who had been trained to use it properly “knew whether war would occur,” and “whether there would be death, or whether there would be famine, or whether quarrels would occur, they knew it for certain, since there was a place to see it, there was a book.” The book was the Popol Vuh. We don’t know what happened to it, whether it was found and burned or hidden and lost, we just know it’s gone now, and our sight as dull as ever.