S4E29: Episode 100 | Two Deserts, One Story with Rubén Martinéz

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from the desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555.

0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:46 - (Chris Clarke): thank you Joe and welcome to this hundredth episode of 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. I, as always, am your host, Chris Clarke and we recorded a lot of really wonderful things on the evening of Thursday, August 7th. So much great work from half a dozen wonderful activists, journalists and writers. And because we have so much good content, we are breaking this episode up into six pieces rather than have an hour and 45 minute episode. We're considering all of this the hundredth episode in our hearts, but we are numbering them as distinct episodes to make the podcast distributors happy.

0:01:20 - (Chris Clarke): So don't be too confused. Some of them will be a little shorter than usual, others will be a little bit longer. I am just pleased as hell with what people brought to the table last night. This chapter features Rubén Martinez, a longtime desert writer, though he also writes about other places. He's based in Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. He's a writer, performer, artist and activist, and he's reading from a piece he wrote a couple of years ago for an anthology edited by Gary Paul Nabhan.

0:01:48 - (Chris Clarke): Okay, let's, let's move on to Ruben, who is a native of Los Angeles. He has family roots in Mexico and El Salvador. Rubén is a writer, performer and teacher who holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University, is the author of, among several other books, Crossing a Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail and Desert Boom and Bust in the New Old West, Ruben, this wasn't entirely just an excuse to see your face after too many months.

0:02:22 - (Chris Clarke): Just really, really glad for you to for you to join us. What you got for us?

0:02:27 - (Rubén Martinez): The pleasure is all mine. I've been hearing about the podcast and I was a fan of your writings at KCET back in the day with your work there with our mutual colleague Juan Devis. So great to be here. Felicidades on the hundredth episode and as I was thinking of what to share today, I've been in the desert a lot recently. I was just actually in the White Mountains, which I hadn't explored very much and boy it's nice up there in the middle of summer. 11, 000 ft and actually made it all the way out to Deep Springs College and might even be doing a little guest thing there. So getting back into the desert community from the Bay Area for a long time, which is undergoing its coldest summer in decades right now. San Francisco.

0:03:12 - (Rubén Martinez): There's that old Mark Twain joke about the coldest winter being the summer in San Francisco. So I'm going to read a piece that was written some years back. It's referencing the first Trump administration, but it's a piece that I was drawn to because there was kind of a piercing moment politically back then. And we're in a new phase of this struggle. And as I've gotten older, I've attempted to be more and more integrative and in my writing and in my life. And so this is an attempt to join two different deserts together.

0:03:46 - (Rubén Martinez): I write about the desert from within the confines of a Cistercian monastery hidden in the undulant forested hills at the edge of the Pacific Ocean in Mendocino county in a region known generally as the Lost Coast. I hope some of you have been up there to the Lost Coast. If you haven't, please get up there as soon as you can. It's one of the most special places on the California coast. The few roads are narrow.

0:04:13 - (Rubén Martinez): The place really lives up to its name. Serpentine roads canopied by towering redwoods driving them in daytime, one darts in and out of pools of deep, almost nocturnal shadow and sudden glaring sunlight. I sit at a tiny desk inside my cinder block cell, looking out onto a meadow of autumn yellow gray grass. It has not rained in six months, and it is only a couple of months since the devastating hist.

0:04:37 - (Rubén Martinez): California wildfires in the summer of this is dating the piece now 2018. So how many devastating wildfire summers have we had since then? And of course, the terrible winter wildfires of Los Angeles this year. By the way, I didn't find out until a couple years after this particular visit to the monastery that I was actually in what they call a cell in monastic tradition. I was in the cell that was occupied by Thomas Merton in 1968.

0:05:07 - (Rubén Martinez): I have come here to the Lost coast to inhabit a monastic tradition that recedes into, for Americans anyway, an impossibly remote history. Redwoods Abbey was founded in 1962, but the Cistercian order dates back to 1098. That's 1098. And it employs its spiritual guide, the Rule of St. Benedict, written as early as 530, Common Era. That's a long time to be honing tradition, the liturgy of the hours, simplicity in living quarters, silent meals and ora et labora life, equal parts manual labor and contemplative prayer.

0:05:44 - (Rubén Martinez): I'm writing then of two deserts, one material and one transcendent, Christian contemplative tradition casts the desert as its central spiritual metaphor, which turns on the idea of arid lands as empty space, surely upsetting to desert wildlife biologists and plant biologists relative to the green effusion of riparian areas or the tropics. This was the distinction early Christian mystics made between the densely populated Nile River Valley and the lonely landscapes of Egypt's Eastern desert.

0:06:17 - (Rubén Martinez): Civilization grew along the river's course. The desert was a place for hermits to hole up in caves and battle demons in emulation of the temptation of Jesus in Judea. Over the centuries, and to this day, monks and nuns have retreated to monasteries far from the Sahara. But they imagine an arduous journey into the darkness of the desert, hoping to find illumination in the silent land. This is not the desert I would have written of had our editor, Gary Paul Nabhan and I should plug the anthology because I have the screen. Gary Paul Nabhan edited this wonderful collection called the Nature of Desert Nature a few years ago, published by the University of Arizona Press.

0:06:57 - (Rubén Martinez): It's a wonderful collection of myriad ways of looking at the desert, and that's where this piece comes from. Gary invited me to contribute to this anthology, and a dozen years ago I would never have written what I'm writing now. When I was at work on a book about the deserts of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, I had not visited the monastery yet, did not even know that it existed. When I thought of the desert, which was all the time since I'd been living in it for well over a decade, I considered the place part of my birthright. Through my Mexican grandparents who grew up in the arid lands of northern Mexico.

0:07:29 - (Rubén Martinez): I also imagined I belonged to it because I'm the son and grandson of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador. The journey north into the United States from Latin America crosses the desert physically and symbolically. My people wander in the desert, exposed to dangers, natural exposure, and human border patrol. Yearning for Canaan, I thought of the desert then as a borderland in the material and historical and symbolic sense.

0:07:58 - (Rubén Martinez): That desert is still very much on my mind today. The current President of the United States. Remember, I'm writing about the first Trump administration. The president has portrayed an imaginary borderland desert with brutal and crude nativist rhetoric, a fearsome place populated by bad hombres and Middle Easterners. Indeed, there is blood and death in the desert, and not just in the symbolic Western that Trump conjures.

0:08:22 - (Rubén Martinez): Actual brown bodies with names, hometowns, families, fears and hopes stumble through the wilderness, fleeing terror in their homelands. They encounter more terror on the roads north. They die of exposure. 339 deaths so far this year that I'm writing in several thousand in the last two decades. They are killed by the Border Patrol, 97 fatal officer involved shootings since 2003. And yet no Border lives matter. Movement registers these bodies in the national consciousness.

0:08:54 - (Rubén Martinez): Washington is too far away from the desert. I bring this desert with me to my other desert, the one in the forest. I'm in the desert in the forest because Douglas Christie, a very tall and generous theologian friend and mentor, sent me. It took a heart attack to get me there, or at least the one I thought I had, the result of a panic attack that took me to the emergency room at St. Francis Memorial Hospital.

0:09:20 - (Rubén Martinez): In the wee hours one San Francisco night, I bolted upright in my hotel room bed, awash and sweat, and was stabbing pains in my chest, only to be told by the ER resident doctor who had the dissociative bedside manner that my problem was not cardiac but neurological. My hypochondriacal mind assumed this meant a brain tumor until I was handed the list of Bay Area psychotherapy clinics. My emergency room visit was the culmination of an existential season of artistic frustration and marital tension that in turn had its roots in my oldest demons, the darkness of depression and its opposite, mania.

0:09:58 - (Rubén Martinez): The writer could speak only through the manic character, of course, and depression stripped him of his voice. So after the heart attack, I embarked on an intense therapy kick in the California vein. Psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, aromatherapy, hypnotism, mindfulness, and the antidepressants prescribed off label for anxiety made me more anxious. The aromatherapy made me sneeze. The hypnotism did absolutely nothing. Though I felt so sorry for the hypnotist that I finally raised my arm for her on her 25th suggestion that it was rising its own volition.

0:10:37 - (Rubén Martinez): My psychotherapist helped me in his gentle way, but still the darkness pulled at me. Meditation worked. After decades of scoffing at my friends with New Age tendencies, I sat still as often as I could, and occasionally I arrived in the interior desert drawing a sense of peace I had never felt before. I had once thought of anything that had a whiff of withdrawal from the world, the material world, as an irresponsible escape.

0:11:08 - (Rubén Martinez): I was beginning to understand the opposite, that sometimes withdrawal is a necessary salve for one's wounds and for the world's. Not long after the panic attack and my psychotherapy, all those Therapy things. I met Douglas, theologian, Californian, every inch of UC Santa Cruz banana slug down to his perennial flip flops, and suddenly my co teacher in an interdisciplinary classroom. We called into the desert the result of a friendly argument that had begun over coffee at our school, Loyola Marymount University.

0:11:42 - (Rubén Martinez): We would both wind up in the desert, or rather in different places in the desert. Doug's early research focused on the birth of Christian monastic tradition in the Egyptian deserts of late antiquity. Famously led by the original the OG hermit, a Western mystical tradition, St. Anthony. I brought my blend of borderlands, deserts, and a radical comparative journey was underway. We would swing from medieval mystic, philosopher Meister Eckhart, casting the desert as the ultimate metaphor for an ineffable God, to border novelist and poet Cristina Rivera Garza, immersing us in the violence of the contemporary desert.

0:12:21 - (Rubén Martinez): Over time, our binary approach gave way to a more integrated vision that would find me dabbling in mindfulness with the students and Douglas holding forth on racial rifts in America. In one moment, the desert stood for a traumatic absence, and later as a peaceful emptiness beyond our minds, so typically cluttered by the everyday. The desert was lack, was fullness, was political or beyond politics, was the canary in the gold mine of climate change, was death, was emergence, was native land.

0:12:55 - (Rubén Martinez): My greatest challenge was to find that place where the God of the desert dwells. As I read more Christian monastic history, St Anthony suffering in solitude, the assault of the demons in his cave, I began to sense that alongside wanting to be a witness to the migrant journey, I was also seeking spirit. Indeed, the migrants themselves had been telling me about it all along. I just hadn't heard it in their narrative. Their journey was a pilgrimage across the desert. Every step in the wilderness was an act of faith.

0:13:27 - (Rubén Martinez): And so here I am in the woods, in the desert, in the dark, a dark that can be terrifying, but also, on occasion, a passageway to the sense of unity with the all. I'm going to skip ahead here. Just briefly mention that when I wrote this, the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh were being held. And you remember that riveting moment where these two women activists got Dr. Ford to testify. I was at the monastery during this moment, watching it from afar from the mystical desert. But I was well aware of what was going on.

0:14:08 - (Rubén Martinez): And so back into the narrative. One morning I arise well before dawn and head out across the meadow toward a grove of redwoods that form perimeter around the cloister and the church, where an hour of sitting and walking meditation awaits me. My flashlight is a puny thing in the immense dark of the forest, and sometimes on this walk, a primordial paranoia overtakes me. This morning, however, I'm sleepy, calm.

0:14:34 - (Rubén Martinez): And of course, that's when it happens. I sense movement in the periphery of my vision over my left shoulder. I turn to look, and what I see, or rather not see, I can only describe as an absence. There's an area of darkness on the meadow about 50 yards from me, about the size of a sedan. I shine my flashlight at it, but there's no reflection. It's like pointing a flashlight into a bottomless well or up at the heavens.

0:15:01 - (Rubén Martinez): I'm shocked still and uncomprehending by this. Then the absence abruptly, rapidly and noiselessly floats across the meadow and into the woods. I swear this happened. I witnessed this. I hurry into the redwood grove, which usually gives me the willies for refuge. In a couple of minutes I'm inside. The church is comforting semi darkness, where a single candle on a saucer sits on the concrete floor at the center of the nave and a lamp hangs from the ceiling and casting a cone of light over the altar.

0:15:34 - (Rubén Martinez): But the view that dominates here is what is beyond the altar. The clean floor to ceiling modernist windows that in daylight look out on the trunk of a massive old growth redwood. But at night are black, save for the faint reflections of our faces looking on the absence where God dwells. The nuns told me nonchalantly that what I'd seen was a bear. I wrote to an elder of mine, a Catholic writer, and he wrote back that I had maybe seen the patron saint of depression or a vision of St. Augustine's evil, the absence of good, a black hole in the fabric of the substance of life.

0:16:12 - (Rubén Martinez): Two darks, two deserts. One where corruption and violence joined to crucify the bodies of the vulnerable. And the other where silence is a salve, where no word or image can corrupt what is pure love, the force that makes the body whole again. I'm in my desert alongside the migrants in theirs, writing in the dark. Thanks for the invitation, Chris.

0:16:40 - (Chris Clarke): That was absolutely wonderful. So, as a parting gift, how can people keep track of your new work, aside from going to the 90 miles from Needles bookstore and picking up your back copies?

0:16:54 - (Rubén Martinez): It's an interesting question. I move in and out of different genres. I've been in the performance over the last few years with a kind of musicalized narrative of the sanctuary movement in the 1980s. Had no idea that we would be needing it so direly once again. And of course the resistance movement is coming up. We're not using the term sanctuary quite the same way we did in the 1980s, but I would say I'm at a transition point. You can always audit one of my classrooms at Loyola Marymount University.

0:17:20 - (Rubén Martinez): That's where I'm holding forth right now. I will be writing and it'll appear somewhere somehow.

0:17:27 - (Chris Clarke): Excellent. Thanks for asking. We'll have to put something together at the Beatnik next time you're in Joshua Tree.

0:17:32 - (Rubén Martinez): Absolutely.

0:17:33 - (Chris Clarke): Excellent. Thank you so much, Reuben. It's great to see you.

0:17:37 - (Rubén Martinez): Great to see you, Chris.

0:17:39 - (Chris Clarke): And that's it for this chapter of our 100th episode. Thanks to everyone who's contributed to this, namely Masonville, Morgan Sjogren, Cameron Mayer, David Morales, Rubén Martinez, and Ruth Nolan. Thanks as well to our voiceover guy, Joe Jeffrey, and our podcast artist, Martine Mancha. Our Nature Sounds recordist, Fred Bell will be showing up in our 101st episode. I know I said that he would be showing up in our hundredth episode and I was mistaken. I apologize to Fred and to you.

0:18:13 - (Chris Clarke): Don't forget we only made it to 100 episodes because people supported what we're doing. If you like what we're doing and you want us to keep doing it, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate if you'd like to get us to Tucson and El Paso at the end of September to spread the word. That's 90 miles from needles.com elpaso thanks for listening and here's to the next 100 episodes. Bye now. 90 miles from needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.