An Assortment of Not-Rights

Spend a day in the desert and you’ll learn a lot about the vastness of time and space. The sun’s beating rays are received as throbs of heat on your face. Vision in waves, time ticks. It burns radiation. Design exists in the cracks in the dirt and there is nothing left for you to add to this world. 

We fear this barren space. In Ancient times, exile meant death; outside the city was the wilderness, the realm of wild animals.¹ Well beyond the age of the original “city-states,” we look at the wilderness in a much more romantic sense. As Donald Revell said: I have children out there. May some of them / Be lakes that climb into the sky and live.

25,000 years ago, sometime during the last Ice Age, a small family group travels through the Pyrenean Mountains. They are carrying a leather rucksack of flint cores and flakes: these are pieces of their homeland. This mountain pass, Montlleó, exists much more treacherously as glaciers narrow the path; 20,000 years before this moment, this narrow pass was a grassy valley.² 

As eons occur, well, I would say the human condition exists outside these walls we’ve constructed. 

1. Kazim Ali, There are More Cells in One Human Body Than There are Stars in the Universe, (Poetry Foundation, 2014).
2. Marta Sánchez de la Torre, Homo sapiens Regularly Crossed the Pyrenees During the Ice Age, (Jstor Daily, 2025).