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White noise
Greater than the fear of death is the terror of being buried alive, trapped under the rubble, alone and unseen. The inability to communicate, the incommunicability of experience, is arguably the supreme fear.
Weeks before the recent earthquake you cruise along the desert highway at night, contemplating those who leave no trace because there is no one to tell their story: frozen in time, like Pompeian houses, haunted by the spectra of death.
In the face of natural evil survival is nothing more than delayed oblivion. The Romans were probably not even aware of Vesuvius’ volcanic character until that fateful day. How many will pass unnoticed, unrecorded, you wonder. Likewise you too could have not imagined the catastrophic event that would shortly decimate the region.
Gradually the lights of a town that has historically attracted opportunism and fortune-seekers come into focus. Ouarzazate comes from the Amazigh phrase meaning “without noise” or “without confusion.”
Clear mountain air is funnelled down from the High Atlas to this small crossroad town that once linked the Atlantic to Timbuktu. Africa is moving north towards Europe. When the pressure gets too great, something has to give. Anthropologists are drawn here to study the dying embers of a storytelling tradition. The strange proportions of the film sets designed to trick the camera play havoc with the mind. In the hotel lobby a de Chirico painting depicts a Parisian bar lit up.
In the cafés mist sprays from sprinklers in the ceiling. Friends engage in easy-going dialogue, not afraid to condescend to silence. The Amazigh is a free man who dearly loves his freedom and is always ready to fight to defend it.
Immaculate pise clay architecture that dates back a thousand years. Atlas Studios – the largest in the world – offers optimum conditions because it rarely clouds over, let alone rains here. David Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ was set against the dunes, the kasbahs and mountain lakes – filming locations that now double for Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter, rural Afghanistan or the Russian steppe. Ridley Scott’s ‘Gladiator’ utilised the ethereal light.
The abandoned movie set symbolizes the quest for immortality as the dissonance between the material and immaterial. Once the moment has passed and the physical world has been transmigrated to a movie reel or digital file, there is a sense in which it no longer exists.
The vast expanse of faded nothingness perfectly awakens the senses to another mode of seeing. Ever since the disciples of Plato retreated to pitch black caves to receive ancient wisdom have philosophers been drawn to the sensory abyss.
Fourth Century Christian elders fled the materialist cornucopia of Christendom’s excesses in search of the proper response to incommunicability. Terrence Malick’s latest work, “The Way of the Wind,” recently wrapped up filming here.
Another philosopher filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, directed Nikos Karakantis’ “The Last Temptation of Christ” here. Philosophy attracts those who want to define themselves in relation to the whole.
In the room is a Ruwedel print: a kind of photographic Rothko marked by desert vistas devoid of motion. You contemplate the absence of subject object interplay, the empty space sequestered from all the white noise of life: It merely conveys a daunting impression of gravity. Perhaps the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre was right when he said that essence precedes existence, or perhaps it’s the Ganzfeld effect that elicits the strange sensation here.
Underlying tension
Haunting melodies and the plucking of an old guitar fill the air in an art deco café. The proprietor proudly rearranges his rounded chairs, their lacquer peeling, and then dutifully sweeps the checked floor. A cluster of locals are following the football on the TV above doors that lead to a vine-covered terrace.
On the sidewalk several scenes unfold. You contemplate the depth of vision. Fragrant mint lingers from the sugared tea the people drink.
A stray tortoiseshell kitten is chasing its tail under your table: blissfully unaware that it isn’t the only creature in the world to have done this for the first time in the history of the world. For whom existence is something altogether wondrous.
Pitiful and pathetic by western standards; or perhaps this is the idyll, and the overfed felines back home are symptomatic of a Western culture in decline. Another appears with a limp; its hind leg hangs pathetically causing it to hop. Does it possess self-consciousness of its own suffering? You wonder.
Japanese land cruisers with faded decals advertise desert excursions. Dusty yellow taxis abound where it’s not usual to walk, even if it’s a couple of blocks away. Locals pass serenely, their fake designer labels worn out and faded. They cycle incredibly slowly or filter past on ancient motorcycles with bulletproof two-stroke engines. The vehicles here go on forever.
Meanwhile a parking attendant meticulously arranges scrap cardboard over the windshield of parked cars. Old and leather-skinned now, his day follows the path of the sun. He has done this most of his life, and if he hasn’t it was equally something as simple. Toiling away under the burning sun.
After all, it was the Amazigh plough that once made Africa the granary of Rome. But who wins in the end, and where is this thirst for knowledge leading us? Understanding takes us only so far, and in the moment knowledge is not enough.
The heavy police presence coupled with the metal detector arches in all the hotel and restaurant entrances impart a strange foreboding feeling, like a spaghetti western shootout scene, calm quiet, all that’s missing is tumbleweed. The police too pass their days on their smartphones deep in conversation.
The riot cages on their windshields look strangely apocalyptic. You decipher a strongly worded article in “Challenge” magazine on the Paris riots triggered after a young immigrant was gunned down by police.
After the mint leaves settle at the bottom of the glass they reach for a cigarette, but they don’t smoke excessively like those in the West. It’s true you feel the passing of time only in relation to external absolutes, in relation to the world: ultimately death.
Some browse newspapers but most are preoccupied with their smartphone, engrossed in whatever sound is being conveyed through their earphones: audiobooks, Quran verses, local FM, beamed in via one of the megalithic radio masks above the square. Visitors invariably mention the slow pace of life as if time is somehow plastic, malleable.
You are acutely aware of the sun beating down on you. They say hell is actually cold because it’s a lifeless place. The absence of a shadow causes you to ponder the nature of evil. The dissonance wrought by isolation, the solipsism the pandemic exasperated. Thus each, though together, regresses further into their own reality. And thus the question confronts us of what our essence really is. Namely what is essential to us and what is dispensable. For who would want to exist encumbered with what they realised at the end was inconsequential.
The tortoiseshell kitten returns the following day, or it could be its sibling, rubbing its neck against the table stem. And if only you could bi-locate, they would see their fate is not unique, or confined to this desert stopover city. A shoe shiner awkwardly, soliciting trade. But the population, you notice, are all wearing sandals. The car parking attendant lays in the shade. A local waiter delivers him a plate of tagine with bread. One block feels an eternity away.
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3AM in Ouarzazate
At sunset the city casts off the sapping inertia. You could write about the melee of nighttime activity. The souks and the restaurants all lit up. A proprietor presents a rug for inspection, invaluable he says, but yours for an excellent price. With a wry smile you politely excuse yourself.
The bookseller with his classics printed on recycled paper. Families take their daily paggasiata, children and grandmother in tow. The beggar girl in the square has found a friend, who clutches a stray puppy in her arms.
The Imam sounds his call to prayer, a sombre wailing song, like the rumble of a regular train to someone living beside the tracks. Someone must have enabled him to trust. And, in order to trust, someone somewhere must have already entrusted themselves to him.
This can only be understood in practice, by the personal example of the one who has already reached the other side; the one content to waste their life, the one so misunderstood, so hopelessly at peace.
The question, then, is whether anyone is sufficiently trustworthy. When you die for someone, you entrust ourselves entirely to them. But can anyone or anything be worth dying for? Serenity, then, is the ability to face death, as opposed to being killed. What else have you got to give in the last resort, except yourself? When desire is strong enough death holds no sting.
The Ouarzazate sky is simply sublime; thousands of glittering stars reveal the mysteries of the universe. There’s a barely present breeze. The couple of luxury hotels, located together, subsist off desert tourists and movie crews.
They are flanked with flag poles and impressively irrigated gardens, pristine terraces and sparkling pools. A hedge separates the gardens from an abandoned tennis court: the cracked clay penetrated by weeds, the markings barely visible. Three flood lights stand erect; the fourth lays flayed across the baseline. No one has played here for many years.
By the pool Metallica is playing: Life is ours, we live it our way, All these words I don’t just say, And nothing else matters. Couples share secrets beneath the palms, lit up in effervescent hues. The aquamarine is illuminated by underwater lights. There is no loutishness, not artificial happiness induced by alcohol.
There is nothing here except sand, perhaps the perfect Ganzfeld conditions. Metallica’s Nothing Else matters and the call to prayer reflect two contrasting philosophies, two worldviews: two quests for dominion.
In the early hours a group of errant youths leap into the hotel pool, splashing elatedly then leaving as quickly as they came. It’s 3am in Ouarzazate and you feel far away from the cosmopolitan noise of Paris or Casablanca. You think about the scene in Gladiator where Maximus is searching for his family in the afterlife, how he runs his hand through the wheat field.
Later they extend to one another their hands with an expression of quiet sorrow on their faces. When he finds they have been slain his gaze is one of calm concentration, an inevitable sorrowful reconciliation.
When the divine calls us to the crucible of doubt, you cannot go empty handed. Each test contains within it the sum of every previous test, even as each prayer contains within it the sum of all that went before. Through testing you are refined even as the dross is burned away. You strip ourselves of our own will and embrace the loss of all things.
Only a few lights illuminate the distant dunes. The darkness is accompanied by silence, broken only by the howl of a dog or the Muezzin’s call. The white noise of the AC is oddly cathartic at this time of night. The rhythmic pulse of cool air forced to circulate.
From the personal to the universal, God anchors cosmic salvation to the promise of a son who is Ibrahim’s own flesh and blood. The promise relates to the present and the distant. The desire for transcendence, the faint murmur of faith set Ibrahim apart. But you have been chosen, and you must graciously accept the gift entrusted to you. You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others did not possess: nor for power or wisdom, at any rate. Such questions cannot be answered. Ibrahim desired a city which hath foundations, deliverance from a perishing world. The earthly pilgrimage towards the object of devotion perfects the image. The Atlas Mountains, home to contemplators and mystics. ‘Farewell, Beloved,’ Maximus says. It is not to cry that the Romans came to the mausoleums, but to remember them as they were when they were alive. And what remains for us who understand that death and time reign on the earth? This awakening to the possibility of transcendence is your abiding impression of this place.
Weeks later, at 11:11pm one Friday night, the town is awakened to an altogether more physical fear and trembling.
About the author
John Hartley is a school teacher and writer from Droitwich, England. His work has been featured on the TheSmartset.com, 3quarksdaily.com, and in the Traffika Europe journal.
