Riddle and microcosm

...The challenge of desert narrative thus nourishes a yearning to discover other chords, allowing our inner selves to be uttered, and raising up a spiritual chant capable of communicating the venture of a human who is both a riddle and a microcosm. In this process, dream replaces the traditional novelistic capital of relationship.  

Through the inspiring breath of mythology, the human becomes an axis, gathering existence around himself. Not content simply to encompass society, he contains existential experience in all its worldly dimensions. Borrowing talismans from the Unknown, he vanquishes the Ghoul. He is like Oedipus, whose own talismans defeated the riddles of the Sphinx, crouched over Thebes...

from Desert Narrative: Challenges and Possibilities by Ibrahim al-Koni at Vagabond Homelands

Image from New Desert Myths by David Parker

Desert

It is only in the desert that we can pay a visit to death and afterwards return to the land of the living.

from an essay by Ibrahim al-Koni for Myth and Landscape by David Parker (2014).

The desert is not a place, writes al Koni:

A place has preconditions, and one of the preconditions is water, and the lack of water in the desert makes it impossible to settle there, so the desert becomes a place of absence, a place that is the shadow of another place...

Image: New Desert Myths I (detail) by David Parker.

Here is a view on Mars, January 2015

Sirens

Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence never.

from The Silence of the Sirens by Franz Kafka, quoted by Marina Warner in an essay for Myth and Landscape by David Parker (2014)

Image: Siren XXXV by David Parker