Another thought that really took hold during our last jaunt to the desert was the notion that everything, EVERYTHING is defined by the edges of other things — the inside of one object is the outside of another. During the last third quarter of our trip when the dread subsided and the mode became a pensive amble, it became hard not to see the boulders, creosote, mountain ranges, the visible parts of our body and all other physical objects in view as defining each other — not unlike that illusion where faces in silhouette define the contours of a vase and vice versa. All pointed to the feeling that nothing can be seen without difference — an object is caused into being by it not being something else (if something is the same the mass just increases). Most powerfully was when this impression turned to non-physical objects (thoughts and ideas): a mental reaction to stimuli is formation — like the way a mother’s disappointment or approbation to her child creates an enduring posture of inadequacy or resiliency in the resultant adult. And to larger postulations, the failure of art movements or philosophies to cause lasting change form new aesthetic and ideological stances: Realism to Symbolism, Minimalism to Post-Minimalism, Structralism to Post-Structuralism and back again. (Even this sentence is a formation; the attempt of shape out of disorder — all the way down to the alphanumeric characters themselves, red on white; white on white or red on red would not be legible.)
        Being in that place, out there in the desert, with the time to mill these notions against the gorgeous, sturdy multitude of aspect, of that non-human world, really bucked us from over-simplifying this notion into pat binaries. It allowed us to see formation as limitless in facets — hard, soft, vaporous, gradient, or what have you. That this world both inner and outer is stupendous in its bloom, its decay and its otherness.