Call Me Ishmael:Desert Rat of Las Vegas

by Lenadams Dorris

Vegas is my city. My body is built from its air and water. My mind is shaped by the spinning of its wheels, and my soul pulses with the energies of this place beyond the imagining of fabulists.

Since the word's beginning, writers have made metaphors of their cities. Whether through facile abstractions of eternal verities, or by crude caricatures of style and temperament, cities are mirrors framed by the creators of popular culture. We don't know Paris itself so much as the Paris of Hugo, Bu–uel and Lautrec; New York lives in our minds shaped by the words of O. Henry, the songs of Cole Porter and the films of Woody Allen.

My city isn't a big apple. Nor is it an eternal city, nor one of brotherly love. It is the city which has not been made into a metaphor, but which is at its core metaphorical--a city not abstracted but abstract. "Lost Wages," they call it. The incarnate devil's "Sin City."

Vegas sprawls in every direction from a tiny historic core fed by a filigree of highways, wires and pipes. Prostrate before the world's largest nuclear testing ground, it emits more of its own light than any comparable human assemblage in history. It's name means "the meadows" in Spanish, in honor of the verdant fields and bubbling springs now covered in asphalt. But the most profound name I can myself give to my numinous burg is "The Radiant City."

"Where the light is brightest the shadows are the deepest." Wolfgang Goethe, Faust

I sit in my garden in the dark. It is the first cool night of the fall, the eve of my ancestral new year, rosh hashanah. For the people whose blood still flows in my veins, this was the time when life began again, when the gentle rains of the eastern sea conquered the ruthless aridity of summer. Desert people, moving to a desert rhythm. And I am, all these millennia later, again in a desert place.

Rows of thin clouds roll in from the west, reflecting the light of the city, mimicking the absent moon this September night. Coolness brings perfume, smells my ancestors knew: musk of fig leaves; apricot pierce of late blooming olive; daylight rosemary, bay and lavender and somnolent juniper and pine. Two hours before dawn. A train's erotic moan, freedom's blues, lingering in the alleys of this old neighborhood. Saturn smiles down on me, huge and radiant, a gentle mockery of this most brilliant of cities.

We have built this place on the southeastern edge of a vast, interiorly draining basin. But we built it on the side that slides slowly and twistingly to the river, on to the gulf and then to the sea. Only fifteen miles north, and every precious drop of rain that falls on my garden walk would sink into an alkaline quagmire the only escape from which is evaporation or descent. Perhaps it's for the best that our little strange attractor has some outlet to a vaster world. It is not only water that flows downhill, my sweet.

And it's just one more silliness that my life's linearity is wrapped around a city which has none, that I'm rooted to a place modeled on an impalpable fata morgana--cinematic floating mirage, golden city not on a hill, but miles above it, edges obscured by clouds of its own manufacture. Witness to history that does not exist, testifying to consequences whose causes are lost in myth's ruthless creation.

For the intellectuals of the world, lately stripped of nationalistic pride, we are the despised Other. We are indefensible Hicksville, ludicrous Podunk, lamented Hamelin. Moral relativism grants dignity to cannibals, warmongers and murderers, but we remain that which gets its value from its easy disposability.

Two dimensional stage set: greedy, ugly, vicious, vulgar; emissive not reflective; surface, shallow, godless, mindless, faithless, decadent, immoral; hooker, dealer, hustler, whore; white-bread, low-rent, low-brow; hot as hell, void, arid, empty; heathen and hedonistic, cancerous, monstrous, always hungry, gaping, grasping, all-enveloping urbana dentata; Circe, Salome, Medea, Elvis, Liberace, Siegfried and Roy; fear, oh yes...and loathing, too; Mississippi of the west, wasteland of the south, Eldorado of the north, eastern province of bankrupt California; bring the kids, leave the money, but whatever you do, come back soon.

It's no skin if it's really not that clear-cut. It's how we make our money.

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event -- in the living act, the undoubted deed --there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!" Herman Melville, Moby Dick

tree illustration California is the end of the road, the continent's edge, where everything is made new again in the soft temperate light of a new New Jerusalem. The American Dream, inheritance of all dreams that have gone before, a golden age for mind and body fused with the endless reach of empire. And Vegas is the essence of the California dream, dissolved in the solvent of clear desert light.

We who are here are blessed to be here. Unburdened with the strangling tradition of our shared past, unshackled from the religious strictures of our fathers, unencumbered by the boxes of our histories, baptized by the unwavering desert sun, we are scoured by sand and made fresh by the wind. We take center stage in a theater of infinite vistas, where cubist mountains, far from hemming us in decorate our night's skirt, a night in whose bosom stars yet shine, ignorant of throbbing neon, penetrating lasers and halogen portals. We are reminded by stone and stellar glory that "our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: the Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar."

We make ourselves anew, now, and have become as gods. Triumphant, we claim as ours all of human history. Pyramids, Arabian Nights, Rome's splendors, the decadence of last century's end, even the yellowed core of the late Big Apple, all are ours to play with, boxes which once held treasures, but which now are just building blocks in our gorgeous megalomaniacal game called "The End of History."

Vegas is as real as it gets. It is the most straightforward, honest and modern of all of the cities that have existed on this muddling globe. It is stripped of all that is not human. It is here simply because Senator Clark wanted it here, not because of trade routes, water sources or the warring politics of rival kings. But we are a prize that belongs to no one man or group of men. Even the mob couldn't hold on to it. The bottom line here is the bottom line. All the artifacts of feudal man--the prejudices, the tribalism, the melancholic creativity born from captivity--all fall away in the face of the Las Vegas mantra: show me the books. Incompetence, impracticality and Pollyannish thinking are purged away in the furnaces of economy. And yet the fantastic remains.

The wheels spin, the money flashes, the lesser priests recite their introits. What we now are we have always been, even here in this world, this Brave New World so long sought. But it horrifies. How could this be "the new American city"? How could you let it grow like it has? Doesn't anyone know better? Can't anyone see the horror?Aieeeeeeeeeeee!

What hogwash. Vegas is a box into which certain kinds of dreams are put. Those dreams are not preordained any more than they ever have been. It is the Word made Flesh, and this time you're here to see it happen.

The sun is almost up now. Rosy-fingered dawn spreads out above the wine dark sea of our little city. The clouds that earlier lapped softly at each other now jam together against an invisible front which hovers above the ancient eastern mountains. A mockingbird sings--mewing like a cat, then honking like a car alarm--lifting first its left foot then its right in obvious delight. Even the birds can't escape the metamorphosis, but at least they seem to enjoy it.

The clouds shift, and the grizzled face of a lost and confounded Ahab speaks: "Hast thou seen the White Whale?" But our poor captain fades as first light floods the valley, and the distant roar of dawn's first cetacean tour buses give counterpoint to the mockingbird.

Today, like any other day, the sun rises. Our temples of commerce will be filled with coins that clank and sparkle, models of the sun, and of the moon, and of every glittering thing. Ahab thought he could buy his fate with the bounty of a gold doubloon. Ultimately, he discovered that "this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man but mirrors back his own mysterious self."

Lenadams Dorris is the voice of "Desert Bloom," a daily Commentary on KNPR radio and a partner in the Enigma Cafe in downtown Las Vegas. His home page on the web at http://www.well.com/~vegas/ is a front door to the wonders of Las Vegas and the Mojave Desert. Graphic done by Lenadams Dorris.



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