Desert biome.

Pokémon. The Matrix.

My earliest encounter with the elements of nature—besides Pokémon, of course—was a wonderfully illustrated book of biomes. Creatures of all kinds crept across the double-paged spreads, settling into environment next to captions bearing their common name: the wood mouse, the orangutan, the Gila monster. That is what a biome was, I reasoned. Animals and weather patterns. That more or less seems to have held true, except for one: the desert. 

Where other biomes are distinguished by their populations, their abundance and diversity, the iconic feature of the desert—at least in popular imagination—is the absence of such things. Other biomes can also be hot or dry; other biomes likewise have lizards and snakes and plants you shouldn’t touch. What sets the desert apart is its emptiness. It is a place without; etymologically, forsaken or abandoned. Thus the desert is one of only two biomes which we refer to symbolically, the other being the jungle, which we use as a metaphor often to stupid, crude, and racist effect. 

But the desert outstrips the jungle in its capacity as a symbol. The jungle is too substantial, too full to carry anything but itself; however it is invoked, it always remains a crowded, noisy, overgrown image. There may be things like a jungle, but no one for a moment really believes any of those things is a jungle. The same may not be said of the desert. One cannot be jungled, whatever that would imply; but one can be deserted.

This sense of the desert as human condition, an existential state, is what makes it so powerful, so symbolic. Vast and hollow, it can contain the biggest ideas, revealing their fullness through their absence, their potential through their destitution. The folly of empire in an antique land, or New Mexico. The fragility of civilization as seen from Australia, or the Matrix. The avatar of falseness, unreality, is not a shadow in Plato’s cave—it is a mirage on the sand. 

It is a place of visions and vision quests. A site for burning men and wandering peoples. A biome not for living, but for being and becoming.