“It is often said of deserts that they are where the Prime Mover was practicing before making the rest of the world. Such definitions imply that the desert is where we are closest to the creative spirit of the universe, and it’s not coincidental that several of the world’s great monotheisms were born and raised in the desert… We call the desert a wilderness, the closest synonym in the dictionary for which is “wasteland”, and can’t decide which it is. The Great Basin hosts both, like other deserts a home to the anomalies of the divine. Although the desert is not a blank slate, it’s empty enough in comparison to what we are used to that we’re prone to transform it in our imaginations into a literal void that happily receives our mythic inventions… We want, apparently even need, to see it as that void that helps define us as a people. The more crowded the planet becomes, the more contested the supposed nobility of our history, the more we need the void as a physical purity to reassure us that all is not lost.”
~ William L. Fox | The Void, the Grid, & the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin