Heroes Not Zombies

In 2004 I took a trip to Marrakesh and the day after my 50th birthday I took this photo. When you look at it I think you’ll be struck by hint of a river. There is a long, winding, irregular path in the desert below. Some of the sand looks dark, as if it is still wet, but most of it looks as dry as dry can be. But a river runs through here. Just not always reaching the surface I suppose. So we see the path of a river. A river bed, but the water is sleeping somewhere else. The water has passed through here, right along this very patch of sand, more than once. That’s why the traces it leaves is so deep on the right hand side of the image, and so easy to follow right up until it disappears into the distance.

You can see that from time to time the water comes in significant amounts. So much, in fact, that it broadens out the river, spilling over the edges, producing that clear swelling in its belly right in the middle of the shot. Where it swells, it gets a little wild, and carves out one of the sandy banks creating what looks for all the world like a large bite mark in the desert. And just beyond that zone of intermittent turbulence the water seems to seep under the surface in both directions, creating the conditions for plants to grow.

Maybe you can see a dark rounded patch to the left of the image? That’s the shadow of the hot air balloon I’m in. This is the only time in my life I’ve had a ride in a hot air balloon…..and for me, this was above the desert at the foot of the Atlas mountains, at dawn. That one small shadow brings all that back to me. I remember the day vividly. I remember the French pilot, the cool air, the bright morning, the way that I had the distinct sensation that I was standing still in a square basket as the world fell away below me – that it was the world which was moving, not me, not the balloon. Such a strange sensation. I remember the markings in the sand showing where water flowed from time to time, the well someone had dug to find the hidden water, the walled towns and the scattered flocks of skinny sheep.

You don’t have those memories, so the shadow of the balloon won’t mean much to you, but I wanted to share this with you today because of the images of both the shadow of the balloon, and the carved out markings in the sand, left by the water which passed by in the past. In their own different ways these “marks” (one fleeting, one lingering for much longer) tell us stories…..or to be more precise, provoke curiosity and/or memories. We try to make sense of them. We try to figure out just what we are looking at, and it doesn’t take long for imagination and memory to kick in and contribute so that we see much more than could be captured by simply measuring and describing the shapes we can see.

I think this is an example of how we see and experience so much more in the world than can be captured in the form of measurements and data.