Sonorous Desert is subtitled - What deep listening taught early Christian monks - and what it can teach us. All of which made it appear a really interesting prospect to read. Does it achieve those two aims? Not quite, but could it ever do so? Is a book, as opposed to a lived experience, really the best medium for this? Its evocatively written, and all the QR codes linking you to some of her sound recordings in deserts is a cool thing. However colourful and atmospheric, I didn't find those recordings particularly illustrative in relation to the chapter I'd just read. But perhaps I wasn't listening deeply enough.
Sonorous Desert Soundcloud
What she does conjure up well is the conflicts within her own, and in monastic, expectations of what the desert would be like. What a desert will bring into being. T E Lawrence described the desert as being clean. And it is this experience of living a life shorn of anything extraneous that drew monastics to the Egyptian deserts. From St Anthony, as the hermit pioneer, through all the many Desert Fathers who were to follow. Each sought out the wilderness with misconceptions of what they would find there, experiential or spiritual.
Living in environments, often so close to the edge, turbulent wind storms, the barking and baying of animals and sudden unearthly sounds in the pitch black dead of night, became demonic, when luridly possessed by our imaginations. Anything could take on frightening proportions in one's mind when it intrudes into our solitude. I've experienced mild panic attacks whilst on solitary retreats, and that was in the UK. There is a sense of being doubly vulnerable in the desert to the wildness of the terrain and of one's own imagination.
Sounds in the desert become amplified, heightened by being surrounded by that hard unyielding sparseness. There is a whole chapter here on monastic encounters with echoes, and how this sense of something answering back, of your own reverberating presence, was an aspect of the growing intimacy between what was 'other' in the desert and a monastic's own life.
There is, beneath this book, a really absorbing subject matter, one that is existential in nature. Deserts strip us, they reveal us starkly and nakedly. The exposure of what was once concealed, laid bare for everyone to see, is what emerges whenever we are left alone with ourselves. When just for once we have to listen, and listen deeply, to the subterranean and fragile echo chambers of our inner being. Does the book fully flesh out its themes? No. It tries, if anything, to cover too much ground. But it points us in interesting directions to reflect on.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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