kitt peak.

[canon av-1]

this is emil. he wrote a great text about the kitt peak experience. enjoy.

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The vastness of the world which disquieted us before, rests now in us; our dependence upon it is annulled by its dependence on us.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation



April 2011, 56 miles southwest of Tucson, Arizona

State Route 86 leads us straight in a southwesterly direction through a vast landscape with an unbroken horizon. Behind us lies Tucson and ahead Kitt Peak comes closer. We are in the land of the Tohono o’odham. All around, waist-high creosote bushes and cacti grow, every plant with a certain distance to the others that makes them on one scale to appear as individuals, but on another much larger scale to disappear again in a seemingly endless repetition. After a sharp turn, the first in a long time, the ascent begins. The immense space that spreads with the desert seems to grow as the bus climbs higher. A space that is not fully perceptible. With the height, the wind is increasing as well. Outside the sheltering windows of the bus, the air is dry and strong winds shakes the body. The sunshine is sharp but both height and wind keep the temperature down. On the summit, the observatories stand, abstract geometries, completely directed up towards the sun, the sky and beyond. Inevitable, a feeling of being infinitely small, both in time and space, appear. It starts at the desert floor and reaches its climax in the wind on top of the mountain, with a gaze searching far away in the unmeassurable. Over there, on the edge (or can it be on the other side?) of the horizon, disparate dreams are built in steel and concrete. Dreams about colonizing mars or a community without cars and capitalism. I leave the peak with great happiness. But my feelings are in conflict. The observatories were built on Kitt Peak due to its isolated location and many hours of clear sky, in spite of the fact that the Tohono o’odham named it “Home of the Clouds” and in spite of that it is their second holy mountain. Yet another territorial violation by the colonizing power. Who’s dreams and ideas are projected on that mountain top out in the desert and who’s are not? The bus ride continues. We pass many suburbs with high walls erected between the desert and the houses and i recall the remains of a wall framing the Hohokam compound at the Casa Grande ruins. With the Kitt Peak experience in mind I wonder if walls were raised not only to protect from rattlesnakes and sandstorms but to give shelter from a space that strains the mind at the edges of itself and at the edges of its conceptuality, to quote Jean-Francois Lyotard on the sublime. Walls to establish a space and order that is graspable and under control. A fixed sedentary interior as different from the ever changing nomadic exterior that doesn’t give any answers. Two different ways of thinking space, or rather, two different spaces of thinking.

Emil Lundh