About deserts

17/05/2021 Nilson Lattari

The streets around me are empty – pandemic’s time. At midnight, I hear the homeless guy of the neighbourhood screaming; “Guys, where are you? Where are you guys?” Like a prophet, he faces the wall, and he seems to shake his thoughts, trying to take something out of them, and he starts a song; “It comes, it comes, I’ve already heard its signals!”
There are a lot of things that scare us. They are hidden into my thoughts, they are surrounded by the walls of my home on the last floor of the building. I also hear the same signals which come from the homeless guy’s thoughts, vibrating, meeting my own thoughts.
But the question of this text is speaking about deserts and beaches too; “Solitary beaches go on, looking for us”, and they finally meet us. Or not?
But deserts are beyond the earth, deserts belong to our thoughts. Deserts dwell inside good people too, that love life. They have money enough in their pockets, but they are afraid that these pockets become a desert as well. A desert of ideas but full of greed.
The homeless guy walks along the desert of the streets, and his voice predicts the future.
People say that deserts have their beauty, their loneliness, their infinite horizons. There isn’t life, it has one colour, and the peregrine walks with his shadow reflected on the ground. It changes during the peregrine walking. Sometimes, it’s large and distant, and sometimes it’s close to him, very close. Because, sometimes the danger seems distant, and on the other hand it seems close, very close.
The hesitant walker tries to survive in the solitary and empty streets. Who helps the walker? He is a philosopher (he told me, once, he studied Philosophy) and he can see life in the streets hidden by a desert. He is the drunkard and the tightrope walker.
But deserts go on, and they are “in the brains and in all mouths”. The shadows seem like robots following the orders of an intoxicated man, walking down the deserts of strange thoughts, and challenging the good sense. Yes, we need to lead our destiny.
Talking about signals. What is the homeless guy telling us? Where are the signals from? Deserts need the absence, the ignorance as well. A kind of desert is going to kill us, everyone, by thirst of trust. And deserts come from the silence that “are in the brains and in all mouths too”.