Waiting for Lawrence of Arabia on the Big Screen
The English have a great love of desolate places.
—Prince Fisal
Our provisioned expedition settles in, sings girlish praises: O’Toole and Sharif
lounging windblown in oases. Expanse of matte-white screen and four delicious
hours yet to travel.
On set, after every charge of sun-rough rebels over dunes, weedy interns
in wide-legged Bermuda shorts and goggles guarding against shrapnel sand
brush the desert clean of prints.
The world swept new again, and every take the first. There’s nothing
epic in being second, in following hard-packed camel trails to smooth-walled wells.
No romance in an un-lost compass.
—
There is nothing in the desert, and no man needs nothing. Yet we grapple
for unmapped jungle, unplumbed depths, unwatched classics—to be first, flinty-eyed
explorer, to endure what no one has.
And if it’s love, it’s Stockholm syndrome—sun’s anvil, lip split with rime of thirst
clammy chill of a gaucho night, campfire coffee grounds settled by an egg poached
mottled brown and gritty.
Or if it’s love, it’s an escape into the graspable, an honest kind of hurt.
The clean sincerity of the conversation between body and land:
a throat too dry to spit.
Or if it’s love, it’s a sweet mirage the desert tells us, a Hollywood lie,
Baby, you’re the first. This bleakness yours to interrupt, this stark
horizon yours to cross.
—
Each of us a vanguard, blue eyes blazing as we stalk the desert night.
Shuffling after boom mic and camera dolly and someone to scuff away
our marks, restore what’s loved.
No man needs nothing, and wind-whipped sand can kill—but lights dim,
we hush each other for the trek toward intermission. Projected flicker. Desert dark.
Give us something blank to write on.
