Deserts as Averages

I was thinking today about the way
that deserts are averages.
The South Pacific as much as
the middle of the Sahara,
the ridge of Everest
or surface of the Moon;
all feel like manifestations,
things being pulled to a center.
They find an advantage there,
the sustaining average.

Far reaches of the Ocean
seem all but devoid of life,
a standing-wave of non-happening.
No wave in the water,
no cloud in the sky,
molecules standing no-wind,
no-moving thing.
If I were there, in a boat or a raft,
I might only hear my breathing
and wonder if the tinnitus
was the horizon.

Deserts are fascinating
maybe because they’re big.
Adventurers have crossed them
in major feats of strength!
But some that didn’t make it
give deserts a threatening aspect;
they crave a cycle of sameness.
To a desert’s ears
a change is violent,
a voice is death.

These mathematically unforgiving places
bring friction and force
to whip wide unsurvivable spaces;
averaged to zero, a desolate course at last.

Left to themselves,
deserts level what is put there:
buildings in the Mojave
are returned to the Mojave
unless life-reinforced,
inhabited by voices.

A greedy desert’s pristine average
changes with diversity.
Where it appears their perfectly
bubble-sphere ecosystems become lumpy,
deserts edge into complexity with life.
Where life survives, adaptation follows.

Natural selection knows
how the averages work
as the complexity grows,
lifting above the desert
like a kite in a hurricane.

Life outside the desert
flying kites in a storm of abstractions:
Data oceans, idempotent functions,
clouds of computers, trees of networks,
layers of support, hierarchies of management,
cultural scaffolding of beliefs,
shared goals, corporate missions,
mass-produced furniture building instructions.

All abstracted by averages,
lowly lowest common denominator,
enabling more across more agents,
black boxes for measuring everything,
instructions for understanding nothing.
To understand, or have expertise,
is not a desert thing.

Like artificial language models,
a fraction is stolen,
the edges of diversity cut away,
negative feedback swells,
forming dunes of bulleted lists
with instructions on sameness.
The desert a precipice of sanity,
full of hallucinations,
chemical and biting,
cares not.

For averages are controllable,
they are printable in headlines.
A cancer of averages gives
growth for sameness-sake
to better control us my dear,
snuffing the very diversity
nourishing the advantage
of our average.

As Power wants control,
competing levels emerge,
survivability pulled too far,
it dashes and flattens,
competition rattled,
reaching closer to the desert-like
numbness of power,
a Kudzu Republic reigns
and chokes itself to grow.

A desert does not live.
It averages, empty
to everything but itself.
Respecting the desert
as a lonely place,
average-engulfed,
we breathe it.

Because with a reversal becoming
the empty block of wood,
a silent piano piece
with every sound,
we give it a voice
to suffocate the sameness,
flourishing into life
no perfect moiré
but an emerald-dithered garden.