“The deserted island is the origin, but a second origin. From it everything begins anew.”Gilles Deleuze “Desert Islands”, 13
“Nomads are motionless, and the nomadic adventure begins when they seek to stay in the same place by escaping the codes”.Gilles Deleuze “Nomadic Thought”, 261
The film Sheltering Sky begins with a nostalgia. The opening scenes of the film, shot black and white with a sort of nostalgic glance at the New York City, remind us the old flickers in the history of cinema. These flickers had a different speed of motion than what is accepted as the standard in cinema industry of today. In these movies, the images flickered and people and objects moved in a strangely and supernaturally faster speed. This is how the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro wants us to have a picture of New York on our minds for the rest of the film. New York is a melancholic nostalgia for the characters in this film. One of a quite different speed, time, and place. Actually, when one pays closer attention, it is apparent that these scenes are nothing but a montage of old archive shots showing various places and times in New York City. So, the city is shown in fragments. The film tell us in the first moment that in the memory of Port and Kit, the city is only a fragmented nostalgia.
Melancholy as Home
In the first scene after the credits, Port is shown lying in a state of distress under red and orange light – wet in anxiety, restless, uneasy. This is where the text of Paul Bowles begins - Port waking up from a dream:
“[H]e was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he has just come. If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and space, he also lacked the desire. He was somewhere, he had come back through vast regions from nowhere; there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness was reassuring, because it alone was familiar.”
The non-being...He has just come... This description of deterritorialisation entails the comprehension of “being” as a list of attributes you hold according to the value system of the culture you are born into. This sort of reading suggests that once you moved away from it, you get stripped of your being. But here, the analogy merits attention. Port’s peculiar state that lingers between dream and wakefulness is parallelled to his journey away from home to North African deserts. In this respect, being away from home is resembled to nothing but a twilight sleep – between dream and reality. Not at an exact position in “time and space”; but floating between spaces. Port is both somewhere and nowhere, as the text suggests. Somewhere, but it is not important exactly where. He has come from nowhere, because left behind as the previous destination, now means nothing. In such a mobile position between fragments without depth, Port has only but one feeling familiar to him: sadness. Melancholy is the home of the traveller.
This melancholy can hardly be interpreted as a feeling of longing for home, though. Obviously, Port is never thinking of going back to New York, or Europe. Kit, however, believes they will “stop” and go back to New York, one day. She sometimes enjoys dreaming European cities .
Consuming Fragmented Spaces
What drives Port to such a state of mobility? He is rich, he is a New Yorker – one of those people we see in the beginning of the film, enjoying underground, skyscrapers, city lights, a metropolitan culture at its height. Renouncing the opportunities and facilities of living in one of the centres of Western society, he travels to desert. His departure off the geography he is born into might be romanticised through an interpretation that suggests that he renounced the system that governs West and went for the desert – the domain of nothingness. However, Port rather seemed to me a “consumer” – a consumer of spaces, shaped by postmodern condition : “No needs should be seen as fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate” . Therefore, postmodern subject is driven into a state of excitement – an excitement seeker. “[A] good consumer is a fun-loving adventurer” . The postmodern subject is a nomad, travelling from one desire to another: “There is equally the restlessness, the mania for constant change, movement, difference – to sit still is to die” . The satisfaction, however, abides only in the moment of arrival. Then begins a new adventure towards a new satisfaction, which actually values so little compared to the process.
A sort of traveller like Port cannot really get into the culture he is travelling into. The lack of pathos is always existent within the postmodern nomad. In Sheltering Sky, we see Port drifting from one place to another without ever getting into real contact with the local culture, except for his mysterious journey to the tent of Marhnia. For him, the important thing is to “go”, to “travel”. As soon as he arrives in a town, he goes searching for the next bus to another city. No ultimate destination exists for Port. Port is a consumer of voyages. He is a collector of memories. He is always in exile. Although he is present in the towns of Sahara, he is simultaneously absent. He is like the “black hole” without a “white wall”. A half face without Kit . He watches everything around and registers to his subjectivity, yet he can hardly share them with Kit. There is always a sort of deferrence between the two. And this is mostly felt in the scene where the two are finally left alone as Tunner left for Messad:
“[R]ather than make any effort to ease whatever small tension might arise between them, she determined on the contrary to be intransigent about everything. It could come about now or later, that much-awaited reunion, but it must all be his doing. Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they both had made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.”
Time, as non-existent...Kit determines to behave quite the contrary to her will. For she believes, time means nothing and what she longs for will happen eventually. Port undergoes a similar decision process a few lines before Kit’s. He “temporarily abandon[s] the idea of getting back together with Kit.” He takes this decision on intuitive grounds though. He believes that “when he least expect[s] it, the thing might come to pass of its own accord” .
Both are waiting for a re-union, so we learn, a re-birth of their intimate days. And to be reborn, he and Kit head for the desert - an island, surrounded by lands of different type. “A cosmic egg” – so does Deleuze call islands in his magnificent essay “Desert Islands”.
Noah’s Ark becomes a Bed of Pain
The title of Deleuze’s article, “Desert Islands” is twofold by nature. One can read it as a combination of an adjective and a noun – hence islands that are deserted, or, islands that are like deserts, or else, islands which are deserts themselves. Another reading would suggest – through noun plus noun combination – deserts as islands. Indeed, deserts are much like islands in their isolated nature.
In the case of Sheltering Sky, the desert is an island, so much as it is a deserted island for Port and Kit. Like ships around a deserted island, they wander around in distance but never really come ashore. Throughout the narrative, there are examples when Port goes for a walk into the city and meets the locals. These are only fragments, though. He can only experience the local culture in fragments. Kit’s existence, on the other hand, provides him a sort of connection to his native culture. The relationship of husband and wife is also fragmented and a parallel motif for this situation.
Desert, as a cosmic egg, in Deleuze’s sense, is expected to serve take away this fragmentedness. In “Desert Islands” Deleuze suggests:
“the formation of the world happens in two stages, in two periods of time, birth and rebirth, and that the second is just as necessary and essential as the first, and thus the first is necessarily compromised, born for renewal and already renounced in a catastrophe.”
We know that Port renounces New York when he comes to the Sahara, seeking for a new beginning in life that will come with succeeding integration and a re-birth of their marrigae with Kit. Also Kit, later on renounces her connections with that culture after the death of her husband, and she flees to the desert. There, she seeks for a new beginning with Belqassim in her new disguise.
Deleuze explains this renewal in his essay via the myth of flood; the first creation renounced and a new beginning is sought and only made possible by an island – a mountaintop circulated by flood waters around. Noah’s ark sets on this island, a sacred land in shape of egg. Remember that Port and Kit arrive in the Sahara by boat, actually they insist on coming by boat. The journey, intended for new beginnings, is therefore both an interior and exterior one.
“Nomads are motionless”
Earlier I have stated that Port was a consumer of voyages. There is no question that he is a traveller-type of fellow, as it is clearly indicated both by the narrative and by a key scene in the film. I have also stated that Port and Kit’s journeys into the desert have an interior value the aims of which are similar to the physical journey itself – the re-beginning. However, although these people try to escape from New York, from capitalist mode of production, from Western value system, they seem to be entrapped by it in some way. The very system conditions its individuals to a sort of restlessness and will to travel – remember Bauman’s point . In this sense, Deleuze discusses that the term “nomad” should actually be understood in a different way. For Deleuze, “real nomadic adventure begins when [one seeks] to stay in the same place by escaping the codes.” To seek a new beginning in the global world, one should think of travelling beyond the codes. If that is ever possible.
A Nomad in the Desert of the Real
“I think all you drinkers are victims of a huge mass hallucination” cries Port to Kit and Tunner, who are less like him in terms of postmodern restlessness.
Imagining everyone seeking a way out of this system actually as a result of the conditioning of this system, creates an image of the world as a desert. When stripped of its codes, signifiers and signifieds, its charming commodities, its conditioning media, the world is nothing but a global desert. As Baudrillard puts it: “Welcome to the desert of the real”.
