AN ALGAE COVERED POND AMID FIELDS AND A STAND OF TREES OVERTAKEN BY KUDZU IN MISSISSIPPI.
| It’s a cool day in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I am taking the day to rest and reflect. As of yesterday, I’ve been traveling across the country for a full month. As you’re probably aware, I’m attempting to make a documentary loosely about water and the built environment; how we live with water. I’ve been putting my trust in spontaneity; my “research” has been guided by what I stumble into as I travel. And In many ways I’ve been rewarded for this non-method; strange and beautiful conversations with people I’ve met by luck, arriving to landscapes, events, neighborhoods, always at what feels like just the right time, beauty and wonder each day, everything like kismet. To dislodge oneself from the internet in some ways aids magical thinking and the feeling of always being in the right place at the right time (vs. my default mode of obsessive research) and I’ve been luxuriating in this feeling, embracing unfiltered reality.
I think perhaps its because I’ve just got out of academia, where most of my research was of the “remote sensing” variety—learning through other people’s writing, through observations on the internet (Google Earth vs. actual site visit), absent from the physical world— that I am particularly motivated to sacrifice these ways of knowing in favor of unguided wandering. A dérive across America, a materialist method (of the marxist variety) of research to the extremes, one might try to justify. But I haven’t been justifying. In fact I’ve been trying to avoid any explanation of my work. I’ve been absolutely allergic to any sort of plan, method, any hypothesis. God forbid an Artist Statement. Perhaps to my detriment. When someone asks me what my documentary is about I tense up, admit my absolute lack of direction with an embarrassed shrug. The good thing about water is that its such a broad topic and so approachable that usually people are excited to share their perspective and offer encouragement (with the sole exception of a painter, an MFA student, who really gave it to me at one of my favorite dive bars in New Orleans in the wee hours of the morning for not having any real perspective, a “lazy” and “extractive” approach to making work).
She has a point re: extraction, especially. All art and knowledge production requires some sort of extraction, though we might loathe to acknowledge this fact. Which is the very reason I’ve been so hesitant to claim any specific ground (or in this instance, waters). I want to be like an earnest and unknowing child, observing without prior judgements, open to new stories and paths of experience which might take form along the way, taking nothing with me but my own learnings and lots of footage to cut into some coherent narrative later on.
Of course, even my existence in any of the places I’ve been traveling and observing has been reliant on significant extraction of a different type: destruction in the form of tanks of gasoline…another topic entirely but I’ve been imagining this as my last Great American road trip, each one of these tanks of gas hopefully in the the twilight of my reliance on automobiles. What would be reasonable? 100 more tanks in my lifetime? 1000? I’ve been loosely planning to live in LA for a while as the end point of my cross-country trip, which might complicate this goal, it being the apotheosis, in megalopolis form, of U.S. car culture (yes?)
Narrative, then, has been a primary question haunting me as I drive. The narrative of this project. The narrative of my life. My “career.” Legibility. Sense of place, of time. I try to write songs. I try to write nonfiction prose. I try to make photos, sketch. A documentary film. I look back on my design work from the past three years with a removed and apathetic gaze. Maybe it is okay to go through life without a hypothesis if you have a method. (i.e. a songwriter doesn’t necessarily need to have a uniting theme to their songs, say). Or its okay to switch mediums if you have a hypothesis (an artist interested in a specific topic might make photos, paintings, essays, diverse mediums as tools to approach a singular goal). I’ve never stayed long enough with either subject OR medium for either to grow into a discipline. (a telling word, discipline).
It feels telling, too, that for the first time in my life that I’ve had real funding to support my work I find myself wandering aimlessly without a clear goal or outcome and unable to articulate the project, if there even is one. |
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| A COTTON FIELD AND IRRIGATION DITCH ALONG THE ROAD OUTSIDE CLARKSDALE, MS. EACH FIELD FELT SO CHARGED WITH SOMBER HISTORY AND MEANING, A MILLION BRIGHT POINTS LIKE A HORACE PIPPIN PAINTING. |
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Don Quixote, what many herald as the first modern novel, is a story about a man who goes mad by reading stories. A man with an average, novelistically illegible life chooses to live under a self-delusion to bring to his life a sense of purpose, a projection of an invented reality onto the world around him, often in direct confrontation with the “real.” Doesn’t any narrative, any story, require this same form of magical thinking? Rather than having ““swept the world's admiration for the mediaeval chivalry-silliness out of existence” as Mark Twain (another self-dubbed name, another fiction more real than the reality of Samuel Clemens) put it, I see Cervantes as having hit on a much deeper, existential problem, a problem both central to literature and extending beyond it to all of cultural meaning. I read Don Quixote as a brilliant critique of the human condition, a nihilism with a chuckle at self-invented meaning as both futile and our only hope in a fractured, morally subjective world.
I can’t decide if it is tragic or hopeful. What does it mean that on his deathbed, Don Quixote renounces his false name, even his lady love, the unseen Dulcinea del Toboso, again becoming Alonso Quixano, the simple hidalgo who kept a library of chivalric romances and dying alone as his “true” self? Don’t we all wish, like his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, that our protagonist might meet his Maker as the great “Don Quixote”, even if he no longer believes, or maybe never truly did, in the fictional world he created?
I used to think our obsession with “titles” had some thanks to the career-mindedness and increased specialization under industrial capitalism, and of a post-cinematic world. Scientist, Artist, Entrepreneur. Actor, Conservationist, Writer. Petroleum Engineer. Gluten Free Specialty Bakery. Chief Executive Officer. Post-Hardcore Sludge Metal. Multidisciplinary Designer. Content Creator. But here we have a story from the early 1600s. By reinventing himself as the protagonist of his own life, isn’t Don Quixote doing what all of us do constantly? We are absolutely saturated by stories– cinema, photos, branding, biographies, resumes, social media; now it feels that to build some sort of artistic (or otherwise) legibility, you must choose your narrative wisely. If Don Quixote chooses to be a knight errant, what am I choosing to become?
And does it matter if he knew he was pretending or not? I think of other great spinners of self-myth, populist leaders; Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, etc etc. Perhaps dramatic examples, but demagogues point to the insincerity of self-image, identity, of stories. This is the thing I have been resisting, I think. To declare any “title” feels at best like a collapsing of my self into a narrow and flattening simulacra, and at worse an ego-driven self-serving tool which might erode the few core beliefs and symbols I still maintain as my “truth” or “true self” through a gross simplification which consumes the complexity of reality. A house of mirrors. But by resisting a legible (both internally and externally) self identity is a dangerous game— in attempts to avoid being typecast by the world I might loose any hope at the very authenticity I’m chasing. Instead of simply writing about my trip, my work, I am now writing about writing about my work: always I am removed. These are not “fieldnotes” as I had planned ( a nice paragraph about the Gila Wilderness here, a diagram of a slot canyon there, say) but further tantrums of a lost soul, further neurotic, inherently self-indulgent and pathetic ramblings. |
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| A CONVERSATION AMONG STRANGERS ABOUT A HORSE IN DOWNTOWN CHATTANOOGA. |
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