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NARRATIVES ON NARRATIVE FORM:
TRAVEL RESEARCH & DON QUIXOTE 
10-14-2023
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.


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.

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.


A CONVERSATION AMONG STRANGERS ABOUT A HORSE IN DOWNTOWN CHATTANOOGA.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the narrative structure of a quest. In short, it is the pursuit, across space and time, of an object. Its quite the popular, perhaps the eternal, narrative device. We love the simplicity maybe, the panacea, the silver bullet. Related to the quest: I’ve often felt similar feelings to those outlined by Agnes Callard in the recent New Yorker piece, “The case against travel.” Travel, in the fully commodified experience it so often has become, is repulsive, at its worst, and horrifically boring at its best. I, and many of my ilk, might try to avoid these “consumer” experiences abroad in favor of some “authentic” reality. Even this instinct, though we might trace to concepts of the “exotic” and the colonial origins of tourism from within the British Empire. And, then, even people who drive the horrid homogenization of the world through their obsession with “comfort” or “security” still desire a “safe” version of “authenticity.” (Perhaps you are staying in the more "authentic" Mérida and trying to learn some Spanish phrases and looking down on those tourists walled in the all-inclusive resorts of Cancún. Yet you both arrive, searching for something, to Chichén Itzá).

And so I think maybe the answer is to travel with a purpose. The pursuit of knowledge. To learn ways of conserving water, say, to help us as we approach a fatalistic tipping point in global climate change. Or some other fabricated narrative.



A DRAINAGE DITCH BEHIND SOME HOUSES IN JACKSON, MS


A quest, then. But what is my object? And how could any travel research possibly be non-extractive? Missionaries had a purpose. As did the conquistadors. Even my tentative new name for my practice “Field Works” harkens back to the “golden age” of exploration, the bookish adventurer I so idolized as a child: Alexander von Humboldt scribbling notes on some inhospitable and impossibly remote peak in the Andes, fighting the wind for his sheet of parchment, Darwin waking in his cabin on the HMS Beagle, uncharted islands on the horizon rippling into a kaleidoscopic green in the crown glass letting in the pale morning light onto the worn wood floors where hand-scrawled maps and notes lie spread out from a late night of work, Indiana Jones packing his gun and his whip and donning his hat after giving another well-attended lecture to his star-struck students.

So what drives an adventure, without a grave to rob, or new lands to chart? (I hope you read the irony, here.) For some, its found in the collection of other things– aging blues artists for music ethnologists like Alan Lomax in the 1960s, say. Or its the photographs– for the professional photographer and Instagram influencer alike, typically the more rare and difficult to attain the better. What was Thoreau, really, but the first cottage-core influencer? (again, irony, yes. But I also remember an artwork at the National Gallery which put reproductions of Thoreau's cabin and the Unabomber's cabin side by side...Googled quickly, I believe it may have been James Benning's Two Cabins, but not positive). For the academic, it is to do “research." Are any of these ethical imperatives? How much good must come of synthesized knowledge to be worth the costs? How do we make work without becoming the bullshit we've long criticized in the salad days of one's creative practice?


TWO YOUNG MEN STANDING IN A BOAT CLOSE TO SHORE IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER IN VICKSBURG, MS



A RESTROOM AT A TRAILHEAD IN BIG BEND STATE PARK, NEAR THE BORDER BETWEEN TEXAS AND MEXICO

All of us are driven, to varying degrees, by a desire for more, a hunger…it is this blind, embarrassing and undirected ambition fueling me across the limbo of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways in search of MORE: more purpose, more community, a better place to call home. I’m trying to embody the experience, at the very least: To really be, fully, the ethical gray that is a roadtrip across the United States in the time of extreme global precarity, to admit to myself that my own placeless and Sisyphean ego drama is rooted in the same cosmopolitan bourgeoisie artist identity I frequently scorn, to accept that any chance at escape from this identity crisis might not require either a Quixotic leap into the deranged world of ambition-Capitalism (LA is a good place for this, I hear) or further decent into a rejection of prevailing norms (give away my phone, go WOOF at an organic farm in Oregon) which becomes, like Thoreau or Kaczynski, its own form of White man ego-yelp and self-delusion, but instead could, like a seedling, grow from a slow and steady building of community, of empathy, of hope. Perhaps its not this impossible choice of a) join a community of fellow Quixotes in a lifelong playdate of agrarian anarchism, or b) learn to accept and even cherish the violence of our world, drive a big truck, and buy stock options. It is simply to try to be a little better each day. To try to make friends. To share, earnestly, to practice kindness. To try to buy less plastic (but not beat yourself up when you eat an entire pack of Corn Nuts, a bag of Zapp's Voodoo chips, a Heath bar, and a Coke in one 100 mile stretch crossing West Texas).

To be able to hold and inhabit both worlds— the fictions we need to make to participate in our current world (i.e. a legible "career," a sense of self not founded upon self-flagellation, even, dare I say it, a Roth IRA) and the truths which might build a better one (that our daily life relies on unimaginable suffering worldwide and is ushering in the 6th mass extinction on Earth), is maybe all I can do "authentically" at the moment. I drive my car many miles each day and see things of beauty. I don't know have a clear narrative for my life and I know I want to make something beautiful and try to end or abate some small sufferings with my short time left here. I wouldn't wish this writing I've just scrawled on anyone and yet I will send this email anyway. I fear the power of stories and feel a strong urge to capture them.

I might paint Rocinante on the side of my van, even knowing that I'll later regret it.  ◬