yesterday I stumble onto this image of poutine and all of a sudden I get this punctum thrown at me from the upper right-and-left corners of the image, the text, the indentations on the plastic container, and all of a sudden all I can think about is a lust for displacement, rearrangement, not-being here.
I used to think about this quote a lot, senior year of high school:
Ibn Ata: Where is that, master?
Hallaj: Anywhere. You will know your action. You are present there, not thinking of somewhere else you ought to be.
and it is taking place now, I am here, here. but sometimes there are these other vectors that pull me away, and now all I can think about and all that envelops me is the sensation of foreign money, of a rearrangement of visual senses, not knowing where I am, uncertainty, and the corresponding reach-into-the-self action that happens as a result of pursuing this uncertainty from within. arms plunging in, dragging out an interiority, turning the self inside out.
if the train is a good example of technology that's widely understood as transformative, changing population densities, cities, discoveries, perceptions of expanses, shrinking distances, and so on -- it's also appropriately a linear form of progress, going along tracks, from before to after. and I think (and this is me whistling, having stoppen at a red light on my bicycle with a vaguely ovaloid sweat patch on my back between my backpack and my shirt) that if the train track is a linear vector than it's only appropriately orthogonal to the horizontal line of a frontier -- and more specifically, these two things are the condition of their creation. the frontier only comes about through a directionality that is, for the most part, linear and chartable. the directionality of the train track (and therefore of progress) comes from its direct opposition to the boundary that defines the other. a sort of metanarrative of progress, perhaps. it's interesting to think of American westerns and the presence of the itinerant cowboy with his intelligent steed and the gleaming dark train, and how they are such opposites of each other, both in terms of social roles and metaphors that they conjure up, yes, but more interestingly in terms of a morphological pattern that reflects (and induces) said ideological differences between the two.
grace. grace. grace, grace, grace.