The Eastern Lands

Taken from above the San Fransisco Bay on the morning of September 17, 2007, as I took leave of the third marriage, the first of several steps that have led me across the Atlantic to The Netherlands. It would be too maudlin to post an image of the grief that was part of the trip...and this picture seems to capture better the symbolism of the event. Ingrid had moved West - an action apropos to an American Studies/Pop Culture scholar - a few months earlier. The scale of the airplane's engine suggests a relentless energy pulling the plane into the opposite direction, the boat below anchored to the waters of the Pacific, the flight and altitude themselves giving the feeling of lightness, release and possibility. Our wedding bands lay in the shallows off n Alameda beach.

Five decades in a land I have a love-hate relationship with have ended; beyond indoctrination years I never bought the Manifest Destiny mythology used to justify Western expansion and now at a time when we've run out of Western Lands into which to expand, William Burrough's rendering of it as the place of the dead seems a more appropriate metaphor.* The Netherlands has plenty of blood on its hands from its own Age of Empire, but seems to have progressed at least a little toward a more just and humane society; hopefully the PVV and Geert Wilders are a temporary aberration.

In architecture you're not supposed to render your design with too many growy things, since the building should be able to stand on its own. Modern art is criticized for too often requiring an accompaniment of a written description to decipher the artist's intent - but we all find ourselves reading these explanations when we visit a gallery or museum, and often the work goes off in our head like a bomb when something is revealed about the process or intent. Same here: this is just one of countless airplane photos out there, but it's the act of turning this particular one into a story that makes it gain emotional resonance. And that's the idea behind this photoblog: post images that stand on their own as visually interesting, then expand on how it was taken, what I was thinking of when it was taken, it's meaning or its connection to other times, places and ideas.

*This Wikipedia entry appropriately includes a thrown-into-the water reference: "Scenes that are unmistakably auto-biographical include vignettes where Burroughs takes out evidence of amphetamine prescription bottles his mother gave him to sink with a large stone at the bottom of Lake Worth, Florida. The bottles were evidence his mother found in her grandson’s, Burroughs own son, bedroom. While Burroughs is ankle deep in the water, his aged mother is stalling police investigators in her home."