I
Distance has its way with us. It sneaks up on us in the gap, the lag,
between physical space and virtual space. Our friends and family
scatter without concern, and we stay in touch as casually as if we
were still neighbors. Able to be “close” despite distance, we invest
ourselves more and more in people and places that remain finally,
irreducibly, not here. We are left with spirits at once discontinuous
and naïve: they span oceans and splay out across landmasses yet are
surprised and anxious to find that they lack a localized coherence.
And so in canvassing our country we will remind ourselves of the
reality – the difficulty – of distance; we will shift the balance of
our attention a little more to the physical from the virtual, so as
to appreciate our distant close-nesses for the miracles that they
are. And as we pay our respect to distance, so will we demand
respect in return. Prolonging and ingesting the miles that separate
us from others, we will put Distance on notice: You may bind us to
where-we-are, to not-where-they-are, but do not forget that we have
the power to pierce you, to inhabit you. We may have our way with
you too.
II
Our country is in fragments. We are a nation of choirs performing to
mirrors, driven
apart and sealed off from one another by the inductive force of
marketplaces (of ideas, goods, taste, etc.) that thrive on popular
partisanship, brand loyalty, and fetish. We want to break out of our
cocoon. We will be a channel of
communication that casts itself outward, in a looping swath, so as
to insist upon a whole, instead of training itself inwards, in
ever-tightening focus, so as to further define and isolate a part. Directed
toward the public, directed toward the City, directed toward an
audience that is un-specified, un-expected, un-honed-in-on. In
search of a commons.
III
My mother had a game in a little white box on a shelf over her desk:
Capitol Flip. Inside, fifty stamp-sized flash cards and the seeds of
an eccentricity. Tallahassee, Helena, Annapolis, Phoenix – like a
mantra or spell, the words were nonsense at its most evocative. They
seemed primary, architects of the geography that would embody them:
How does ‘Montpelier’ express itself in urban terms? ‘Cheyenne’?
With its shapes and sounds, each name conjured hazy images of a
far-off, otherworldly cityscape.
IV
In honor of the public: A celebration, a revival, a memorial. Free
performances. Outdoors, at sites open to everyone, on ground
dedicated to the public trust, among monuments to regional identity
and mythology.
V
To do something new to the land, something that was not prescribed:
To move without moving through a turnstile. To share a secret with
our surroundings; to have a relationship with this crowded country
that is private.
VI
How can you call a place home if you are a stranger to its names?
Especially today, in a media age, when names have newfound power,
when until you have been to Alabama it will remain an immaculate
myth, subjecting you to its celebrity, estranging you from the union
to
which it – undeniably - belongs. But it is our union; this is not a
matter of choice or opinion; we have been born into it and bear its
name. We will not be estranged from it; we will not be homeless; we
will take ownership. We will be acquainted with all of it so as to
be able to act in its name, as opposed to it acting in ours. We
will forge an alloy of its presence and our experience, gathering
referents for its terminology, collecting its names, taking them
unto ourselves. Becoming of it, not from it. Becoming Americans.
VII
We will carry Utah dust into Massachusetts, Arizona slang into Idaho,
Washington soap into Alaska, Kansan anecdotes into Mississippi. In
the movement of our bodies, our vehicles, our accessories, our words,
we will be a vector of cross-pollination, of exchange, of democracy.
VIII
You can always get what you want. These days, pretty much, what with
Target, Ikea, TiVo, Ipod, headphones, satellite TV, the internet, and
the like, each dutifully at the service of your every personal whim.
Which is a marvel, and to be appreciated. But you lose something if
you let yourself go too far into the egocast: adaptability, tolerance,
empathy - a richness that derives from traffic with the unknown. So
for a summer we will enter settings that are not prepared for
us. Adapting to them, instead of asking them to adapt to us. Performing
in the midst of, and exposed to, the cities we visit. Engaging with
and playing off of sites that are already realized and meaningful,
that have their own mission independent of us and independent of
entertainment. Seeing what might happen.
IX
Because they’re there, because it can be done, because fifty is a
beautiful, elegant, perfect number, because who doesn’t love a road
trip. Because madness will out, and what a wonderful method. Because
human spaces long to be deterritorialized, paroled for a time from
the sober roles to which they have been assigned. Because people do
too. All Fifty States. All Fifty.
X
In the twentieth century God was dead and everything was permitted.
Freedom was radical, existence preceded essence, and mechanical
reproduction made the styles and modes of previous eras readily
available for sampling, collage, and juxtaposition. Just do it: the
choice and responsibility were yours to become anything
you wanted to be. But in the twenty-first, history is making a
comeback. Your slate is not blank. All men are not created equal and
abstract. You are of the world: you have contingencies, roots. And
your freedom and your challenge is to create and navigate your
relationship to these unchosen roots. We then will carry out a journey
whose course is determined on the basis of history, not style. Carson
City and Harrisburg, not Vegas and Philly. To remind ourselves that
the past was real, that the past is not an aesthetic choice. And had
it
happened differently, we would not be here now: We owe it gratitude.
In recognition of something more substantial,
and perhaps more meaningful, than personal taste.
XI
It was a vicious and degrading election year. Mobilized by
this side, demonized by that, we were dehumanized by both.
Trickle-down histrionics set in, and public discourse
was overrun
with proxy concepts, talking points, and a ruthless us-versus-them
mentality. Each of us has been infected. We
need to shore ourselves up against the damage; we need to experience
people and places firsthand, immediately, so as to reground the
blocks with which we build our ideas and opinions. In the
aftermath, we must purge ourselves of propaganda.
XII
To perform an act. A synthesis, an integration. A phenomenon not
merely political, nor merely artistic, nor merely whimsical, but
rather a multivalent and robust hybrid. Produced through an extended
process of variations on a theme, spanning considerable space and
time, and subject to unpredictability and evolution: sedimentary.
That couldn’t have been composed, modeled, sketched: couldn’t have
been created in private, at a remove from, and critical of, the world.
That, in order to be, had to be done.
XIII
It is our country. It belongs to each of us, not to the regimental,
super-human force manifest in the pollster, the demographatician, the
imageman, and other distorters of the national landscape, who funnel
our attention and sense of significance along narrow channels that
link selected hubs and leave all else out to parch and wither. We
will take it back. We will chart a different course, survey with a
different metric. Subscribing to a mythology of earthy roots, not of
shimmering surface. Fighting for the freedom to explore space on the
terms of the childhood words that captivated us not because we knew
what we would find when we got there but rather because we didn’t.
Reopening the frontier, seeing it as no longer a matter of breadth
and expanse (that which lies beyond a horizon),
but rather a matter of
depth and flow (that which lies beyond a constriction).
We will be weavers, aboard our shuttle, trailing a thread of resonant
restagings. Sewing together a land we can believe in.
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