A Republic of Desire

The locus of the end points of projected desires and imagined journeys from my home(s), 1978-2009.

All projections

A rainbow of imagined thrusts into the world. Not places I'd BEEN, places I LONGED to reach, journeys I envisioned. Romantic with a capital 'R' journeys, quests and above all ESCAPES. Connect the end points of each of these and you have the borders of my imagination

at six years

the extent of my ideas was minimally detailed—a desire to see the places in stories I'd heard, an inexplicable curiosity about Russia and the USSR. Also the Ripley's believe it or not museum in SF, Timbuktu, and Burma.

at around 13

The next several years saw many additions to my list of places, goals real or imagined, and inspiration from stories. More tales of my mother's family in Burma, stories from Australia, images of creatures in Tasmania in our Time Life book of Mammals, the story of the discovery of the coelacanth off Africa and Madagascar, Lake Victoria and the 'cradle of life', the songs of Evita, family trips to Minnesota and Canada, Baja california, Moscow, utmost Norway, the North Pole of JRR Tolkien's Father Christmas Letters, and more. These are places I visited, or dreamed about, or saw myself visiting. Places that drew me toward them, however impossible.

at around 20

I became much less ambitious for a time, or rather, Romantic. Enamored of the poetic visions of this nation and its interpreters. A longing to track the landscapes and adventures of our poets here, a kind of belief in the ideals of Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley." But also remote things, distant things: the farthest reaches of the Canadian wilderness; walkabout in the bush; Siberia and between here and there, the nuclear and industrial wastes of old Soviet land; the soft sounds of the sea upon the thousand tiny shores of Homer's Greek islands.

up to and around twenty five or so

the romance extended: a vision of *walking tours* of great long adventures exploring in depth. Down the coasts of the americas. Along the paths of Cormac McCarthy novels. A great and vast journey over sea and land. The path of my mother's family in Burma—they called it Shwe Pyi Daw, The Golden Land (a kind of parallax of the Golden Country of Orwell, breathed into life in the place where so many of his dreams foundered, despite it all). A brief interest in Japan, the salt smell of the coast, the sound of rain among the leaves, or upon the still roofs of tiny retreats, tea houses amid the hill country. The Yucatan, Oaxaca—the flavors of fire, the great stirrings of the Zapotec and Aztec kingdoms. The diversions of artists and poets in Europe: urban Paris, the riverlands of France, the rich largesse of Piedmont. The vision of Wim Wenders, his own reframing of 20th Century American Romanticism and my appropriation thereof. Visions telescoped with others' visions.

thirty

Very *focused* desires, with a minimum of extraneous distractions: a consuming need to return to Minnesota, around which all others revolved. With only two other travels even dreamed of: visits to NYC, and the continued dream of the trip to the homeland of the language, the fraught and historic streets of London, the greenways and hedgerows of the country, the visions of Tolkien, Orwell, Dickens, the rollicking fun of Stephenson. . .

at present

A distinct SF0 focus, with some recurrent themes as well. The addition of China and South Asia. The return to Russia and travels through the homeland of Norden, a craving for Lake Superior's North Shore. Between these poles perhaps a kind of "smoked fish romanticism"?

overlay with tracing

If you lay the many paths atop an actual world map you see thirty years of life in the mind and it's relatively easy to trace the limits of each of those imaginary journeys. A psychogeographic exercise stretching over decades. Pushing again and again toward a world which does not exist. A striving for a geography which is only in the head, in the secret whispers of the heart at bedtime, in the private hollows of the home.