the nice thing about jet lag is that it builds solitude into even the most ambitious travel plans. like here on this overnight bus to bilbao with Bis sleeping, albeit fitfully, in the seat next to me, and darkness all around. it's close to 3 and i'm far from sleep. outside the terrain is growing hillier and more ragged, and i'm realizing the minor miscalculation in scheduling all our travels between destinations for times when i won't be able to take in the landscape. in the darkness, what i can mainly see are the texture of the wild grasses, the stretches between the larger bushes and trees, the smoother tracts of the dustier surfaces. they form a cadence in their passage across the bus window. It'll be interesting in the morning to see if it is as arid as this midnight vision suggest and it will hold any of the colors my mind anticipates...
a moment ago, we passed a random hill with 2 upright trees on it which looked almost exactly like an illustration of Don Quixote I once saw. i could be wrong, but i believe that's from an entirely different part of the country. just goes to show how willing a mind can be to find connections, yet it's still got me wondering about how much of what we see as fresh and new in works of art and literature is not so much to the credit of the creator as to their surroundings or the social context of their life - or not even that, so much as the difference (or differential, really) between what is familiar and real to them and what is familiar and real to us who are absorbing their work. not such a mind blowing thought, that...it's funny though, because i think it also highlights how much energy people can spend pursuing a contradictory ambitions of experiencing a different reality from their own (however temporarily) but also perpetually seeking out intersections among ones personal reality and that of others that serve only to reassure them that there is such a thing as commonality and communal experience.
where ever we are now along this route, there's a persistent glow along the horizon. it gives the impression of massive cities aglow, just behind the hills (or mountains, i suppose, though we're in them so i'm not sure of the right term, here), but then the road rises and the countryside is only vaguely dotted with towns or clusters. with the nature of my own thoughts, it's as if the landscape is playing tricks on me, feeding into my own skepticism about human connections. like it's winking at me.
...i'm going to have to read Don Quixote again; i remember too little of it...
That word on my back
Posted by: Ganger | Saturday, 19 January 2008 at 21:15