Found in the Boondocks

All places exist somewhere…

between the inside and outside views of them

symbiotically related to a sense of displacement

a kind of intellectual property, a place for non-

belongers to belong, their own corny backwater flowing

from tributaries currently stagnating in the boondocks.

Memory, delimited, is part first-person, part collective

stratified, each view a palimpsest of serial sensitivity

to place, a topographical intimacy, emerging from half-

forgotten sources in the puckerbrush, invisible to visitors,

cartographers and New Deal government policy.

Imagine further back, scanning down city dwellers to

woodsmen, the terrain of childhood (in temporary exile)

to penetrate lives, memories, sift them through a local

filter and bring new material. Avenida Vieja

the adobe ruin next door might have been a stage stop.

Transients bring fresh eyes to the place they landed,

kinetically becoming part of the landscape of handed-

down history, offering four layers of meaning, much of it

intimate. Foreignness (a variation on the Exotic Other)

holds unexpected familiarity, borrows from rooted imagery

in photographs, recollections and oral tradition, content

routinely favoured over form. A sense of place, the dirt

with tall grasses growing up between the ruts of everyday

life; specifics redefined as ‘universal’, a state of mind

rather than a place on a map (often unrecorded).

Image, my own taken at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Drap i cordill (Rag and String) Antoni Tapies