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Date Posted: 21:02:19 06/02/08 Mon
Author: SS
Subject: ***********************TUESDAYJOURNAL#5********************

Noah Eaton
May 30, 2008
Writing 420

The Journey Is Our Destination Upon The Atlas Of Experience


There’s something about the last week of any school term, where I have any sort of emotional attachment to a class and value at least something I receive from it indispensably, that I feel this sort of indolent dreaming wistfulness lather over me, a monsoon of saudade gushing in, that often can come in with such a gossamer-laced torrential force that, even while that saudade is situated in the present and extends into the future, it’s also able to turn you to the nostalgic past as well, and I find myself leafing through old scrapbooks and shoeboxes, to try and make some sense of those haunting echoes from my own Elysium that keep repelling in my ears.
Suddenly, I was reminded about what I had learned a previous semester during a creative writing class, about how we always leave behind little pieces of ourselves wherever we roam, and yet every footstep we make a piece of a new experience is added to the walking collages we truly are. It was in that class we looked at some excerpts of The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon, who Dan Eldon was a photographic stringer for the Reuters news agency in Africa, raised in Kenya, who tragically was murdered by an enraged mob while on assignment in Somalia at just twenty-two years of age and, to pay a most heart aching tribute to her son, his mother Kathy Eldon, also a freelance journalist, collected pages from the seventeen scrapbooks he had completed between the time he began his work at fourteen years of age to his death, and from it prefaced a scrapbook-esque publication which contained a hodge-podge of diverse material from journal excerpts, sketches, photographs, knick-knacks and other things he compiled, with his own signature blend of pastiche.
It is beyond relief to hear that this publication has become a best-seller, and that the world could witness the artistic depth and eloquence Eldon possessed. What I was especially drawn to in that class was how Eldon’s publication was presented like a visual journal of sorts, providing a window into a world a vast majority of us are unfamiliar with, where linearity is juxtaposed from time, where you’re guaranteed to see something new each time you sojourn back toward the collection, where someone who lived a shorter life than any of us in the class have lived nonetheless is able to prove how his own age and the exceptionally rare insight he offers is about as eternal as one can sense in any text.
That got me to thinking that I should consider putting my first visual journal together, now. So, on Friday afternoon and Saturday afternoon prior to running the Starlight Run to launch the Portland Rose Festival in earnest, I leafed through several related texts, including “Found! The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World” by Davy Rothbart, “The Atlas of Experience” by Jean Klare and Louise van Swaaij and, my favorite, “Urgent 2nd Class” by Nick Bantock, all of which are texts that encourage the amalgamation of linguistic lisp with spatial and visual interplay

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