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Date Posted: 22:19:55 06/02/08 Mon
Author: SS
Subject: Re: ***********************TUESDAYJOURNAL#5********************
In reply to: SS 's message, "***********************TUESDAYJOURNAL#5********************" on 21:02:19 06/02/08 Mon

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.
The former is all molded together from random items the author and his Found magazine readers have found over the years, which range from a note found in a recycling bin at Kinko’s warning residents to lock a door in order to “prevent unauthorized people from entering the building and defecating in the washing machine”, to one found plastered on a windshield that read: “Lost Cobra Color: brown, black, yellow, red (on teeth), blue (color of tongue) Snake has been known to bite off heads. Snake is not house trained. Answers to "Psycho". Length: 7' Weight: 45 lbs Warning, snake is deadly. Will bite if provoked. Psycho has a strong Scottish accent.” The latter two play on both the conventions of cartography and ephemera preservation, but twist them to allowing the imagination to run wild and set yourself off on your own map-making and visual poetry, where in “Urgent 2nd Class” especially Bantock demonstrates how you can take something as mundane as an in-voice and transform its original intended use into any number of artistic forms through drawing, dying, juxtaposition, narrative techniques and other forms.
It got me to empathizing again with the coterie of women writers that make Janet Sternburg’s “The Writer On Her Work” an intelligent and heartfelt collection, and particularly reminded of Susan Griffin’s essay “Thoughts on Writing: A Diary”, where, because she confronts two other voices in her, namely the “voice of despair” (108) and “the calm writer of poetry” (108), and she explains how she resolved this dilemma by saying that she “needed two voices posing conflicted versions of reality.” (108), going on to say through explaining how she wrote Woman and Nature that she wanted “to draw a portrait of this creature of despair who inhabits me, capture her, name her. Write a phenomenology for her.” (112) which is the voice of patriarchy, of science, of order, of labor, a “judge without vision” (114) as she accurately claims………….someone like Susan Griffin, who harbors this sensitivity toward sociology and our relationship to language would benefit immeasurably by juxtaposing these two voices in the form of a visual poetry collection, or even an ethereally-composed scrapbook which draws portraits of both these voices, gives them names, writes phenomenologies of them both, allows them to make their cases, where the “voice of protection and order” (116) and “another voice---accused of laziness and childishness and too many emotions---who wants to speak, who is overflowing with language, and whose words, in some unpredictable ways, always afterward, after they have been spoken, seems necessary to reason.” (116) duel it out in a Xiaolin Showdown of wits and ingenuities (think we both know who the mordacious one is, ;) )
This, I believe, would only encourage her to keep working to find meaning at a more extrasensory level, to have her trusting her own heart ever more strongly and bring to the surface, like that proverbial grain of a polished wood, a patterned sense to words she loves for no true reason. Anyone who gathers meaning through experience would benefit through the perspicacity of Dan Eldon, or the perception of Davy Rothbart, or the vision of Jean Klare, or the ingenuity of Nick Bantock.
There’s probably a million pieces of me in my bedroom alone, either laying about or stored away, in the form of birthday cards, stickers, buttons, business cards, concert ticket stubs, negative photograph reels, rabbit foots (okay, I know this is beginning to feel a bit too Tim O’Brien-esque, LOL!) and other ephemera which I feel often try to speak to me and say there is meaning that is yearning to be gathered from them like honey from a hive. What it is, I cannot say yet, but, as Susan Griffin mentioned, intuition is a mode of listening to the universe, and it was intuition which rescued her from the zeitgeist of patriarchy. There, the faith is instilled in me, as I make a worthwhile pacing upon my atlas of experience.

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