Driving

Driving is a fabulous form of oblivion. All is revealed, all is annihilated. There's the primeval shock of the deserts and the glare, then the lesser radiance of the voyage begins. That of the harsh distance and nameless faces. Of some astonishing geological structures which ultimately confirm no human will, while retaining an aura of upheaval. This ritual of travel admits no exceptions. When it runs up against a familiar face, a known landscape, some readable idea, the charm vanishes. The amnesic, austere, asymptotic allure of evaporation gives way to effect and semiology.
   
This kind of travel fashions its own strange events and innervation, so it also has its own unique form of fatigue. Like fibrillation of muscles, striated by the surfeit of heat and haste, by the excess of things seen or heard, of places passed through and forgotten.  The defibrillation of the body laden with bare clues, handy tokens, the superb radiance of the sky, and somnambulist spaces, is a sluggish process. Details become softer, as culture becomes more esoteric. And this singular shape of culture which America has created, a brief form so close to a vanishing point, seems the best adaption to the life that lies in store for us. The shape that rules the American West is a seismic shape. A fractal, interstitial culture, born of a split with the Old World. A solid, brittle, agile, glib culture. You must obey its own tenets to sense how it works. Seismic, swinging, soft skills.
   
The real issue on this voyage is how far can we go in the killing of value? How far can we go in the non-referential desert shape without snapping, and yet keep alive the cryptic allure of vanishing?