Eagle’s Landing Motel, Missouri I think.
Landing back home after my usual tax-time road-trip to Oklahoma, it dawned on me that I am always happiest when moving. I think that’s why I don’t really care much for air travel—it doesn’t take long enough. I want to experience the movement across land. After three years of traveling the main highway, I don’t take many pictures. But like a strange mosaic, the sites that compel repeatedly are telling. Eagle’s Landing Motel is next to the Dinner Bell Restaurant. Same place, different year.
There’s always the urge to document things, to hang on. But the thought is a little different this year—I was listening to a BBC Front Row podcast (I always save them up until the news is old) with an interview with Brian Eno about 77 Million Paintings. Eno claimed, rightfully, that the amount of time that it has been possible to record things (visually, aurally) represents an infinitesimal sliver of historical time. In the rush to record, we loose something valuable in our experience of the world—or at least this has been the claim about the “tourist” experience volleyed back and forth since the sixties. We’re meant to just let the experience flow past us, to let it go. Documenting is like collecting, and I don’t really see a problem in that. Collecting creates, for me at least, a deeper experience than letting go.
Of course, embracing flux is an important counterpoint—“I’m not going to be around forever. Why should I care if my stuff is?” No matter how personally fascinating, collections (of images or things) seldom generate mass interest or appeal. But if we save nothing, we lose everything. Although I love to move, I also love to collect.
