In my short time in the United States, I have moved along the routes of nineteenth-century photographers, charting the country’s westward expansion through the continent.
I drove through the High Plains roads following the trajectory of a bullet. I saw a land that would not be mapped into a disenchanted rational universe, into a space with no wonder and mystery.
In the Southwest, below the asphalt of parking lots, I saw mounds and traces of prior lives, meaningful and rich.
Lost rivers and pines of the Edwards Plateau offered me hints of earlier and other creation, and creeks mured under San Francisco concrete showed me the hidden paths of the bay.
I saw the world of happenings, not of things. I saw landscapes and people whose loss laid outside the language we shared. A language that crawled under my mother tongue and pushed it out of its nest like a cuckoo chick pushes its rival.
I learned that if I listen and look as if in the presence of a cautious rare bird, I will hear not just the palpitations of the past, but murmurs of things to come.
I caught a glimpse of the new West. Unbound from the railroad tracks, it occupies floors in downtown skyscrapers, funds robotics research in public universities, and carries warfare wherever the course of empire takes its way.
Listen to it go ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.