Ideas come in queer and roundabout ways, their provenance obscure or tangled in contradictions. Who knows where this one began? Perhaps with some people who came here, and some who left, and some who wouldn’t come here for a million dollars in the currency of their choice, and some who have been here “all along.” Perhaps with some who brought with them strange and dark ideas and some who brought ideas of quirky brilliance. Perhaps in scattered paranoid fears and lost visions. Maybe from the Texas panhandle and la Vendée in France, from P.E.I. and London, from the Midwest and the Valley, meaning not our Valley but the home of the golden girls of east L.A. Maybe from Africa — ex Africa semper aliquid novi, after all. From Khartoum at the junction of the two Niles, via Dublin and St John’s. From ties of love and blood, from nostalgia for what once was, from a spirit that can now only be seen in the interstices, in the businesses closed and shuttered or turned over to the tourist trade. From all of these, perhaps.
On the other hand hey, it’s a pretty simple idea. Obvious, even. You’ve probably had it yourself.
Maybe it began with a wisp of a girl in pigtails and a long flowing dress, barefoot in a field, cutting with her scythe in a kind of queer Zen serenity. Full article.
Photo: Ted Pritchard.