Friday, April 24, 2009

Documentation

This is the Tampa incident. Ours was in sunlight and strewn on green grassy embankments.
Yesterday, speeding down Highway 101 with my son, we saw a most striking sight: about a half-a-mile stretch of highway strewn with sheets of white paper. It went on and on, as if someone lost an entire ream of paper. Thickly strewn in places, dwindling away to a few sheets, a lone one and then none.

From within our moving car, we could not tell if the pages were blank or written on. We could not stop to investigate, but my curious mind made up a story anyway.

What if it was someone's novel, freshly finished, tossed or fallen for some reason from their moving car? Unwittingly, or surely someone would have been there, trying to gather those precious pages.

Maybe it was like the incident where all the voter documentation was strewn down the road in Tampa, people's names, addresses and political party affiliation physically broadcast to the world. They never found out who did that, but as in "Alice's Restaurant," it would have been possible to answer that question.

What if it was a diary, full of secrets? Life-changing, dirty little secrets.

What if someone was moving and their filing cabinet came open in the back of the truck, critical documents fluttering out onto the road? Birth certificates and immunization records flying out like trash.

We think, in our culture, that everything important is now digital, but it isn't true. We are still a culture of documentation. If you don't believe me, just try to change your name after a divorce or help your kids get their first driving learner's permit.

At any rate, it was a striking image, one I would have photographed had I not lost my camera. But the good news is I found my camera today, beneath the couch cushion my sick son had been camped out on all week long. And under which I had already looked.

I missed my camera. The world is full of visual rhetoric.

15 comments:

headwrapper said...

I know an artist, who in a fit of depression, left a dozen or so of his best paintings under freeway overpasses between somewhere in Alabama and Atlanta. Then he had a change of heart and turned around and went back to get them. At one location, in order to retrieve one of the paintings, a painting that he had just thrown away, he ended up getting into a fistfight with someone who was there loading it into their car.

Indie said...

Good story, Headwrapper. By the way, I have been meaning to ask you: Have you seen the glyphs in Sweden?
They remind me of your paintings.
Also, there is a book that came out just last month called: "Unlocking the Power of Glyphs": A Breakthrough Manual to the World of Symbols


http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/20/MtnSheepPetroglyph.jpg/300px-MtnSheepPetroglyph.jpg&imgrefurl=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroglyph&usg=__sA_3O2H-Af6Vwz81dYjkNBfSZL0=&h=234&w=300&sz=20&hl=en&start=1&um=1&tbnid=y3vk7lb7GgtiZM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=116&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dglyphs%2Bsweden%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26hs%3DuTl%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1

headwrapper said...

Thanks. I hadn't seen those Swedish glyphs before. One thing you notice right away is how universal the style is: from Australia to America to Europe.

The book looks interesting, I'd like to look at it. I wonder if someday there will be, or maybe already are, "glyphies"... sort of like "trekkies". Glyphie conferences, retreats, etc. where one can meet other glyphies drinking from glyphie coffee mugs, and sporting glyphie wear etc. ;)

Indie said...

One can only hope...

Kym said...

Both your post and Headwrapper's left me feeling like I need to write a story about this...

Indie said...

Go for it, girl! Things you find on the freeway. Things you lose on the freeway. All my hitch hiking stories come to mind...

Anonymous said...

I just hope it wasn't somebody's Masters Thesis!

headwrapper said...

I'd like to hear your hitchiking stories sometime Indie. I once worked for three or four months on several small paintings, 8x10in on illustration board, for an important show. Then when I was hitchiking to the gallery to deliver the finished work, I left the box on some strangers backseat never to see them again.

I also remember hearing a curious thing about found shoes, gloves, etc, --there's a large disproportion as to right and left. I think it's the right that's found a whole lot more often.

Indie said...

"I just hope it wasn't somebody's Masters Thesis!" OK that just made my blood run cold. Now I feel like I should have screeched my car to a halt and had a look at those papers, for the sake of some poor soul!

Headwrapper, you are the second artist I've heard tell a story like that. The other person left his whole portfolio in a San Francisco taxi, never to see it again. I'll bet that thought does to you what the mention of the master's thesis did to me!

How interesting about the Right vs. Left glove. I have to think about it, but I can see why. You take them off in a certain order, it's usually left to you less dominant hand to hold onto them. It doesn't. Hmm.

Anonymous said...

Not the right place to post this, I know, but the event is happening in a few minutes. Maybe it will help to know about it. It's from today's Times-Standard.

EHS to hold first MS walk in county
Eureka High School stu­dents will be holding the first multiple sclerosis walk in Humboldt County today. The fundraiser will start at Eureka High School in the cafeteria, following the Rhododendron Parade.
The doors open at noon, warm-ups will follow, led by professional trainers from Praxis Fitness, and the walk begins at 1 p.m.
To register online as a team or an individual, or make a pledge, go to www.msconnection.org.

Indie said...

Another friend told me about that, Anonymous. And I would sincerely like to participate and to know other people with MS locally (I know none). But I have such strong, negative feelings about EHS since my son's bad experiences there, that I can't bring myself to step foot there. Even for such a worthy cause. But thank you for thinking of me in relation to that.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Indie. I understand.

Kato said...

"What if it was a diary, full of secrets? Life-changing, dirty little secrets"

It's a digitalized version of throwing your diary to the wind, but have you checked out: postsecret.blogspot.com/ ?

Glyph culture reminded me Tolkein, who developed mythological alphabets for authenticity to the different cultures in his stories. It certainly is universal. Could glyphs be the future global language?

Indie said...

Here's how much of a nerd I am: in 10th grade, my friend Chris (who now works for the Pentagon) and I taught ourselves to write in Tengwar, the Elven alphabet in the Silmarillion.

I can still do it, to this day. I

t was my first introduction to the concept of spelling phonetically, which I'm sure is what made linguistics and phonetic transcription come so easy to me.

Just in case anyone doubted that I am a nerd...

Anonymous said...

Hi K, haven't read your blog in a while, you read mine, so you know why... well, I believe it's this adopt-a-highway thing in CA... I bet it's somebody wanting to get back at somebody else! Something like: here, clean this now!!! *lol* R.