Welcome
“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta
So probably ole Ibn never really said that, in any language, but I suppose the thing with manufactured quotes is that attribution lends gravitas to an orphaned idea that nonetheless has impact. In the case of this Yet-Another-Travel-Blog, the speechless/storyteller idea should, I hope, hold true.
Years ago, before I could really appreciate the essence of the words, I wrote the lyric, “we bear the traces of places we’ve been,” over a weak melody and the song has long since disintegrated into notes and syllables. However, after finding a new muse in travel started later in life, that idea comes back to me in new ways.
There’s this urge to blog — centrally, I’m a writer by both vocation and avocation — however, I’m not a Fodor-style diarist. I seem to hunt for ephemera, the secrets of new places that hang in the air, osmotic parcels that speak truth in metaphor and resist literal representation.
So this idea foments to share my experiences in a non-linear and impressionistic way. I won’t be the sort of traveler you’ll find on packaged tours or ritualistically scouring for the best restaurants. I stumble and look over there. I raise camera to eye for unknown (even to me) reasons and I feel something indescribable when, legs aching, I edit through the day’s photos. The sights and smells return, as does the feeling of these places, changing on a street-by-street basis.
As photographer/writer/musician, all of this fills my grey matter and recombines into imperfect output, words and melodies and images that are perhaps further from the elements of absorption than I’d ever expect, but still tied, in the synaptic circuits that perhaps only I possess.
Yet, both life and travel offer up kindred spirits, and a single connection has value far beyond the cost of a motel room, so I offer up little things here in hopes that someone, somewhere thinks, “I know what he means.” Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. It doesn’t matter. That’s the way of art, I suppose. To speak without speaking and to find commonality without contact.
Plus, I find this stuff fun. That’s enough for now.
Key West, 11/28/2018
Itinerant Impressions 