Midwestern Traveler: wherever you go, there you are

This week watch for an announcement regarding the  publication of Emanations: 2 + 2 = 5.  In the meantime, Philip Murray-Lawson has posted an interview with American travel writer Christina Ammon.  As I also have Midwestern origins, I find that her description of breaking from the Midwest strikes a sympathetic chord.  Perhaps there is something about leaving the Midwest that is itself Midwestern, unique among the experiences of all those the world over who choose to leave their homes.  Perhaps the effect of the landscape is such that you can never really escape. Wherever you go, you take it with you. The flatness, the distant clouds, the sense that there is no where else to go--it stays with you.  Indeed, leaving the Midwest is psychologically impossible. Compare a figure in a Salvador Dali painting walking off that boundless plane.  Beyond the horizon there is nothing but another empty horizon, filled by different poetic metaphors, perhaps, but that broad horizon remains the defining characteristic of the place, and of the experience.  Our first fictitious Midwestern sister, Dorothy, is only half right when she says, "There is no place like home."  Oz is really just a figment of localized atoms swirling through an immense vacuum, and the truth of the matter is a Midwesterner is home everywhere.

Please click HERE to read the interview.

Dali, The Apothecary of Ampurden in Search of Absolutely Nothing, 1936