other|matters

retread| America the Itinerant 24 May 2008

Retreads are quality posts from yesterweeks that are given a second run on Fridays. This is originally a VARANGALI piece from 14 Nov 2006.

drive, he sd

- Robert Creeley, “I Know a Man”

There is a vein that runs deep in the American psyche, one that binds self-knowledge to flight. It is Huck Finn on the Mississippi; Jack Kerouac “driving west into the sun;” James Dean poised on a motorbike, revving our engines as he coolly dangles his cigarette. And it is Bruce Springsteen commenting on its fatalism: “The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive.”

Running, driving, and flying are not particularly American fantasies. Per Garret Keizer,

Speed not only abrogates pleasure; it is a pleasure in itself. As soon as man learned to run he began to imagine his own divinity.

But running (away) as a path to self-discovery is a particularly American notion. While other cultures do have rich traditions of self-discovery through journey, those tend to be based on solitude and spirituality. The American rite of passage is based on simply getting away, and getting away fast. It is retirees exploring America in their RV’s, one Wal-Mart parking lot at a time.

As such, American itinerancy is little more than flight. What Kerouac fashioned as enlightened hedonism – crafting with his naked passengers the blueprints of how to “save the planet and alter human consciousness” – was a suspension of real life, not the search for its meaning.

Flight only sets in relief that which one is fleeing-–-Huck Finn understood society’s hypocrisies much better once free-floating down the Mississippi. But the story of flight is not one of engagement with difficult ideas and decisions, so Huck found himself only further alienated and ultimately fled westward, still in search of that nebulous notion of identity.

As we buckle in, turn the ignition and crank up rock radio, perhaps we should ask ourselves: does self-knowledge lie ahead, or is it receding in the rearview mirror?