The Luxury of Time

I had a chance to drive from Santa Fe to Nederland, Colorado, over the weekend, making the trip up and back in two days.

(An aside: I remember what Deleuze said about the American journey vs. the French -- it's an interesting take on something (today) we wouldn't necessarily assume. The American journey is the journey into the smooth, an escape from striation.)

In preparation for the seven hour journey, I uploaded some podcasts into my ipod. Though I usually listen to music, this trip I found that for such long treks listening to conversations and lectures open up a different sort of intellectual stimulation that were more metaphysically enlightening. I had previously found some In Our Time podcasts and downloaded a couple. Now, I can't seem to download individual podcasts or archived ones. Strange.

An interesting thing about aural media in combination with driving is that there is an intermixing of disembodied philosophical speculation and the movement of one's body in space. The landscape coming down from the mountains of Colorado into New Mexico presents a vast scene that is simultaneously endless and yet free of a daunting blandness; trees and vistas poke out of the fluid, lapping waves of the ground. Such a beautiful expanse paired with the spark of philosophical banter made me realize the luxury of the moment. These moments are few due to the constant distractive jarring of our normal lives in the milieu.

It is quite an interesting place to be -- contextualized in nature around oneself yet encapsulated in a vehicle that moves quickly along the ground. A sort of hovering in the Umwelt. Though surrounded by very technology that facilitates this experience, one feels in tune with the phenomenological thread at the edge of consciousness, and perhaps reveals that plane in which the two merge and emerge into one another.

As we align ourselves into the openness, we streamline the intellectual rhizome as is bursts forth from our bodies in space: like releasing a ghosted line of fog as we go along, we insist on the creation of form through the mesh of spirit.