Thursday, June 18, 2009

Day 363: All in a day


from here to there, in a matter of hours

We left Mono Lake yesterday morning and drove through the Owens Valley. Our tiny car sandwiched between the the last slab of the Basin and Range and the Sierra Nevadas to the West and Death Valley to our east. Proceeding south we crossed the Mojave, the San Andreas fault, drove the crest of the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains to find ourselves landing in a valley that at first glance fits the epitome of pop-culture- Los Angeles. The whiplash effects are high, but something in the air around here makes everything feel alright and slowed down. Is this why people live here? Somehow the super reality of all that a day can hold seems fitting when landing in this particular place, yet Baudrillard on Death Vallery echoes in my geologically focused mind...


"A fragment of another planet (at least predating any form of human life), where another, deeper temporality reigns, on whose surface you float as you would on salt-laden waters. The senses, the mind, and even your sense of belonging to the human race are all numbed by the fact of having before you the pure, unadulterated, sign of 180 million years, and therefore the implacable enigma of your own existence. It is the only place where it is possible to relive, alongside the physical spectrum of colours, our successive historical forms: the mineral, the organic, salt desert, sand dunes, rock, ore, light, heat, everything on earth has been, all the inhuman forms it has been through, gathered together in a single anthologizing vision."


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