To understand this language of sites is to appreciate the metaphor between the syntactical construct and the complex of ideas, letting the former function as a three- dimensional picture which doesn't look like a picture.This little theory is tentative and could be abandoned at any time. Theories, like things, are also abandoned. That theories are eternal is doubtful. Vanished theories compose the strata of many forgotten books.--Robert Smithson1
It’s possible to launch a stone
from the roof of this building and have it land in the Missouri River. We’re
that close. But you can’t see, touch, or smell the river from inside. The
history of places stands between you and water’s edge. And these are not little
obstacles. A levee. A rail line. Warehouses. Roads. Stench from past and
current sins. You’d need to get through all that to arrive at water. Which, I
guess, is why, despite us being that close to one of our nation’s greatest
natural resources, few venture the journey. No matter how short.
If, as Twain remarked, the
Mississippi Basin is the body of the nation, then the Missouri River Basin is
surely it’s brains, heart, and soul. The Missouri River has almost as many
tributaries as stories. The stories, like tribs and fish, often get bigger if
one must wait out a storm on its banks. The river also has eddies. I’ve seen
them, day and night. Sometimes they make a sucking sound but mostly they remind
me of meadowlarks that greet the morning. Traveler, do not be afraid of the
journey that awaits. Call to it and sound its depths for it is both shallow and
murky, swift and dangerous.
These works are about the river
in the same way that fishing is about the river. Or that Jesus was about
fishing. To cast a line into the water is to understand that tension is the
first surprise of any reward to follow. Some say the river waits for no one. Or
did they mean time. Same thing really. River and time. I say no rain, no river.
Holy water will, by definition, have some of both else it would be
other-worldly rather than merely restorative. Step inside and dunk yourself in the
real. Or the metaphorical. Doesn’t
matter because we need both and all faiths are accepted.
m.o.i. aka
The Minister of Information, Chief Hydrologist for Tributary, April 2017.
1 A
Provisional Theory of Non-sites, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings,
Jack Flam, ed., Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, California, 2nd Edition,
1996.