native soil

Flying home to California tomorrow (hum Joni Mitchell lyric here). My devotion to the idea of a politics of place comes directly from my devotion to the place where I grew up. The topography of California shaped the contours of my own mind; I don't feel truly at home without mountains on the horizon and wide sky overhead.

The first time I went back to California after moving to North Carolina I flew into San Jose. Flying low to land, I could trace the arteries of the highways, knowing which freeway was which, and which to take to get anywhere I wanted to go. In short, I knew where I was. I was located in a larger system of meaning.

I've often felt rather alien in my devotion to home, to a specific place. So much of American life is geared in the opposite direction, towards EveryPlace, towards NoPlace. The nomadic life of most Americans seems not to affect them, or at least, they don't articulate the ways it might affect them. Anywhere we go now, we can get the same food, go to the same stores, buy exactly the same things. And since our identity is conflated with what we consume, we believe that we are the same person wherever we are, since we consume the same things in every place. I've never felt that way. I felt obligated to leave home, since I believed that I would be missing out on some kind of "starting over" experience if I didn't live somewhere else. There's some element of cowboy-into-the-sunset about it, that real adults, actualized men, must always be on the move, can never stay on the ranch.

I think I was mistaken about the way we start over, in our lives. While moving to a new place may, for some, mark the beginning of a new identity and a new belief about life, I think that the opposite happens. Moving to a place where we are uncertain, unlocated, we tend to hold onto that of which we are most sure--our personal identities, which become hardened and concretized as we define ourselves in order, oddly enough, to fit in. Our very motion, which we believe keeps us free, imprisons us in a world without possibilities. Constant motion limits the horizon.

As for me, I look forward to meeting myself again at home.