Re: <documenta X><blast>home

Eve Andree Laramee (wander@earthlink.net)
Mon, 14 Jul 1997 18:43:02 -0700 (PDT)

July 15, 1997

Back "home" in Brooklyn for one week before returning to California.
The rental car logged in at 2,627 miles.
Since last posting, couldn't keep out of the desert despite the heat. Two
more trips into the Sonora Desert of Mexico and several to the Anza
Borrego, Mojave and Yuha Deserts of California.
The heat of the desert bakes rather than stews as the New York heat.
The extreme is divine.
What moves is either reptile or machine.
The Mayor of Calexico spoke to me about matrixal border issues of a
different sort.
Walked across the border to Mexicali.

Here, I research the erratic boulders and folded metamorphic bedrock of New
York City.
The library is cool, it is crowded.

Bedrock, the foundation of place, is the bed the foundation of home?
Somnolent. Amnesiatic.
I feel myself slip into to the fold.

I learn the Hudson and East Rivers are in fact fjords carved by glaciation.
I "live" at the confluence of the East Fjord and Newtown Creek, the
"natural" border between Brooklyn and Queens, which was canalized during
the 19th Century (by the relentless Army Corps of Engineers). Not so long
before that, there was a large village here of people known as the
Maspetches, Mathpeth, Mispat, Mespat or Mespaetches (take your pick of
spelling variations-errors) after which the town of Maspeth, Queens took
it's name. It is now filled with industrial ruins.

I think of the Baroque stratification of this place. I become restless.

Eve Andree Laramee