Terra Incognita

Unknown or unexplored lands – and in this particular case I mean both. The notes in the margins of maps scrawled by cartographers too baffled by what they’ve seen or too terrified by what they might encounter to go further. I’m looking for something there at the edge of what’s known to me, a doorway or a hint of a crack in timespace that will provide even just the faintest taste of that yesterworld magic. You know what I’m talking about – recapturing a moment, a sense, from a time in your past when amazement infused your Polaroid photos and mix-tapes, and you believed in impossible things. Beautiful things. That all the monsters in the world just existed in manuals and could be defeated with a roll of the dice. That everyone you knew and loved got to live forever, pets included. And that we would too.

I crave some of that right now. Sometimes I feel it slipping further from my grasp. I know, rationally, that my yesterworld wasn’t really ever a place that existed on any map or in any present tense – only past. I’ve often thought that no matter how long and how far I drive, it will never materialize before me fully; that I can only hope to catch the slightest glimpse of it for a microsecond in the rear-view, when the light strikes at just the right angle, in just the right atmospheric conditions, and it drowns the world in the sepia of old camp photos while a half-remembered song comes on over the radio that none of us listen to anymore.

Turns out, the more I seek the more I find. Within and without. And I get to thinking that what I’m looking for may still be somewhere out there after all. I catch traces of it here and there, when listening to ethereal dream folk music drift like smoke out over the Hudson river from a long forgotten botanical garden; when a comet splits the deep purple summer sky over a city skyline I know by heart; when I get lost wandering among the statues, pyramids and voodoo shrines of a New Orleans cemetery; when I stumble unexpectedly through a portal and into some strange new world, like Quentin Coldwater discovering Breakbills.

So I’m setting out to find or reproduce that sense childhood wonder and awe, to fill my head back up with prismatic, translucent dream dust. For me, for Steve, for you too if you want to come along for the ride. It started already, before I knew my feet were on a path, before I could form the words to an incantation, and it keeps going until the gas/ink/blood runs dry.