Lighting out for the territories

 
There are certain phrases that ring my chimes, and have wrung em since childhood.

Among which I place Huckleberry Finn’s “lighting out for the territories”. 

This is how I used to think of the Great American space: an expanse of escape routes, a vast hide n seek imperium, a second chance, third chance fourth chance quick change theatre, a down river up river gamble. 

And this was how, in adolescence, I used to think of bohemia – artland, fuckland, poemland, desperateland – too. Always, of course, in opposition to where I was, which was subdivision land. By its very sound it is judged: to live in allotments, in suburban houses on suburban lawns, seemed to me to be a very low estate indeed. Instead of guitars and rock n roll, this was a place where the angels wings were clipped, and Blake died. Died for all our sins.

As Emerson observed in Circles, more or less: what goes around comes around. Here we are, living in an apartment in Paris, and my son’s image of heaven on earth is to live in a subdivision in Lawrenceville Georgia, with all the fixings: a state of the art entertainment system, a big tv, and food piped in from the nearest McDonald’s.
My notion of the territories, those ambiguously legal appendages to the State – where no one is a slave and the mind forged manacles are parked at the sod house door – was consistent with the things I read as a teenager about the amazing garrets of Paris and New York City, where you died young for beauty itself, or some semblance of it. Though age has drained most of my teen day dreams, I’m still one with that awkward manboy in having an enormous nostalgia for the bohemias of the past. I realize that much of the writing of the twenties was financed by trust fund babies, who have now moved in and taken over the bohemian dream vide the NYT style section. It is sad to think of that ratty utopia fallen into nepo hands, but there are much sadder things, of course. Sad for me.
Still, I think social media is bohemia’s distant heir. When I read the bitching about it, as a general proposition, I have to laugh: isn’t this what all of education is for? Isn’t the dream of every teacher in the past one in which the students actually want to write things? Whose message from the homework assignment is: hey, this is flying? Yes, they mansplain away, they whitesplain away, they say the dumbest things imaginable, but underneath the enormous cretinism, just as underneath the streets of Paris in 1968, there’s the beach. Or in my case, the territories.
Lighting out for the territories is still an ethic and aesthetic that generally presides over all my dumb opinions since I stumbled upon the Adventures of Huck Finn.