A Note From the Editor

BOULDERPAVEMENT 5

Gertrude Stein said “There is no there there.” Once we’ve arrived there becomes here and there is somewhere else.

We are mobile, even when static, moving through space, moving through our days. Journey is a constant, underway simply because we exist. As we move into a new year, a new chapter of the 21st century, this concept seems most appropriate.

Some journeys are shaped with intention and there are journeys within journeys. All journeys shape us.

The concept of journey informs so many literary works through our received written legacy – Matsuo Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Far North, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, or M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled. With a nod to those, and many other adventurous titles, we have shaped this issue of Boulderpavement around the concept of journey.

Our six contributors have gone somewhere else and captured a “there” for us here. We travel with Wade Davis on his spiritual journey from the Spatsizi Wilderness in northwestern British Columbia to the sandveld regions of Botswana, in prose.

We journey with Kateri Akwenzie-Damm’s spoken poem as she goes tracking; we rock out with Mise en Scene’s mysterious and explosive music video; and there are other stops along the way for drawings, photographs and a getting intimate with a sloth and a shaman. Just strap into a comfortable chair and the transportation is free. Rumble along through imagination and representations of reality, each exotic in its own way, looking for the “there there.” You will be transported and transformed.

Transformed, yes, yet there is no escape – as Rabindranath Tagore suggests in his poem Journey Home, no matter where you go, there you ‘are’.

…The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own,
and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end. …

(from: Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali: Song Offerings (Wellesley, MA: Branden Publishing Company, 1979), p.17)

Steven Ross Smith, January 2012