I bought a print the other day of the Camino; the road from France to the Spanish town of Santiago de Compostela. It was in our library as part of an exhibition series exploring the nature of roads. Standing on the road ; a trail really; was the solitary, lengthened shadow of a pilgrim with a walking stick; and the low sun, the sense of impending twilight, and the antiqued paper, giving the print of the road a quality of roughness and endless distance.
A road always suggests a journey: leaving somewhere, or someone, or something. and going to something else. But the gist of the journey is the process, not the beginning or the end of it. The shadow on the road is fully in contact with it and will look forward and look backward throughout the journey, leading and following the traveler and in the midday foreshortened, watching the traveler from one side or other throughout much of the heat of the day. Though the traveler passes through the country, the road hard and rough, the traveler footsore, he is confined by the direction of the roadway if he is to progress to the intended target.
If it's the road to Zanzibar Dorothy Lamour made with her friends, or the Yellow Brick Road, or the Camino Road, the place to be is the place between. This is where we walk one step at a time. In my print, the solitary figure expressed by the shadow gives a feeling to the viewer of the loneliness of the roadway. There is no Bing Crosby to accompany Dorothy or Toto to accompany the other Dorothy. And these roads are beside the point. The Camino road is the point. The road in my print is for each step, the present and the only reality. My print could have been anywhere because road is a metaphor for life.
I have never taken the road to Santiago de Compostela, marking the way to the Cathedral of St. James, and I am too old to do it now, but a road is a road is a road and we are all on a roadway to somewhere and leaving somewhere. It's a process that we live, from that road we decided to take, rather than the goal that would take us somewhere else. How many times did you start with a goal and find during the journey that the real purpose was somewhere else?
A road always suggests a journey: leaving somewhere, or someone, or something. and going to something else. But the gist of the journey is the process, not the beginning or the end of it. The shadow on the road is fully in contact with it and will look forward and look backward throughout the journey, leading and following the traveler and in the midday foreshortened, watching the traveler from one side or other throughout much of the heat of the day. Though the traveler passes through the country, the road hard and rough, the traveler footsore, he is confined by the direction of the roadway if he is to progress to the intended target.
If it's the road to Zanzibar Dorothy Lamour made with her friends, or the Yellow Brick Road, or the Camino Road, the place to be is the place between. This is where we walk one step at a time. In my print, the solitary figure expressed by the shadow gives a feeling to the viewer of the loneliness of the roadway. There is no Bing Crosby to accompany Dorothy or Toto to accompany the other Dorothy. And these roads are beside the point. The Camino road is the point. The road in my print is for each step, the present and the only reality. My print could have been anywhere because road is a metaphor for life.
I have never taken the road to Santiago de Compostela, marking the way to the Cathedral of St. James, and I am too old to do it now, but a road is a road is a road and we are all on a roadway to somewhere and leaving somewhere. It's a process that we live, from that road we decided to take, rather than the goal that would take us somewhere else. How many times did you start with a goal and find during the journey that the real purpose was somewhere else?
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