The Archaeology of Solitude

“As a life’s work, I would remember everything --- everything, against loss. I would go through life like a . . . net. I would trap and keep . . . every conversation, configuration of leaves, every dream, and every scrap of overhead cloud. Annie Dillard “One might say I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. . . . So perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is as the center of all other loves. Thomas Merton The Archaeology of Solitude (Series) Though solitude is not the direct theme of this work, it is the guidepost and first principle—the result of having lived the last twenty-seven years in deep woods some forty miles from New Orleans, where I was born. I am more archaeologist than artist, forever excavating and resurrecting the strata of images from my own interior life1. All of this in dream, memory, and imagination available to all of us. Multiple themes, a myriad of source and influence, both known and unknowable appear, vanish, surface, and then fade away. The imagery—obvious, subtle, intentional, archetypal, and erotic (critics and friends see this element more than I do). There is a common theme in the Delta blues music and maybe to most (pre- social media) children that says you are never alone when you are chasing the “thing”.