We’re about to embark on perhaps the last of our long sabbatical wanderings. In ’98 we took eight months to re-trace the travels of Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclán through Spain of 1911 and South America of 1910 when he was on a lecture tour. This time, over five months, we will end up in Paris and then Spain after starting in Mexico and staying a while in Austin, (gasp) Texas.
So this paragraph of Dyer’s struck me last night:
The sense of being constantly in motion contributes to what has often been remarked on: the grim, bleak quality of [Robert] Frank’s pictures. According to another European observer of America, Jean Baudrillard, part of the pleasure of travel is ‘to dive into places where others are compelled to live and come out unscathed, full of the malicious pleasure of abandoning them to their fate. Even their local happiness seems tuned to a secret resignation.’ That is the mood one encounters again and again in Frank’s pictures. But what is going on in them is more complicated than that. There is also snatched, self-cancelling lyricism, a grainy yearning that never quite has the opportunity to manifest itself fully. The fact that someone is passing through makes those who are staying put conscious of their fate so that their resignation becomes disturbed and unsettled by the possibility–even if it will never be acted upon–of moving on. In turn moving on acquires a taint of desperation: the fear of being one of the abandoned, one of those doomed to stay put. (167)
