Right now I'm reading a book called The Song Lines by Bruce Chatwin. It's about the Aboriginal concept of distance and time and maps, like how you basically sing the world into existence as you go along, following in the footsteps of your ancestors, who aren't even necessarily human. Landscape features are also elements of plot in the song-story, like for instance, this hill was formed when an ancestor forgot how to kill off fly larvae and the land was covered in maggots until he gathered them up and buried them all here. All of the land was formed in the Dream Time, which is kind of like the Judeo-Christian story of creation, and all of the paths still sing the same and are owned by different clans within different tribes, who can lend or borrow their songs at any time, but they can never get rid of them or lose them for good.
There's still a lot I don't understand about how land and movement can be a story, and how this concept totally precludes the idea of territorial boundaries or "owning" a delineated chunk of land, but I find the idea arresting. I like imagining the act of walking as something like writing because the times when I've felt the lowest and most tangled up, it's been coupled with an irresistible urge to walk. Once I ended up walking seven miles through South Austin when I'd just parked at the lake to look around. And this summer I went stomping out of the building pretty regularly on my lunch hour for two weeks to wander up and down the rows of grape vineyards tugging and tugging at some knot in my mind.
I'm finally working a little on my thesis, and it's heartening to discover that there's quite a bit of raw material to play with.
