Tagged — Jamie Lyons
I don't know what the hell Magellan was thinking. Maybe he was running from something. Maybe toward something. Probably both. That's usually how it works, isn't it? The ocean doesn't give you answers,it just gives you more ocean, more horizon, more of that sickening beautiful emptiness that reminds you how small you are, how temporary, how utterly unremarkable in the grand scheme of things.
And yet.
There's something about that emptiness that calls to us. The same thing that made Magellan sail into those winds, the same thing that makes a kid stare out at the water until his parents drag him away for dinner. It's not hope, exactly. Hope's too clean a word. It's more like... hunger. A kind of restlessness that civilization can't cure. We build our cities, our routines, our comfortable little prisons, and then we stand at the edge and look out at all that dark water and think: Not yet. Not here. Not this.
The ocean doesn't promise me anything. It'll kill me as soon as look at me. It's indifferent to my dreams, my fears, my carefully constructed sense of self. And maybe that's exactly why I need it. Because in that indifference, in that vast unknowing, there's a kind of freedom. Out there, I'm not defined by my mistakes or my achievements or what people think of me. I'm just a speck on the surface of something infinite, and somehow that's... comforting.
What motivated those explorers? The same thing that motivates anyone who's ever felt trapped. The knowledge that beyond the edge of the map, beyond the familiar harbor, there's something else. Maybe it's death. Maybe it's disappointment. Maybe it's just more water. But it's not here. It's not this. And sometimes, that's enough. That possibility. That door left open.
Industries / Wanderlust 2026
The sky looks like it’s thinking about violence. Not cinematic violence. Not the slow motion hero shot nonsense. The real kind. The kind that does not care if you are ready, if your leash is waxed, if your head is right. The kind that has been doing this since before our species figured out how […]
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Adventure 2024
Charlie’s first time on a sailboat. Monterey Bay at sunset. Three years old and already braver than his old man. Here’s something to know when you take your kid out on the water for the first time: you’re terrified. Not of the ocean, I know the ocean, respect it, understand that it doesn’t give a […]
ReadWanderlust 2018
Devil’s Slide is the kind of place that makes you understand why people drive off cliffs. Not in some morbid, suicidal way, though Highway 1 has claimed its share of souls who got hypnotized by that impossible blue, but because beauty this raw, this uncompromising, it does something to your brain chemistry. It rewires the […]
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Speculation 2015
A place is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. … It implies an indication of stability. A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense […]
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Engineering 2015
Here’s the thing about standing in the Pacific at dawn, reciting words that haven’t been heard in their original context for two-and-a-half goddamn millennia: you’re probably insane. Or maybe that’s the only sane response to a world that’s forgotten how to have actual experiences that aren’t mediated through a screen or commodified into bite-sized chunks […]
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Speculation 2015
Speculation: exploring a new performance space… Euripides‘ Andromeda? Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it “speaks”. All the modalities sing a part in the chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the walker. These enunciatory […]
ReadAdventure 2014
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world, For I would ride with you upon the wind, Run on the top of the dishevelled tide, And dance upon the mountains like a flame. W.B. Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire Listen, I get it. I fucking GET it. Here’s some romantic fool naming his […]
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Wanderlust 2013
Wanderlust along the Coast: Beach Piano I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a […]
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Industries 2013
They asked me to document a site specific performance piece called Out of Water at Fort Funston for the Performance Studies international conference. Fort Funston… where the cliffs give up and the Pacific takes over. Helen Paris and Caroline Wright had assembled the whole apparatus: commissioned sound scores, UK sopranos, singers and swimmers spread across […]
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Wanderlust 2012
You stand here long enough, looking out at that impossible blue stretching to forever, and you start to understand why Henry Miller said fuck it to Paris and ended up here, clinging to this ridiculous edge of America. Big Sur is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa […]
ReadWanderlust 2012
Let us venerate the dog. The dog (what a funny creature!), has sweat on its tongue and a smile in its tail. Victor Hugo , The Man Who Laughs Victor Hugo nailed it over a century ago: the dog has its sweat on its tongue and its smile in its tail. And here’s Sharka, this […]
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Wanderlust 2009
I open my eyes and the first thing that hits me isn’t the Pacific light knifing through those salt-stained windows or the fact that you’re horizontal in a room where somebody once fucked their way through the Summer of Love, no, it’s the absolute silence. The kind of quiet that makes me understand why people […]
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