Longing for Freedom, a Journey of Self-Discovery - Coursework Example

Longing for Freedom, a journey of self-discovery Blue Highways: A journey into America - Summary: William Least Heat-Moon drove the back roads of America in a beat up old van in the early 1980's after the breakup of his marriage and the loss of his job as a professor. He decided he needed to find something that was missing while it was still there to be found and the result was his classic travel novel Blue Highways. He strictly avoids the major roads and big cities as he tours 38 states and travels roughly 13,000 miles. Setting out from his home in Missouri he ventures alone to places as obscure as Nameless, TN, Globe, AZ, Fort Stockton, TX and Brooklyn Bridge, KY on his round the country trip winding up back where he started. Once in the small and the forgotten places he finds on the map (the book is named for the blue highways that are the small state and county roads on his map) it may be an out of the way diner or caf, a little college community, even a monastery, he retells histories and tales that make these places significant in their own way. He found out much that was new and strange to him: one thing that struck him and made him think was repeatedly finding one shoe as he made his way across the country. Where was the other shoe Why would someone throw one shoe out the car window What good was the other one, alone He finally concluded, without much conviction, that all those solitary shoes were the result of people dangling their feet out the window, with one shoe accidentally flying off and out onto the roadside. (David Fletcher, Resident Scholar, ) Blue Highways: A journey into America and American Road Culture: "On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk - times neither day nor night - the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it's that time when the pull of the blue highways is strongest ..." Blue Highways is more than just an autobiographical road novel - it contains innumerable aspects of the 'American road culture', ranging from ethnical problems and the undeniable importance of diners to the true significance of road literature. In other words, W. Least Heat Moon somehow assists in determining the myth of the road and he invites the reader to join him on a more abstract kind of road, namely that from the past to the present. Having Native American ancestors himself, Least Heat Moon also lays enormous emphasis on the aspect of race and ethnicity on the road. Why do people leave home to go on such an extended road trip What is the myth of the road that fascinates so many And above all, what do such road protagonists expect to find or discover on the road For William Least heat Moon the journey is on the one hand a sort of escape from home and on the other hand it obviously represents an attempt to forget or even heal. "Etymology: 'curious', related to 'cure', once meant 'carefully observant'. Maybe a tonic of curiosity would counter my numbing sense that life inevitably creeps toward the absurd. 'Absurd', by the way, derives from a Latin word meaning 'deaf, dulled'. Maybe the road could provide a therapy through observation of the ordinary and obvious, a means whereby the outer eye opens an inner one." (Blue Highways, p.17) As the name 'Least Heat Moon' already indicates, his ancestors were Native Americans and thus his journey is as well an occasion to search for his origins, to somehow trace his ancestral roots. Most road protagonists set out alone with the simple reason to find their true self. For William Least Heat Moon this search for himself requires the loneliness of the back roads and this purity of experience. However, although the loneliness of the back roads is quite an important aspect, Least Heat Moon knows that it is exactly his traveling alone that also brings him into contact with people that makes him more sociable. "It isn't traveling to cross the country and talk to your pug instead of people along the way. Besides, being alone on the road makes you ready to meet someone when you stop. You get sociable traveling alone." (Blue Highways, p.27) When asking people what they actually associate with such a trip along the back roads of the United States you might get keywords and phrases, such as 'loneliness', 'romantic and idyllic', 'nostalgia', 'the real America beyond all those metropolitan areas and superhighways' or 'the fear that your car runs out of gas with no gas station within the next 50 miles'. Looking at those associations, we will notice that exactly these ideas represent the pattern of traditional road novels. So "Blue Highways" is among other things about adventure, loneliness, about idyllic and less idyllic landscapes and even about such simple things as the fear to run out of gas far away from the next gas station. Another essential aspect in Least Heat Moon's "Blue Highways" is the emphasis on race and ethnicity on the road. However, we have to bear in mind that the phrase 'race and ethnicity on the road' refers again to two different aspects or two different point of views. On the one hand we need to determine the role of race with regard to the protagonist - this means: In how far is the race of the person traveling, in our case the author himself, of importance On the other hand we must consider that on his trip this protagonist will encounter people of different races, religions and nationalities. In other words, this means that discussing the aspect of race on the road is only possible if we consider both, the author's or protagonist's race as well as the race of the people he gets into contact with. "Blue Highways" makes you aware of the fact that the race of a protagonist is a decisive factor as it simply determines the way things are perceived. The same trip, narrated by various authors of different races, will undoubtedly result in a number of different perspectives. For quite a long time, the aspect of race was not important at all in road literature, as authors or protagonists were mainly white male Americans. "Most American road narratives have been lived, written and published by white males. This dominance is easy enough to understand, given the history of both American travel and American authorship. Native Americans, African Americans, women, and other minorities have moved around North America for centuries but not usually in the manner of the road quest conventions." (Ronald Primeau 1996: 107) Nowadays the aspect of race gets more and more important, but what is meant by a difference in perception that I have mentioned before - just think of a white male American on a trip across the United States and then imagine an African American going on the same trip. This is exactly what John A. Williams. a Black American author, did and in his book "This is my country, too" he outlines the various problems he was confronted with, as a Black American on the road. "For the African American on the highway, the road is not always open and dangers cannot be for long overlooked."I do not believe white travelers have any idea of how much nerve and courage it requires for a Negro to drive coast to coast in America [...] Nerve, courage, and a great deal of luck. African Americans do travel and do write about traveling, but not usually for the same reasons and with none of the reckless abandon of the white male on a quest for self-discovery. Williams takes with him a list of places in America where African Americans can stay without being embarrassed, insulted, or worse. (Primeau 1996: 117) So Williams' perceptions and his experience are certainly different from those of a white male American. Concerning the aspect of race in "Blue Highways" we should bear in mind that William Least Heat Moon, who was in fact born as William Trogdon, is not a pure Native American - he has 'just' Native American ancestors. Thus he is not confronted with the same kind of prejudices or insults that Williams had to face. In "Blue Highways" the aspect of race is introduced and given emphasis to by William Least Heat Moon himself. Although he is in search for his ancestral roots it would be exaggerated to say that he really identifies himself with the Native Americans, it is rather curiosity, interest and deep concern. "Blue Highways" contains a number of descriptions concerning the Natives' living conditions, their traditions and beliefs, but again and again Least Heat Moon also mentions the enormous injustices done to Native Americans. "...the government's given a lot of our land to Navajos, and now we're in a hard spot - eight thousand Hopis are surrounded and outnumbered twenty five to one. I don't begrudge the Navajo anything, but I think Hopis should be in on making the decisions. Maybe you know that Congress didn't even admit Indians to citizenship until about nineteen twenty. Incredible - live someplace a thousand years and then find out you're a foreigner" (Blue Highways, p.183) "Still waiting on the weather, I started reading a book I'd bought in Phoenix, 'The Sacred Pipe', Black Elk's account of the ancient rites of the Oglala Sioux. In contrast to the good and straight red road of life, Black Elk says, the blue road is the route of 'one who is distracted, who is ruled by his senses, and who lives for himself rather than for his people'. I was stunned. Was it racial memory that had urged me to drive seven thousand miles of blue highway, a term I thought I had coined" (Blue Highways, p.219) () Into the Wild (Film) - Storyline: "Into the Wild" recounts the life of Christopher McCandless, who is a NCAS student-athlete at Emory University, as told by his sympathetic sister. In response to his parents, whom McCandless perceives as materialistic, manipulative, and domineering, McCandless destroys all of his credit cards and identification documents, donates $24,000, and sets out on a off-road cross-country drive in his Datsun towards his ultimate goal: to travel alone to Alaska and experience its nature firsthand. On the way, he abandons his automobile in the course of a flash flood, to hitchhike after burning the remainder of his cash. He acquires a Perception Sundance 12 open-water kayak and goes down the Colorado River, into Mexico, and later returns to America by freight train to Los Angeles. He encounters many unconventional individuals along the way, such as a group of hippies, a farm owner, and a lonely leather worker who offers to adopt and be a grandfather to McCandless. McCandless trudges onward to his final destination, arriving in the wilds of Alaska nearly two years after his initial departure. He starts living in a "Magic Bus", used as a shelter for moose hunters. McCandless finds joy in living off the land and begins to write a book of his adventures. As the spring thaw arrives and he seeks to return from the wild, McCandless is cut off from civilization by the torrents of a swelled river. As his food supply of small game dwindles, he resorts to eating indigenous plants. Although he consults a book that he brought along in order to identify edible plants, he confuses an edible and a poisonous variety, which shuts down his digestive system and causes him to starve to death. In his final hours, he continues to document his demise in a painful and dramatic denouement. () Into the Wild - Cultural Debate: The film "Into the Wild" renews the controversial debates about search for personal identity or getting away from society. Now the stuff of common lore, the details of McCandless's dramatic departure from mainstream culture and his traumatic demise in the Alaskan wilderness provide fodder for fierce debates about everything from the virtues of drop-out culture to nitty-gritty strategies for extended survival. Too many discussions have honed in on a crass character analysis of the deceased, describing the young vagabond as a nave kook and arrogant idiot - just another white male iconoclast who, in hoping to commune with the land, has only further conquered and contaminated it. The selfishness and sadness about how this tale ends, in sacred foolishness, deflects some aspects of courageous dissent that come with the clarity and ferocity of McCandless's initial break with society. While Abbie Hoffman once burned money as a public prank, the self-made mythmaker of Alexander Super tramp burned his last stash of cash as private prayer - a perverse theater of the self that takes the voluntary simplicity rap to its youthful extreme. This brash purge of modest barter power came after McCandless donated a much larger sum to Oxfam, shredding bank cards and personal identification, and generally denouncing his preparation for participation in the world - a likely path guaranteed by his upper-middle class credentials and recent college degree. Once in Alaska, the lonely Spartan reality of the McCandless quest offers a poor example of how to live as a solitary forager-hunter. From the point of view of what has been called "re-wilding," people have the potential to recover lost lessons from our ancestral heritage, learning practical and tactical skills that might serve the outback escapist today and the person who outlasts the catastrophe tomorrow. The survivalist critique of the McCandless story avoids condemning survivalism. From either the naturist or the collapsist point of view, what's wrong with this picture stems not from the possibility of retreat but with the errors that lead to the inevitable defeat. Even in the evils of a malevolent society that people of conscience for centuries have rejected, there always remain the seeds of a different society. Rather than reject the social entirely, McCandless meant to follow the path of the temporary monk. The question for us, then, is how to preserve "human community" without "returning to civilization." Indeed, McCandless's accidental and individualist suicide wish might be instructive in helping us avoid collective suicide. Rather than a rejection of the social, anarchism might revise how the social gets organized. Far less romantic than the burnt dollars and torched flags of pure rejection, compromise and cooperation can still provide motifs for communal change. At the end, investigating Alexander Super tramp's individualist anarchism encourages us to invest in a nuanced rejection of pure individualism in favor a social and socialist anarchism that supports and honors already the individual. Interestingly, McCandless visits just such a vision before departing forever. Even though his excruciating excursion fails to extol the larger narrative of individualist escapism, it grants some gravity to the gracious necessity of collaborative and communal escape. Clearly, the most heartfelt moments in Penn's film do not take place in a perfect, out-of-the-way place. Rather, having rejected his family of birth, McCandless finds a family just by wandering the earth. The relationships McCandless cultivates with fellow tramps and travelers demonstrate the undeniable ubiquity of love. One of the movie's most memorable sequences takes place at "the Slabs" - an amazing autonomous zone that Krakauer describes as "an old navy airbase that had been abandoned and raised, leaving a grid of empty concrete foundations scattered far and wide across the desert." In this no-go zone, we witness a kind of cooperative escapism. Krakauer contemplates what he calls McCandless's particular "variety of lust," a monastic passion seduced more by open spaces than sexual places. From the lessons of this lust, we might develop an equally devoted passion to creating a slab of reality not unlike the Slabs: a new autonomous zone where rejecting the daily grind does not require us to lose our minds; where we can reject society without ejecting the social, and form loving and lasting contacts with other souls similarly disenchanted with civilization. (Alexander William Smith, < http://www.realitysandwich.com/alexander_supertramp_and_failure_individualist_escape >) Works Cited www.allreaders.com David Fletcher, Resident Scholar Read More