Imagined Homeland

For me, my imagined homeland has been for quite some time a lost continent within me. I have found myself dreaming of Atlantis, but that is not my homeland---it is only a metaphor for my homeland, an undefined terrain that is strangely enough linked to my current encounter with the digital technology of the Internet and its implications for identity.

What is the homeland but a place where we can be ourselves in the full disclcosure of ourselves? Homeland is inextricably linked to Identity, and becaause this new technology offers us a place where Space and Time are virtual, we slip into the virtual presence of ourselves, a defining moment where we might discover ourselves by surprise or by serendipity.

I have much the same feeling when I compose music, or, better, when I improvise without any notion of where I am going, but discover myself in bits and pieces along the way. I am scattered in those pixels... in that binary flashing of zeroes and ones... in the code that is somehow a new DNA of Being.

My homeland is at once ancient and the future. It is full of wonder and silence... of fullness and emptiness... I look for borders and there are none... only the outskirts of myself with vacant lots and rolling prairies.