Imaginary Places
For me it begins with Enid Blyton, a British author who wrote children's books. When we moved back to Nairobi, without television and other forms of entertainment, I started to read her adventure stories. Blyton was fond of Dorset, and set many of the stories I read included descriptions of life by the sea in southwestern England. I soon began to fantasize about being there, on some rocky coastline, on a cliff looking over the ocean, or near some cave hidden by the sea.
It's interesting how a place can take off in your imagination - how you can visit it over and over, elaborating more and more until it's no longer real anywhere but your thoughts. It's strange to think that what I read so long ago is still with me today, a world apart from where I began conceptualizing it.
Recently I met a girl who wanted to go to Uganda. The look she had in her eyes was the one I had when I was asking some British friends about life abroad. James, a practically minded dairy farmer who just settled here in South Dakota from near Manchester laughed, more to himself than for my benefit and called me an anglophile. I was pathetic, but I didn't care.
The girl asked why my family left Uganda and I began my polished short version of my African story. Her eyes became cloudy; too much information.
Information which clouds the reality of the imagination.
I've got so many imaginary places. When it's not Cornwall, it's Bergen, or Reykjavik... that list is too long to even start.
It's interesting to think about how certain places take off in one's mind. For some reason in college I really wanted to go to Peru. I'm not sure what set that off.
Photoblogs haven't helped. The irony of it is this: the more I see of a place, the more of the place I invent and the less the place remains itself.
9:12:16 PM 
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