"The East was thought of as a place of birth and growth, and the West was considered the place of death."
The West = Death = Paradise.
Gray Havens.
Bali Hai forever on the horizon.
The Egyptians called the departed "Westerners"
I wonder if in American culture there is a trend to reversing this polarity? The East Coast stagnating, dying, the old world. The
West Coast younger, fresher, earlier in the decadence spiral. New York is full of
luddites who wear black leather because they saw it on a 60s album cover. San Francisco has self-driving cars and the people there wear black leather to signal that they'll do the spanking.
America is a special case. Of course it is not immune from domination
by trees or the search for roots. This is evident even in the literature, in the
quest for a national identity and even for a European ancestry or genealogy
(Kerouac going off in search of his ancestors). Nevertheless, everything
important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the Ameri-
can rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive
lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside. American
books are different from European books, even when the American sets off
in pursuit of trees. The conception of the book is different. Leaves of Grass.
And directions in America are different: the search for arborescence and
the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic
West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting
and displaced frontiers. There is a whole American "map" in the West,
where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the directions: it put
its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came
full circle; its West is the edge of the East. (India is not the intermediary
between the Occident and the Orient, as Haudricourt believed: America is
the pivot point and mechanism of reversal.) The American singer Patti
Smith sings the bible of the American dentist: Don't go for the root, follow
the canal..
D&G, A THOUSAND PLATEAUS -- INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME