11/15/25

I have spent my entire life in northern Indiana. I think I have expressed that often on this website. For a lot of people, I doubt much would be of any significance about a place like this. It might not be at all differentiable from the spattering of similar regions spread throughout middle-America.

It might just be raw familiarity which attracts me to it, but that seems complicated by what exactly interests me about this place. There's a dark lyricism that it can be held to, I've found. Banal farmland becomes twisted by self-narrativization. Wind blows parallel with the land, transcendent, barren and lacking curvature. And of course, I don't have to understand it this way. Yet, this is what I see when I look.

The landscape is just what it is except for being interacted with by brutalizing industriousness: RV factories, web-like highways, pseudo-urban sprawls, desolate condominiums and presumptuous apartment complexes. All together is a fungal skyline, contorted steel grabbed by weeds and crabgrass and pulled into the earth. It is shown in the landscape what is hidden, but implicitly recognized in stacks of motels on Cassopolis Street, or another storage unit just off the interstate. There is a hoarded, discrete, internalized ill.

I don't even dislike this place. Seeing my constant return to this imagery, however, I can't help but imagine that the only creative act to be seen here is recursion. All that is revealed by the analysis is its own, self-referential immanence. Immanence is for analysis is for immanence is for analysis is for immanence.