my black slop

Somewhere near Lorca on the way south to Granada -- a 30 minute bus stop and I walked the other direction, away from the travel restaurant and down a wide gravel path pinched between highway and big, box-shaped factory buildings. A gravel walkway through lonely trees with weepy branches that tickle the ground and its litter.

What am I looking for? Something tacky to add to my already hard-to-zip-shut backpack? Forgotten money left on the ground? Something interesting to photograph and capture for the blog here? That the girls on the bus think I'm hip for taking the path less traveled?

Maybe I'm just stretching my legs and trying to avoid food at the restaurant.

How is it that I don't know why I'm doing something? Is that possible?

What do artists look for? How do they see things from a different angle? How do they convert this industrial wasteland into a documentary of sterility, morosity, bleakness... to their audience... to themselves?

This place evokes nothing in me. It is sad and barren; another of humanity's embarrassments. Not even a fantastic embarrassment like a war or a supermarket aisle with 50 varieties of breakfast cereal. Just a bunch of trees and trash growing in gravel, with a pipe at the end spilling a steady flow of horrible, black foul-smelling slop into a pit that must have a bottom.

To find beauty in something, capture it, compose it to signify something, and release it to the public: this is art. Its quality depends on its supposed sincerity in the encounter of beauty, its depth in signifying meaning, and its craft in composition.

To find beauty in something, enjoy it, and release it completely: this is what I should strive for.