It was the beginning of my journey — my journey on Raconteur Road. It started in Africa, where I was born, a wild little boy that couldn't sit still for too long. During the day, I used to watch the gravel road that ran over the horizon not too far from my childhood home, wondering how the cars pulled the dust behind them. I pulled my own dust on those roads with my bicycle — two wheels rolling while pondering the strange and the unexplained. At night, I would see the stars wheeling over that same road, wondering where they came from and what they were doing during the day. I always thought it was a wonderful thing to do, to have a cloud of dust follow you to wonderful places. I wondered why dust can look like stars when the late afternoon sun strikes them, just before the African sky turns purple-blue to connect the dust of the road to the bright streaks of the stars.
The San people of Southern Africa will tell you that the dust and the stars were made by IKaggen, a trickster god that can shape-shift and take on the form of any animal. They will tell you that you can find him in the insects crossing the dirt road to rearrange the veld during the day, and you can hear him in the call of the hungry hyenas, somewhere under the African stars. You can find him in the thoughts of the people, where views of clarity often meet those of confusion, where colors are bright and passionate, then slowly change to other hues that have different stories to tell.
It is only later that I learned that the dust and the stars are connected and that, in the beginning, the first light was mixed with the first dark and that the first differences were stirred around in the great expanding silence of space with a spoon made of gravity. The first stars were burning blue-white and furious, fusing hydrogen into helium, helium into carbon, carbon into oxygen, all the way up to iron, which is where the fusion stops and the star has nothing left to give. And when those first stars died, they died violently — tearing themselves apart, scattering their guts across light-years of empty space, seeding the void with every element heavier than hydrogen. The gold in a ring. The phosphorus in a thought. The sodium in a tear. The dust on the dirt road, the rubber in my bicycle tires. All of it, flung out of a dying star like ash from a fire.
Those clouds of dust and stars that were dragging me over the horizons of my youth are now clouds of memory that float across a wide open sky. When I stand outside at night, I look up at that sky. People say the night sky makes them feel small. I understand that — all that distance, all that silence pressing down. But I think they have it the wrong way around. The furnaces that came before these stars are the ones that made the iron in my blood and the calcium in my teeth. They burned for millions of years and then exploded so that their ash could drift through space and find its way into me. Into my bones. Into my eyes. Into whatever part of me is standing here, looking up, and knowing what I'm looking at. I am not small beneath those stars. I am large with them. I am carrying their dead inside me, and their dead are the reason I am alive. So it is true — we are stardust. We are the ash of old furnaces, walking around on a small planet, taking photographs and arguing about politics and falling in love. But here is the part that keeps me standing outside long after the cold has found my hands: it is not only that we are alive in this universe. The universe is alive in us. The hydrogen that was forged in the first three minutes after the big bang is now standing in a field at midnight, wondering about itself. The universe is not something I observe from the outside. It is something that has assembled a small, temporary part of itself into a shape that can observe the rest. I am the universe, looking at itself, and for a short while — a few decades against fourteen billion years — knowing that it is doing so.
The same laws that built those furnaces and scattered them and built them again — the same gradients, the same flux, the same irreversible spending of that first charged battery — those are the laws that built this body, this mind, this moment. Not by metaphor. Not as a poem. By the same mathematics, the same constraints, the same unforgiving ledger. I am a structure made of dead stars, maintained by sunlight, governed by entropy, and walking around taking photographs. The path I took to get here — the cooling, the exploring, the long way round — is the reason I am still standing and not shattered.
And a structure like this one holds its shape only while it keeps spending. A flame, a vortex, a river in flood — each is itself only in motion; the instant the flow stops, the shape is gone. To arrive is to reach the sea, and the sea is the place where the gradient runs flat and the river is no longer a river. So I have given up on arriving. I commit to each moment as if it were the only one — the photograph, the turn in the road, the thing I built — and then I let it go and keep moving, because the next gradient is already pulling, and to carry the last one is only a slower way of stopping. No destination would ever be worth the road. The goal, it turns out, is to have no goal.
That is what Raconteur Road means. A raconteur keeps telling; the road has no terminus; the end point is only where the next route begins. The landscape pictures here are not illustrations of any of this — they are this, caught in the light for a single second while the universe was busy looking at itself through me. Then I pack my cameras, climb back in, and drive on, a head full of dreams, filled with stardust, a cloud of dust following me to another place. Maybe, the San people are right, and IKaggen is still shape-shifting: this time into a man on a gravel road, watching his own dust rise gold against the purple-blue.
