Crossroads

The other night I was mesmerized by delta blues' songster Robert Johnson. I just realized at some point that I was absorbed by his voice and performance. Then I wanted to know more about him. It shocked me how young he was when he died and what few recordings there are of him. Reading of his life I remembered that I had seen years ago a film about him and the legend of how he exchanged his soul with the evil in order to become the most extraordinary guitar player. I also remembered that at that time I was condonscending with the story. A Hollywood stuff I thought. But now it was different.

What is the symbolic meaning of a crossroad? I wondered. I looked for lighthouses to iluminate my ignorance. I found several pictures of the blues intersection of highways 61 and 49. Most of them pure kitsch. But I also found an interesting article about criminals and suicides buried at crossroads in the pre Victorian era. The magic thinking expected that the souls of those condemned people got lost at the intersection and were unable to return to the town. Thus, a crossroad is a place for marginal, disposable, people.

However, marginal people also means people who live at the margin, at the frontiers, outside of the mainstream of conventions. Outlaws and revolutionaries. People at the borders: Hermes' believers.

A linear thinking assumes a binary moral between good and bad. A less simplistic but also linear thinking acknowledges a continuum between a bipolar ethical landscape. A croossroad denies such simplification, for it summarizes the intersection of two ways of life: ethical / unethical, conventional / unconventional, given / constructed, spiritual / material, accumulative / unattached... Both ways run in their own continuum where differences are not of quality but of intensity.

In this sense the quid is not how far are you from one pole within a pathway, but what far are the paths from each other. A dynamic answer to such question requires individuals that are aware of their agency. Builders of choices and founders of decisions: Hermes' believers.

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A delta is not different from a crossroad. That's why I depicted the intersection as one of water. The roads are not disguised by their color or texture but by the constant choice making that individuals do at the crossroad. In this landscape a crossroad is the setting where individuals set depth and meaning: sense and orientation...