The moviegoer is about disconnecting from an image of a place and connecting to the reality of a place, and it is about our ambivalence about placement in the world. … is also about our detachment from the world, and this ultimately led back to the question of abstraction. Abstraction for Percy meant this kind of detachment. In a later book, Percy wrote, " Art like science entails a certain abstraction from its subject matter, albeit a different order of abstraction. And the greater the artist, the greater the distance of abstraction.. Writers like Joyce, Faulkner, and Proust are able to write about the marketplace and society only in the degree that they distance themselves from it -- whether by exile, alcohol or withdrawal to a cork-lined room."
Binx wanted to escape from what the architect, on the surface wants to embrace -- a sense of belonging to a place and, by implication, a region. The book is not about the absence of connection to place, rather, it is about an ambivalence about that connection. As strong as the need to locate oneself by geographic association may be, equally strong is the need to do the opposite, to disconnect from place.
Disconnecting oneself to connect. It links to my previous two posts about being away from reality, whilst still being in it. It is like looking through a telescope to study what is inside instead of what is physically far. Instead of emulating what the site is as a response, we contradict it till there's no sense of the site at all. Yet that's the connection. Hmm, it is so hard to put my thoughts into words now. But it made sense to me.
