You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Moving forward, you kick aside a dog-eared notebook, stained with coffee and rain. You pick it up and leaf through its warped pages. The volume is filled with curious scratchy drawings of what appear to be tiny homes. Many of them are on wheels, and look like they could careen down a bumpy road at any moment. Scrawled notes lie along arrows that point out various features of these dwellings.
Flipping to the the back of the book, you find the writer has tried to explain the word polymecca. The writer sets the stage: It is a spring night in New Mexico two decades ago, there is a car, the writer’s girlfriend is at the wheel, the writer ensconced in a sleepy daze in the passenger seat of the old Corolla station wagon. Peter Gabriel’s Passion wafts from the tape deck. The writer awakes from a wordless dream, and sees the word polymecca float out to him – quite clearly – from the previously innocent glove compartment.
The meaning of the word, too, is uncovered in the notebook’s undulating writing: polymecca is a sense of being many-homed, of holy places being found everywhere, the sacred indicated not by place or by direction, but by travel and movement.
You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.