The geography of the American West never received an official designation; during the first two hundred years

of settlement it was simply the direction all traveled in order to arrive in the New World. A direction alone is insignificant; it is so far beyond any meaning that to call it meaningless would be an insinuation that it actually possessed some meaning that accuser was but denying. Even in a time when the average mind was conditioned to expect and decipher symbols of every imaginable variety in just as many media whether in the environment: solar, lunar, stellar, meteorological; or transmitted through the behaviors of other people, those who voyaged across the Atlantic Ocean were children of a time writhe of a dangerous imagination. If any group of people from any time were capable of imbuing the west with conceptual substance and thus creating a true West it was these people who populated North America during the 17th and 18th centuries. And yet these people who were so prone to the ludicrous, who searched the land for signs from their God telling them what to do while overlooking the impulses of their dire necessities, who expected spirits and demons to haunt the savage wilderness they intended to make their home and were surprised when the devil seemed to beat them to a place previously unknowing of and unknown to the Devil, people whose very identity was defined by a crucifixthe only other common thread that all settlers shared aside from their mutual direction of travelthese very masters of magical thinking cast the very spells from which they would later find the evidence to prove every one of their absurd fears were dangerous ignorants and their damage can still be found today on the tarnished souls of the pompous who preach knowledge of unknowable things and learn to the detriment of everyone through their fraudulent induction of truth beginning with as they do with their beliefs first which are immune to reason, the unholy hallmark of modernitythese are the people who for all the naught it did them possessed an imagination of broad horizons suited to myth making despite their paralytic devotion to and penchant for oppression. They could have envisioned a West within the west. But they did not. The West at its most impotent and barren was not born until the first years of the 19th century. One could argue that the West has never been anything more than the west; the West represents a however, to acknowledge the existence of these two distinct notions is to extend a tacit affirmation that there are, has always been and should always be two wests, one proper and one casualcarrying a chargeborrowing from Whether resplendent as the domicile of the Hesperides or foreboding as the vestibule of the underworld what both myths have in common is the notion that the West is otherworldly; the before and after to the realm in which all life smolders in frailty. August 31, 2007 West is the way of rebellion and death. It is the road outlaws and barbarians ride alike. Some say our surroundings reflect who we are. By this sentiment the West is villainous because to it outlaws flee and there an underworld bulges. But just as the criminal sees the west as rich in opportunity and poor in regulation, the west sees the criminal in return. The West rebels itself against Nature. It is bucking wild and nigh untameable. The West rejects a master and fears a mistress. The West is protean and recidivistic.