Compiled View

Water and Old Stones

This entry is part of the first collective blog on place that is being organized through the Ecotone Wiki. We are all writing, today, about what led us to think and write about place. The wiki can be edited by anyone, so please join in if you'd like!

In November 1991, recovering from a marriage that began in Cambridge, England, and ended in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I went to Venice (Italy, not California). I had travelled quite a bit, but I had never taken myself on vacation before--I had never been alone in a new place recreationally--and I equipped myself with a notebook, some rolls of Tri-X, and contingency plans to visit friends near Milan in case I got too lonely.

Foreigners have been making the pilgrimage to Venice since at least medieval times and have written exhaustively, sometimes well, mostly not, about this unique city. Rather than oppressing me, this knowledge was quite liberating: I was absolved of the need to say anything original whatsoever. What I did not expect, though, was how great a teacher Venice would be in the art of opening my eyes.

I anticipated writing, introspectively, finding myself (whatever that means), basically wallowing in this somewhat decaying, watery city of boats and old stone. The act of walking and seeing and looking and walking some more became more joyful and exciting with each step (and there I was, hoping for some good old-fashioned melancholy!). Every street held a surprise, each canaletto reflected a minor balcony above it, every photograph was perfectly pre-framed by the city. Take nothing, nothing at face value, look harder, she whispers. It's a mask. Look behind the wall, up the stair. In the boatsheds by the water... It's so trite, it's so unoriginal, but it's so true: Venice is a magical city. She's also by far the most prominent personality in her own history (which could never be said of, say, Florence).

My journal scribblings were hastily reworked one afternoon in my tiny hotel room as I pored over them. They can get organized differently! I need not be tyrannized by dates! There are themes! Burano is not Murano because... Torcello watches them all from afar... Venice is like an abalone shell... I dashed out that evening on the vaporetto to buy some blue hand-marbled paper and I began taking photographs differently: I was going to make my first artist's book.

I did not neglect the oceans of Tintorettos but found myself getting impatient to head back outside, to see the light at ten, noon, three, six... to see the fishermen coming in from the lagoon. To see the women negotiating the floods on rickety planks during the aqu'alta without ever getting their expensive shoes wet. To watch how this city just HELD itself in its setting, in its history, in the tragicomic knowledge of its future demise. In its place.

I have the Venice Book, still, a large and unwieldy affair with a blue calfskin spine (inexpertly thinned with a skiving knife) and an italic calligraphy whose spikiness makes me wince, just a little. The photographs stand up twelve years later, though. Whenever I see the book I relive that tiny epiphany in that tiny room.

The question as posed -- How I Started Thinking About Place, And Why I Started Writing About It -- tempts me to start cataloging a list of thank-yous, academy-award style, to places I have known that have taught me, well, place--the pre-Roman ruins at Tiermes in Spain, the Cotswold rookeries, the salt marsh between Cohasset and Scituate, Massachusetts. But for me the writing came first, and Venice taught me the connection between them. By writing I learned to think about place, which in turn made me SEE it. And the cycle continues... looking makes me listen, makes me alive to the infinite transformations around me that make a place THIS place.

Of Space and Place

Here is another entry for today's collective set of weblog posts for our Ecotone wiki. Excerpts from these posts can be found here.

A year ago last November, it was late in the afternoon in a meeting in Houston on Internet map services, and drifting off, I wrote the following tanka:

The division, which my little poem hints at, between modern spatial technologies and the almost mystical striving for awareness of a particular locality is what is leading me to write about place. As somebody professionally involved with the former, I find I need the latter for balance.

I have always been interested in natural history, and aware of the long tradition of natural history writing. This led me to study zoology in college and for awhile in graduate school before realizing I wasn't meant to have a career as an evolutionary biologist. My search for another discipline to enter led me to geography. Why not? I liked the holism of the field, and have loved maps since the beginning (the tale is that I taught myself to read at age three or so from studying maps). I could combine interests in conservation, maps and mapping, and computing, by working on geographic information systems.

But I also began to read more widely in geography, and learned about the humanistic side of geography in addition to the technical side in which I was specializing. Authors such as the landscape historian John Stilgoe and his teacher J.B. Jackson became favorites of mine. My old interests in natural history thus expanded to wondering about the cultural meanings of a landscape.

The danger in our modern world of geodatabases, remote sensing technologies, and GPS mapping tools with sub-meter accuracies, is that what cannot be conveniently georeferenced and placed in computer maps gets forgotten about. These spatial tools are eminently technologies for the managerial mindset, designed to support the archetypal 'decision-maker'. Lost here is any notion of place as narrative, or place as history.

I was always one for a saunter anyway. As John Stilgoe puts it, cycling along at 11 miles an hour is an ideal way to explore the landscape (at such a speed one can gaze straight through picket fences), and wandering on bicycle or foot is deep in my bones. If every place has tales, trying to write them down is a worthy way to bring them to light.