Bi-Weekly Topic for July 1, 2003
Monday, June 30, 2003
by Cassandra Pages 
ECOTONE TOPIC for 7/01/03: How are we defined and shaped by the place we live?
The first twenty-five years of my life were spent in the rural, dairy country of central New York State. For the second twenty-five I’ve lived in Vermont and New Hampshire, also in fairly rural areas, but ones that had different landscapes and social personalities from rural New York. That was true when I moved here, but today this place has become far more influenced and pressured by urban sensibilities than the one where I grew up. I’ve taken on some of the characteristics of my adopted home, but I think I remain, at my core, a product of the place I was born and an alien here – well-adapted and content, but alien all the same.
Everybody comments – or used to, when it was more homogeneous – on the laconic nature of New Englanders: there are hundreds of jokes about the “aye-yup” that’s all you get for a positive response when doing your best to start a conversation, or the way new neighbors up here don’t say much, or drop by, or even ask you over – although they’ll always show up in an emergency. Coming from a place that is far more Midwestern in hospitality and open friendliness, I remember being shocked at first when my naturally friendly overtures got so little response. After a while, when the natives figure out that you’re staying, there’s a thaw leading to acceptance and affection, but even after living here half my lifetime I know I’ll never feel native – despite the fact that my ancestors came from here back in the late 1700s!
I’ve been wondering about how the land shapes its overlying social fabric. Life was certainly no less hard for the early colonists of New England than for the folks who traveled a few hundred miles west. People needed each other just as much. But the land here is so different: the valleys narrower; the mountains higher and more difficult to cross; the rivers wide and filled with difficult falls; the climate harsher; the earth rockier; wells harder to dig; and the growing season considerably shorter.
On a macro-level, travel and (practically everything else) was difficult. So was building an infrastructure. Actually, there are a lot of dirt roads here still, and many of them aren’t maintained or passable in the winter. Paved roads suffer a lot of damage every year from frost heaves, so it’s understandable why they aren’t built unless absolutely necessary.
On a micro-level, it’s even difficult to see your neighbors here, except of course if you live in town. The way the land is shaped, you don’t always get clear sightlines across a broad open field to your neighbor’s house or barn; there are always woods in-between, and hills, and rocks. Nothing is flat, or even rolling, especially, and the bony skeleton of the earth is always sticking up a shoulder or elbow right in your way. So while there’s a long tradition here of cooperative barn-raisings and town meetings, I think the land had a lot to do with forcing people into self-sufficiency and a private pride that shaped speech patterns and social interaction.
Back in central New York, there aren’t mountains. The sky is bigger, travel easier, and you can’t help but see your neighbors. My great-aunt and grandmother told of constant “visiting” between members of the extended family, spread over the same hills and valley, and they knew every neighbor – and every neighbor’s idiosyncrasies, as well as their horses and dogs.
Things haven’t changed that much back there. People drop in constantly, and you know everybody’s business because people talk to each other, and because social life is central in a place where people tend to stay put. But also, I think, you can see what people are up to. As a result, excessive desire for personal privacy or unwillingness to “be social” is seen as aloofness or quirkiness. Instead being left alone, people like that tend to be coaxed or teased into interaction. Likewise, there’s almost no tolerance for dishonesty, secrecy, or phoniness because it’s quickly discovered and exposed.
In the case of central New York, not many people move in or out. Those who come do so because they want that kind of environment – or they quickly leave when they find out they’ve moved to a fish bowl where joining the “school” is a lot more important and acceptable than being a big fish. But up here in northern New England, the tradition of privacy is now attracting a certain kind of wealthy person who is escaping urban life. They already feel separate and, often, superior, so why should they want to enter into a community – especially one which seems diffuse and hard to understand? They want their big house on top of the hill, or at the end of a long winding driveway. The land offers them what they want, and they have the money to buy its beauty and the privacy it affords; if it costs a small fortune to drill a well through ledge, or construct a half-mile driveway up a mountain, that’s simply not a problem.
For a decade or two, these immigrants to New England have been a minority, lacking power in local politics and eventually retreating into isolation or adapting to the underlying culture. But now it’s changing. The influx of so many suburban and urban escapees into certain areas is creating demand for sophisticated services and products: a transplantation of urban amenities. The best valley farmland is now worth far more as condominiums and office complexes; box stores with national franchises fill sprawling malls and empty the traditional downtowns; and growers, bakers, and crafters bring their products to fancy “farmers’ markets” on Saturdays – a favorite “quaint” place for the new residents to bring family and friends visiting from the city.
New residents often come here for good jobs in technology, medicine, and education in a place that’s beautiful but not uncomfortably far from major East coast cities. Like so many Americans, they don’t grow roots and stay a lifetime. In our area, the average stay for these migratory residents is seven years. I doubt if they are comforted, really, by the natural landscape, although they may admire it. For so many, what seems to be comforting and grounding is the created landscape of malls and interior spaces that look, feel, taste and sound alike everywhere.
Yesterday we drove in back of yet another giant concrete box, going up in a field above the river. I used to watch great blue herons there, and once a bald eagle – now it’s an asphalt desert, and a memory.
The land used to shape and define us. Now we’re shaping the land.
How We Are Defined and Shaped By the Place We Live
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)Thinking about this question on the plane from Philadelphia to Sacramento over the weekend threw me into a panic. Why?
Because: I'm not, I don't think.
I'm sure, at least, I'm not defined by the places I've lived: not by Davis, nor by Santa Barbara, nor by Cambridge, Massachusetts, nor Cambridge England, nor Paris, nor Birmingham (UK, university), nor Montpellier (junior year abroad), nor Derbyshire (boarding school), nor Madrid, nor least of all by Tiburon, Tiburon in Marin County, California, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where I spent the first five years of my life.
I have two passports. One corresponds to the country of my birth; the other to the nationality of my father (British). It's handy, this land/blood dichotomy: it opens up the world to you as a place to live and work. It also left me at an early age with an identity crisis: I was always defined by somewhere OTHER than where I was actually living, especially in Spain where no matter what we did or wore or ate or said we were always, ALWAYS foreigners. Even today, my hybrid accent sets me apart (I'm well aware it also confers on me a certain status in this country of rampant, albeit often undeserved, Anglophilia).
Being a "Permanent Expatriate" (sometimes I think I should have this stamped on my forehead) is quite different from the experience of being a refugee. Refugees have few choices. They are at the mercy of the authorities of the places they end up in, where the culture is often completely alien, the language is different, the food, climate, customs, expectations, manners, plants, landscapes, buildings, graphic design, EVERYTHING--everything that combines to make a place what it is to inhabit--is unfamiliar. It is very hard for mainstream American culture to understand the unwillingness of certain ethnic groups (the Hmong, for example, who fled Laos in the aftermath of the Vietnam war having fought and died for the CIA with the promise of a new life in the U.S. and who have settled in large numbers in the Central Valley of California) to assimilate. Why, this is the melting pot! We welcome all comers! Bring us your weary, your destitute...
Only, of course, it's not really true, is it. Bring us your white, well-educated, well-spoken, polite, PRODUCTIVE, portfolio-endowed, expatriates in ones-and-twos and we'll be welcoming and admire your nice British accents. Otherwise, we'll growl. We'll inflict our cumbersome bureaucracy on you. You'll have to wait in long lines in emergency rooms and we'll make you walk through nightmarish hoops to get your food stamps. We'll give you work, maybe, and then at minimum wage. And when we wave our American flags in your face by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands, or by the millions, you'd better cheer and holler (even when we bomb your country of origin) or we'll place you under surveillance.
There is little doubt, though, that the places I've lived have somehow contributed to who I am today, the kind of person who might produce the above rant, for example. The kind of person who might subsequently feel it important to apologize for it (being half English means you often have to preface a question with the word "sorry," as in "sorry, would you mind if I opened the window?"). And the kind of person who could segue, neatly, into a parallel track, one which is far less likely to cause offense.
Such as:
The connecting thread in my life for all the places I've lived and even visited has been birds. The birds of Europe are very different from the birds of North America, but they're all birds, and they don't know or care what passports I carry. I look at birds while I'm walking, bicycling, driving, or riding a train. The sight of a flock of white-faced ibis that flew southwest over Sacramento Airport on Saturday evening as I waited for the shuttle brought the first smile to my lips after landing--saying, I suppose, I'm home. Home. Not the home of flag-waving bigots, the home of the white-faced ibis. The home they share with me. The home I will fight to protect -- the landscape that is falling piece by piece to developers of tract houses.
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/06/30/how_we_are_defin.html
Comments:
Birmingham? England? MI? AL?
I understand your bird-bond. For me, it is wildflowers, that, fortunately, are much the same throughout the southern Appalachians where I have migrated to find 'home' a half-dozen times (with my roots in Bham, AL). While not as vagile as birds, to be sure, they show up in upexpected places and bring a smile that only I understand. And maybe you would, as well?
Posted by: fred1st at July 1, 2003 07:30 AM
England. Thanks. I'll fix that...
Yes, I think the smile's the same.
Posted by: Pica at July 1, 2003 08:51 AM
I'm fixed on the geology, myself, the pressures that tumble mountains from their lofty heights, the weather that lacerates them, the crawl of the continents at a rate equal to the growth of your fingernails, and uplifts caused when the earth abcesses and a boil forms. The soil determines the patterns on the hills and the the plant life determines what niches are available for the plants, the insects, the birds, the mammals, and the fungus -- all living things.
Posted by: Joel at July 1, 2003 05:35 PM
God can I relate to your post! I am a German/ Filipino/ African-American who grew up in the Japan, the US, and Germany. Like you I have never really felt defined by any one place, but rather somewhat detached and completely involved all at the same time with every place I've lived in or visited. The feeling of being a "foreigner" everywhere I've been, especially Japan, but even the US, where Americans just can't seem to understand that I am not the same as them and that I have no wish to be part of any "melting pot". (It's sort of the opposite of when some African Americans insist they are African, when in fact they have never been to Africa and if they had they would find that culturally they are completely alien).
One time I was having a deep conversation with a good American friend who kept insisting that I had to carry some sort of idntification with *some* place, that I couldn't just live my life seeing myself as aimless all the time. It was an emotional discussion, and not without some heated responses, simply because this sense of identity is essential to all of us and when someone treads on it, it hurts, especially when that sense of identity has never been defined. However, that day an interesting thing happened: while we were talking, my friend brought out a globe, the kind you keep on your desk. I was dumbstruck. I turned to the photograph of the Earth that she kept over her desk and pointed at it: "There, that's where I belong. That's my home and where I identify with." I promptly broke down weeping. It was quite overwhelming to discover where you belong if you've never felt you belonged anywhere.
But, like you, it has always been the animals, especially birds and insects, that have knitted places together for me. The first thing I do when I visit a new place is to get up at dawn and go for a walk. I listen for the new sounds of birds and peer at tree bark or leaves to find insects that I can name. With the gained familiarity of newly discovered birds, a place settles into something less ethereal. Birds make a place real, especially their calls.
Spain still comes to my mind as the place where Pallid Swifts and Alpine Chough live; the Shetlands "Maalies" (Fulmars), Gannets, and "Bonxies" (Great Skuas); Singapore Black-naped Orioles, Greater Coucals, and Pied Fantails; Japan Azure-winged Magpies, Brown-eared Bulbuls, and Rufous Turtle Doves. All these birds have drawn me into these places and I became part of them.
Posted by: butuki at July 1, 2003 07:45 PM
But Pica, of course you are shaped by place, exactly as the birds are.
Rather than rootedness, you have been shaped by the tropes of migration, flight, bones full of air, feathers of hope.
The ironic impermanence of nesting.
The citizens of nowhere, dependant on every stop they make for sustainance and rest.
I get it...beautiful.
Posted by: Chris at July 1, 2003 11:37 PM
I really enjoyed your post and connected with aspects of it. It's so important for all our different experiences to be accounted for and in our own words. Loved the connections with birds too. There's a number of bird aware persons in the wiki. Thanks for being so outspoken, clear and direct.
Posted by: Coup de Vent at July 2, 2003 10:45 AM
Maybe people who aren't tied to their places through heritage or "patriotism" see their places in a more bare bones way. They form easier attachments with the natural, non-cultural signs of home. You drove this point home to me with "Not the home of flag-waving bigots, the home of the white-faced ibis." I've had this feeling too, but you put it in words for me.
Posted by: Wendy at July 2, 2003 04:50 PM
Creatures feel connected to place because they can feed off of it and take shelter in it. The snowy egret walks the tall grasses, sometimes even in the dry around here, because this is where it can find food and this is where it can hide.
Humans, perhaps, have lost that direct connection to the food-bearing properties of place. What's a grocery store compared to a marsh? Perhaps we invented stories on the day that we moved into a house and had food brought to us instead of eating it in the bush.
A wild fantasy, not especially accurate, but evocative.
Posted by: Joel at July 4, 2003 01:03 AM
Human Cormorant
By Pax NortonaEcotone Topic for July 1: How are we defined and shaped by the place where we live?
Rude me thinks of stumping Socrates with the counter-question: “Define definition.”
I don’t see the place I live as a definer but more of a limiter. Right now temperatures are in the seventies and it is a little after three in the morning. The climate contributes to my decision to be up at this hour: during the day the sun infiltrates the Spanish tile roof and bakes whatever is inside. The cats sprawl on the floor, barely conscious of where they are. I take benadryl, xanax, and do the siesta thing when our stucco broiler runs on high.
I’m neither this address nor is this address me. We’re converging facts 
and when we brush against each other, we make changes. Where I sleep, where I shop, where I take my walks depend on what is near to this place, to a large degree, but then I have decided to prefer places that are nearer to me. I do more to my extreme locality — the wall where I hang my silly stuff, the top of the monitor where I have five Chinese boddhisatvas helping me, the desk where I lose things. We kept the paint and the wallpaper that was here when we moved in: we plan to replace the horizontal Venetian blinds with vertical slat blinds so that the cats can move between them and the window without destroying them.
My effects on the larger landscape are much more subtle: our cars contribute to the haze over Mount Santiago. This typing may disturb a skunk or a raccoon who is wandering through the complex. Our trash gets taken away to an unseen landfill. I’m not just shaping this place, in my own small way, but I am shaping sites beyond my vision, my hearing, my sense of smell, my taste, my touch. I am one of millions in this moon-shaped plain running from the Santa Monica Mountains to Camp Pendleton. I’m a human cormorant, discharging my guano, whiting the landscape.
Someone throw me a fish, please. Salmon is nice.
Comments:
fredf Says:
July 1st, 2003 at 7:40 am
I have some sardines with Louisianna Hot Sauce.. will that do? And do come to my garden with that whiting, I hear it is great fertilizer. And: how far away is the hill in the photo?
July 1st, 2003 at 4:44 pm
The “hill” is Mount Santiago, which is nearly 6000 feet high and located about ten miles from me as the crow flies.
July 2nd, 2003 at 6:50 am
Great image, Joel. Cormorants are great because they operate in salt, brackish, or fresh water, highly adaptable and unruffled. Except maybe by Santa Ana’s…
July 2nd, 2003 at 12:32 pm
I’m enjoying the irreverent responses to the subject. It does make you think and question. Glad to have happened upon your musings. Especially liked the description of the desk area….
Shaped by Place
By Fragments of FloydIt is the year 1803. I am a Scots-Irish immigrant seeking independence and a few hundred acres to farm, so that I might carry on the traditions of my ancestors, in the western wilderness of America. I hold here a handbill stating that there is cheap land available in far western Virginia, along the New River. And everything I will do and where I will go and how I will get where I am going... all of these are determined by the nature of the place. The pitch and grade of the primitive trail determines where I can and cannot go as I move generally westward. And it limits the size and weight of my wagon, and therefore the belongings I can bring with me. The weather and season effects when my animals can find browse, when dry paths will allow travel, when I must seek shelter or die. My destination of three hundred acres of my choosing on the newly acquired Indian lands will be absolutely mandated by the nature of the place: where will I and my animals find water; how does the land lie for crops, can my oxen clear the forest; is the soil rich and deep; and where will the staples that I cannot make or produce myself come from? From day to day, once I arrive and over the years make my home, my life and livelihood will be determined by the nature of place: I must have a lover's knowledge of every fold and hillock and holler around me, because it is from this physical place that I kill game for food, find herbs for medicine, select just the right kind of wood for the tools I craft in order to survive. Place determines whether I live or die, and I respect it's limitations, honor it's provision and will spend a lifetime living in an uneasy balance with it and seeking to understand it.
_____________________________
It is the year 2003. I am the direct descendent of the settler from two hundred years ago. I live near where my ancestors settled in Southwest Virginia. His notions of dependence on the providence of place is foreign to me, neolithic and repugnant. To assume that place shapes us and constrains us in any way is to acknowledge that there are forces or conditions imposed on us by our physical surroundings. This is a very alien and archaic way of thinking in our modern age of freedom from the effects of place upon people. In my day, it is place that is subject, and places that are being changed, shaped, altered by our living here, as we think best. This is the modern way of thinking about place. If there is a mountain where we want a city, we take it down. If there is a stream where we want a road, we divert it into underground pipes. We modify and control every aspect about where we live... our microclimate, ambient noise, the texture and color and order of everything from our clothing outward... to suit our vary narrow tolerance of comfort and preference and pleasure. Indeed, it is this capacity to alter and control our place, our world at all levels for efficiency, economy and predictability that epitomizes mankind's ultimate conquest and dominion over his environment. We need accept none of the givens of where on the earth we live as my forefather was obliged to do, since nature is subject to our whims and malleable to the power of our technologies. What higher good is there than this, than to be free of the constraints of place?
______________________________
How we think about place has undergone a sea change in two hundred years. Basic human biology and the fundamental workings of nature have not. We have allowed ourselves to be dulled to complacency by the prevailing political hubris that the health of humanity is measured more by the economic than biological yardstick. This is a dangerous delusion to which we have succumbed. I fear for our future if the physical world... our forests, parks, seashores, prairies, pastures and woodlots...continues over the next two hundred years to be reduced to nothing more than a quaint backdrop for SUV commercials or pleasant scenery for our brief vacations away from the narrow comforts of our manmade cocoons.
I am pleased we are asking this question of how place shapes us. And answers will come from a better understanding of our dual role as both object and subject in regard to place... learning how to better live in it, and let it live in us. Our ancestor of 200 years ago understood his physical, emotional, spiritual and re-creational needs and attachments to place that we poorly understand, but can reclaim.
Source: http://www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com/fragments/2003/07/shaped_by_place.html
Comments:
Fred: it's amazing how you get this landscape to have a *personality*. I hope you will keep this in mind as you get your book together: it's very compelling. The personality shifts depending on the viewer--depending on the viewer's era--but it doesn't disappear. Good work.
Posted by: Pica | July 1, 2003 08:39 AM
I cannot read the first portion without my mind tagging on a brogue. Then the tone changes, subtley yet undeniably. And then, again you come in with a bit to say that is still different in tone than the rest. Three completely different voices. I think I will be shaking my head on that one for some time. "How did he DO that"? :)
Having read a number of these responses to the "about place" question, I find it interesting that quite consistently the reader learns more about the internal landscape of the writer than the external. And I've noticed a similarity in personality among the folks who think themselves the least defined by place. I did not expect the emotional responses this question has provoked. It's really interesting and thank you for making it so easy for us non-writing blogger-people to participate.
Posted by: lisa | July 2, 2003 09:20 AM
Hi Fred,
Found the style as well as the content really engaging. I guess we are writing as generations of experience and it's good to find ways of releasing that, letting it through.....
Posted by: Coup de Vent | July 2, 2003 03:39 PM
There is a different take on place in NPR's Susan Stamberg's collection of interview excerpts, "Talk". In her introduction to a conversation with Tom Wolfe (January 1978), she writes, "Always, on a story, we look for natural ambient sound that we can record to give listeners a sense of place." And, later, "Sounds ought to be distinctive to a place...."
Posted by: Cop Car |
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
By London and the NorthHow I am I shaped or defined by the place(s) I live in
(Participating in The Ecotone: Writing about Place)
At the weekend I went to a conference called Not Just a Change of Address. It was for people whose parents had survived the holocaust. It was interesting to hear anecdotes of how others live their lives affected by the stories or lack of them about what happened.
When I was at art college I made a painting, a self portrait, larger than life size and in black and white. It may have been my first self portrait. I drew myself staring directly into the camera - without any clothes except my running shoes. Ready. Ready to run.
When I first moved up north a few years ago I was unsettled and found the weekly train trips to London quite unnerving. I just wanted to stay put and put down some roots. Instead I felt forced to get on a train and go. With time the panicky feelings as the train doors shut subsided. Now I enjoy my trips to London. My rucksack is a temporary home.
I bought this rucksack in 1988. It is my most preferred address. My security blanket. I can carry almost my entire world in there.
Left pocket:
Cheque book, tickets, sunglasses
Middle Pocket:
Three kinds of pain killer, various other pills, mustard, toothbrush, pencil sharpener, pencils 3b, 6b and water soluble, an eraser, timetables, fountain pen, ink cartridges, tea bags, plasters, pain balm, lipsalve, spot make-up, keys
Right pocket:
Phone, reading glasses, hairbrush, spare batteries
Main Space:
Psion (or new laptop), cushion, tissues, water, fruit, underwear, sleeping t-shirt, fleece, sketchbook, reading matter, camera, diary
At home, in my living room, everything that can be plugged in is connected. And has its place. Therefore this is where I live. I can tell you which plug is for which appliance. And I like turning things on. And off. You can bring other worlds into your own small space. And then turn them out when youve had enough and want to be alone again.
Outside the house, there are several selves. In the village I am known as duck saver, ofcumden, dog owner and camera. At work locally I hide most aspects of myself and of my world. Up here, up north, there is little opportunity for a common language. I sometimes imagine that I could stop any number of people in the street in London, ask them for a paragraph about my lifestyle and values and they would give quite credible responses. Up here, the landscape is exquisite but culturally unfamiliar and sparsely populated with familiar others. I have found myself creating a mental landscape populated with all those I admire dead or alive, famous or known to me. They are those with chutzpah, critique, concern, creativity, challenge. They know at least part of what I face in all these different environments. Mobile support wherever I am. My true home, where I feel I most comfortably belong, is on that map.
Comments:
Lovely post CdeV. I like the bounce between spaces and the inner space of the rucksack that accompanies you to the various arenas of your identity.
Posted by Chris(www) at 1:17 2/7/2003
English mustard actually. If I've not got food with me and need to buy 'train food' when I'm en route it can be so utterly bland. Tasteless. So mustard helps.
Posted by Coup de Vent(www) at 9:15 2/7/2003
Mustard is exactly what I wondered too. Thanks Chris.
I love the "poised to run" image. Also the counterpart of your ability to blend into the background in London but not in Yorkshire and your choice to be in these two places almost simultaneously. Or perhaps choice is the wrong word? Drive? Need? Wot?
Posted by Pica(www) at 15:33 2/7/2003
I enjoyed looking inside your rucksack and your apartment. What you say at the end, about belonging on the map of your own choosing and creation, really hits home with me. You express the feeling very nicely and uniquely.
Posted by Wendy(www) at 0:51 3/7/2003
Source: http://airenet.co.uk/alife/2003_07_01_archives.html#105709895461753472
How are we defined and shaped by the place we live?
by Other WindThis question is a hard one for me to answer, for two reasons. First, I’ve lived in several places— suburban mid-sized towns, a real “suburb” of a large city, a small city. North. South. Homogenous. Multi-Cultural. So, I haven’t had one place erode me into form over many years. However, I think being submersed in the cultural habitats of several types of places and of different regions has made me more open and curious. It has made me more comfortable with change and left me the ability to greet new situations with hope and ease. Also, experiencing a diverse range of places has made me more aware of oversimplification and prejudice. I can’t say that I never fall prey to stereotyping, especially in regards to cultures and places I’ve never experienced, but at the very least I am aware of our tendency to oversimplify and prejudge. I observe this tendency on a regular basis living in the south, being not quite a Yankee but not southern born. I hear the stereotypes from both directions.
The other reason this question is a hard one for me is my relative youth. I can’t yet see how I’m being formed by my home in this Appalachian valley, in the small city of Knoxville. I haven’t lived here long enough, or lived long enough at all, I think, to have enough vantage. We can’t help but be formed, wherever we are, by the individuals we know, the culture that envelops us, and the moments through which we move. We are tied to place, since our activities and chances are tied to place. I’m still too close to see my big picture, but I know one is forming. So, I keep an eye out.
I can answer the question, however, on another level. Imagination is a vital force in my life. I spend a lot of time in my mind, or in the clouds, as a writer, a reader, and a daydreamer. My imagination formed in the woody mountains of West Virginia, when I was a child—when I had an unforced, unguarded, and unanalyzed connection with nature. The imagery of childhood is cradled in my brain as a gateway to imagination. The secret closeness of the woods. Quietness broken with leaves crushing under footsteps of my friend Todd and me. Crossing the barbed wire fence beyond the hilltop, invisible in the trees until it’s right in front of us, not knowing what lies on the other side. Damp leaves dusting air with scent, covering. Snowy hillsides. Clutching saplings in dry dirt to keep afoot on the way downhill. These scenes mark my birth as a pretender, as a person lost in fantasies of her own making. They have settled into the sediment of my mind’s fertile ground. I am tied to the feeling of those woods—those hiding places of branches and slopes, where I could never see very far but had so much to see up close.
Comments:
Wendy, I agree that age does change our vantage point regarding place, as Beth and I (the ruling elders in the Ecotone group) have remarked to each other. Perhaps a future biweekly: Age and Place?
Posted by: fredf on July 1, 2003 09:04 PM
"not quite a Yankee but not southern born": this is a very interesting concept, Wendy. I'm curious to hear more, from you and others, about what that means in American culture--I mean I know on some level, but I'm outside it. I was thinking about this kind of thing in relation to California, which is not the West, but west of the West--and how so many of us writing about place seem to find ourselves in borderlands, either geographical or imaginative. Perhaps this is a necessary element in being able to see place at all?
Posted by: Pica on July 2, 2003 09:56 AM
I'm starting to think that there are a lot of Ecotonites out there in the woods - a spiritual home! I feel that the things you addressed in the last paragraph are very rich and I look forward to reading more at some points.
Posted by: Coup de Vent on July 2, 2003 03:52 PM
Source: http://otherwind.fademark.net/archives/000304.html#000304
Natal Aesthetic
by Feathers of Hope (Numenius)This is another post for today's collective blogging endeavor at the Ecotone Wiki.
I travel with the image of the place I grew up in. The house -- built on a slope, with five half-levels descending from the front entrance, stairs opening to a church-like living room resplendent in wood, beams peaking to ceiling nearly twenty feet tall, the deck at back overlooking a little canyon where I could scramble and slide to the creek below through toyon and fallen oak leaves with spines that always got you. The streets winding along the contours of the hills, interconnected by many dozens of paths cutting straight down, their steps often now warped and broken by the processes of soil creep and tectonic movement. And a canyon but twenty minutes away on foot where I could walk in solitude and wildness for hours and miles. It is a walker's landscape, a landscape where the winter greening of the ridge across the canyon from my grammar school spoke of possibilities -- not to mention hikes where boots would get all sticky with clay.
The Berkeley Hills landscape I describe, I now know came about through an early twentieth-century aesthetic and image of place, the Arts and Crafts movement finding its way into California architecture and urban design. The house I grew up in was designed by Bernard Maybeck, whose work stressed organic form. Maybeck was an important figure in Bay Area architecture and a founding member of the Berkeley Hillside Club which had a large role in the layout of the streets and houses of North Berkeley. The paths of Berkeley, which I would follow on innumerable meanders, were an integral part of an urban landscape designed before the popularity of the automobile, their role being to provide rapid pedestrian access to the electric trolleys of the Key Route System running up the several main streets into the hills. And though many battles would be fought along the way, something about the culture of this aesthetic movement together with the nascent environmentalism of John Muir and kindred souls would eventually ferment in the remarkable preservation of so much open space in the Bay Area.
I carry this image with me; indeed it defines the sort of place I aspire to live in. A house, not a large one, built with character and craft. Places to roam -- a walker's landscape, not one solely for the automobile. Nature, both in the backyard and nearby. Hills to climb, cycle up, and cycle down. And when I fancy myself an inheritor of the Arts and Crafts tradition, I needn't look far from home to realize why.
Comments:
You know the Carolina hills and forest. Did you feel closed in by this? Was the heavy forest comforting or claustrophobic, coming from a place so different? Just wondering about your experience 'out East' back in your salamander-hunting days.
Posted by: fredf at July 2, 2003 03:54 AM
Hmmm. I checked out some of the links and they were interesting. Also interesting to hear about the politics of access to the countryside. The London tube promoted its early development heavily on easy access to the countryside surrounding London. Now it's all built up suburbs. Have you got pics to show of the house you grew up in or your arts and crafts influence at home now?
Posted by: Coup de Vent at July 2, 2003 10:40 AM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/07/01/natal_aesthetic.html
How are we shaped by the place where we live?
By under the fire starThe people at Ecotone: Writing About Place decided to write today about 'How are we defined and shaped by the place where we live?' If anyone would like to write on this topic, they are welcome to add a link to the Ecotone site. The page for this topic is here. I began to write about this, and then wondered whether I could really say anything at all. It's just a beginning.
The first thing about this place is that it is in the tropics. It is hot here, all year round. We are fortunate to be able to run the air-conditioners every single day of the year. (That may not always be possible - India relies on imported oil, and the price of electricity has been soaring.) The vast majority of the people here cannot shut their windows and turn on the air-conditioner - they wait for the sea-breeze to set in and give them some relief. In America I loved to walk. Here, I stand at the window looking out.
The second thing is water: this place is always on the border between having just enough and not enough water. It is dependent on the two annual monsoons, which sometimes fail. The groundwater resources have been severely strained by over-use. Here on the edge of the sea, as fresh groundwater is depleted, sea-water is beginning to push in. Our well water is more brackish every year. Some of the plants in the garden are well-adapted to brackish water; the more delicate ones have died or are dying. The preciousness of water is always on my mind. I worry about it, try not to waste it. When I visit America, I see water gushing out of taps, left open while people chat. I see people drinking tap water directly, without boiling it first! I've forgotten these luxuries. (Even as I write this I'm worried, because no water has come through the city pipes into our underground tank for the last two days. I'm afraid we'll have to start buying water by the truckload again. That water is pumped out of suburban wells. The quality is uncertain, the water is expensive, the trucks tear up the city roads.)
To these most elemental facts, add human beings. There are so many of them. Too many for the land or the sea to support, and yet, somehow, they scrape by. They are adapted. I'm like one of the fancy plants which are dying out of our garden. I am expensively watered, fed and temperature-controlled. I am always aware of this.
In the morning I looked out the window at a bougainvillea in brilliant bloom by the gate. I went out with my camera to photograph it. The street was empty except for a knife sharpener, who carried his grinding apparatus and called out the name of his trade. As he passed me he said, "Grinding?" I shook my head. I recently read that this trade is dying out as better knives have become cheaply available. I looked at him through the filter of the article. He walked in the sun, his green plaid lungi tucked up around his knees, the heavy wooden stand containing the grinder and a few knives for sale on his shoulder. I photographed the bougainvillea and went back inside, through the garden to the big house.
14.7.03 in Chennai |
Thoughts on place
By The Coffee SutrasThe question submitted to the Ecotone wiki group is "How are we defined and shaped by the place where we live?" I'm turning in my homework one day late. The cats ate my rough draft.
Nursing my penchant for making needless distinctions, being defined and being shaped strike me as two different processes. Each may operate simultaneously. And nursing a secondary tendency toward making sweeping generalizations, it seems to me that we might say that defining is a process that operates largely outside of ourselves, for purposes which may not be in accord with our intentions. Shaping, on the other hand, is at heart a creative process. While shaping, too, may operate outside ourselves, through factors we cannot control, at best this is a co-creative enterprise, in which we participate as artisans in making ourselves into something new.
Here's an example of defining: the place where I live is, most would say, a suburb. That has not stopped the combined city and county government, however, from classifying my neighborhood as part of the "urban services district." This means that we receive free garbage pickup and that we are on the city's primary water and sewage system. You could say that, from the vantage of local government, I have been defined by my capacity to produce waste. The fact that we make do with one small trashcan and dutifully recycle more than the city is willing to collect through its curbside recycling program does nothing to elevate our stature or change this definition.
In similar ways, I am defined as a parent at the local middle school for which my child is zoned, as a voter of a particular precinct, a patron of a particular post office, and a frequent customer of what I've come to call the Kroger in the Barrio. (We used to shop at the Kroger in the Hood.) These definitions may not seem relevant to the question posed, but I think they are: externally imposed definitions of who I am demographically, justified or not, have the effect of creating or negating my potential to make choices. If I want to cook Mexican, I'm in great shape. If I want to cook something Mediterranean, I've got to drive to a different part of town. If I want my child to go to a better public school I've either got to move or be sure she's got the grades to get her into the magnet school lottery. Then I've got to get lucky.
From the mundane (you are what you eat) to the profound (my role as a parent), place matters socially, politically, and economically. It's important to acknowledge these dimensions of place, the many voluntary or involuntary associations that come with occupying a certain tract of land. These associations bring out my inner anarchist.
When I think of being shaped by place, on the other hand, my mental associations are not as riling.
The dominant image that comes to mind is the clay vessel on a potter's wheel. I occupya fixed position, if I've been thrown correctly, at the same time that I am in motion. I am shaped gently by the hands of a potter who has committed, as I am committed, to bringing inner truths to outward form. In such a scenario, the potter, unknown to me except by the touch of her fingers; the clay, which has been dug from the earth, made particular, kneeded, worked with, and prepared; and the wheel that holds the world all collaborate in the process of creation. Artist and material become one, time drops away, everything that matters is herenow.
These are "flow" moments, and they are rare. In such moments, only the most localized space matters. I might discover the fingers of the potter reaching out from a lily, reaching downward pristine white from a weeping cherry, or resting as glaciers on a mountain. I've seen these fingers in the crosses on Iona, reflected as trees in the bowl of a lake, or burning with inner fire as a stick of incense.
If I had to I could probably count the moments when I have been one with and changed--irrevocably--by place. My spiritual interests may have been decided when I took my first communion in a Catholic church in a Buddhist country, living for two years as a child in Bangkok. They were confirmed and enlarged taking long walks on the land surrounding Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, a Shaker village, and again roaming the knobby hills that comprise much of the land owned by the Abbey of Gethsemani. Again, my contemplative nature may have been developed by moments of wonder gazing at mountain vistas while hiking the Appalachian Trail in Virginia, or of ecstasy observing the tides that beat against the rocks of coastal Maine, considering the way those waves have worn rock to smoothness. Here in the suburbs, I have fallen in love with particular trees, and mourned their passing, or have seen myself changing slowly with the changing light of each surprising season.
The place that forms me now, at this daybreak moment, is alive with birds and their sounds. Whether here or somewhere else, I've learned that what matters most is receptiveness. On a spinning wheel, I long for the potter's touch.
Posted by Kurt at 08:48 AM | Comments (4)
Comments:
I will have to reexamine my existence here through the lenses of 'shaping' and 'defining' as you have described them to see how this changes my point of view.
Posted by fredf at July 2, 2003 11:12 AM
I like to move between the political critique and the spiritual. And "inner anarchist" - isn't that the only option on your side of the Atlantic?!
Posted by Coup de Vent at July 2, 2003 02:58 PM
meant to say "the" move.....
Posted by Coup de Vent at July 2, 2003 02:59 PM
Your description of "flow" really resonates with me. I recently read the book "Finding Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, but never really thought about "flow moments" in connection with nature and place. Csikszentmihaly describes the flow that occurs when we are engaged with our work and our play, but the engagement he describes is an inward engagement, the kind in which artist become lost to time and the world outside. Your post has made me realize that some of my most cherished moments, moments in which I have become more a person of my own place, are moments in which I've had flow, or engagement and "receptivness," with my surroundings.
Posted by Wendy at July 2, 2003 06:26 PM
Source URL: http://web.archive.org/web/20030828141222/sainteros.com/weblog/archives/2003_07.html
A Dancing Flame
By Laughing Knees
Moosehead Lake at dawn, Maine, U.S.A., 1991
It's a little late, but I just discovered the wiki Ecotone: Writing About Nature and Place where there is an ongoing series of writing projects. The most recent topic is titled "How Are We Defined and Shaped by the Place We Live?" was due July 1st, but I want to see if I can still contribute to the discussion.
Back in elementary to high school, at St. Mary's International Boy's School, Tokyo, Japan, I was one of the "Others". This meant that those of us who belonged to this unofficial group basically didn't come from one of the significant countries, like America or Britain or Australia, or, to a lesser extent, even though we all lived here, Japan. Usually us Others had dark skin, we played soccer or table tennis, instead of the more macho basketball or wrestling, we ate weird food at the cafeteria tables, and we had to be sanctioned off into the "Non-Christian Religion" class, the other two being "Catholics" (the best denomination) and the "Protestants" (the tolerated denomination). Since a majority of the students hailed from Asia, Africa, and South America, the disproportionate weight of our numbers had to be counterbalanced by strict reference to the West as the basis of our education. We spent seven years studying American history, one year world history, six months Japanese history, six Chinese, and one year Roman history (in Latin, of course).
Now I wasn't the sort of person who kowtows to convention, and since I had enough conflict with the American and Australian bullies under the great camphor tree behind the school, I spent whatever time I had away from the school out in the fields and woods around Tokyo, hunting insects, kneeing through the susuki grass, and walking the trails around the rice paddies and the hills and mountains. This is where I was at peace and where the world made sense.
As a German/ Filipino/ only-discovered-at-twenty African American who grew up in Japan, the States, and Germany, who has been traveling since he was two, and was stateless until twelve years old, places as defined by humans, such as the arbitrary endowment of nationality or the invisible barriers of borders, never gave me any sense of belonging to a place. Even today the fervor that people build up in mindless displays of nationalism, such as the madness that seems to have overcome the U.S., makes no sense to me. The way I see it, the mobbing arises out of a herd mentality, each individual feeling safer with companions nearby and most importantly, companions with whom they are familiar. That these people declare American or British soil as the container of their identities seems, to me, to get the picture backward. Places have always seemed to work more as catalysts for identities; after all, the Native Americans developed a completely different world outlook from the immigrant Europeans, and even modern African Americans bear little resemblance to Africans from the continent, both culturally and often physically.
As I grow older Asian influences on the nature of existence and identity take greater and greater precedence in how I view myself. The Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist idea that the self is no more than an illusion, and that all of creation is but a flicker of a dream, makes sense and seems to explain a lot of the dilemma of body/ soul, life/death, mundane/heavenly, and human/ divine that Western philosophy seems unable to resolve. Buckminster Fuller put it succinctly: "I seem to be a verb". Lately I've begun to see myself, my whole being, as a series of actions and ideas, constantly fluctuating, always becoming something else, but in the end, not having been anything but some dancing flame.
Looking back over my life, I often wondered why it has always been the wild, healthy places, or on occasion some well-designed garden or structure, that held sway over me and kept me coming back or stopping me dead in my tracks with awe and delight. If it is that I am just a dancing flame and that places around me just shifting veils of illusion, then what is it that arouses such wonder in me? What is the relationship between beauty, health, love, and place? Why does a beautiful place universally draw people, to the point that they will travel around the globe to see it?
Perhaps it is that when a place and an individual (or group) participate fully with each other, a recognition of the inseparability of each awakes in one's consciousness. That is my experience at least. Throughout my life I have always felt most in tune with a place when I forgot myself and just "let go" into the elements. Walking a ridge, gazing from a boat window, crouching in the garden observing tiger beetles, or even drifting off into a deep sleep.
Life begets life. Though I have lived in disparate places, thousands of miles apart, they have all been linked, mainly by the forces that greet me each time I wake, like wind, sunlight, rain, trees, birds, insects, and fellow people. All these things have always moved in and out of my life, like seconds in a continuous curtain call. What happened in each of these encounters amassed into the theme that I play today. And tomorrow it will change again. I feel the restlessness that characterizes us humans and will probably move away from Tokyo, to be shaped yet again. A constant honing:
...walking in the woods of Germany with my grandfather, who taught me to find wild blueberries and hazenuts...
...hunting butterflies and rhinoceros beetles in Karuizawa, Japan...
...bicycling the gravel roads of the 1970's Hokkaido, Japan...
...arriving in Oregon from Japan and dumbstruck by the hugeness of the douglas firs...
...strolling the same azure and corn yellow lanes of Arles, France, that van Gogh frequented...
...watching a hundred humpback and fin whales amidst a thousand common dolphins, all cavorting in a copper-colored, mirror-still sea in the Stellwagon Banks, off of Boston...
...bicycling to work in a blizzard along the blue ghost of the Charles River, in Boston...
...sitting silent all day on a cliff in the Shetlands, watching fulmars and puffins and razorbills...
...paddling a kayak across the Suruga Bay, Japan, with my first encounter with deep sea swells, like the earth heaving...
...falling asleep beneath an ancient cedar and waking up to Mt. Fuji bathed in gold...
...running along the Noh River near my apartment, as pipistrelle bats loop above...
...pulling weeds in my garden with mosquitoes biting and cicadas singing...
Anecdotes, but like a string of pearls. These make up my world and my mind. Places drawing through me, more like lines than points, and insisting that I dance along.
I am that blue marble hanging in the darkness. The Earth that shapes me. Perhaps a song. And finally, nothing, nothing at all.
Comments:
It's a wonderful list you have of encounters with place and the elements. I'm curious what you think about the discussion going in the wiki about beauty and meaning in the landscape. At what point is beauty something that is learned, like Fred's contrary example of early explorers finding the Blue Ridge Mountains "most awful in aspect", and at what point is it something that simply hits us at a deep and primitive level?
Posted by Numenius at July 5, 2003 02:19 AM
It is interesting how the first Europeans perceived America. I think there is a real difference between how the Spanish saw it, the French, the British, and the Russians. The Russians saw nothing new, and thought little enough of it to sell Alaska at a bargain. Big open spaces were routine for them. The French took to the Indians with a lot more empathy than the others ever did. The British were terrified of the huge spaces and unending horizons. Of all the groups they were the most close-minded and destructive. And the Spanish, very interestingly enough, saw reflections of their landscapes back home, so much so that they even had the vocabulary for the landforms, like canyon, arroyo, and mesa. Of all the groups that came over, perhaps the Spanish perceived the most beauty, because they were familiar with it.
Perhaps beauty only arises when one feels safe and at home, when the familiar greets the eyes?
Posted by Miguel at July 5, 2003 04:05 AM
The photo of Moosehead lake brought me back to forgotten times. I remember spending time up there in the summer at a friends camp, fishing for perch (but catching eels!), swimming out to sleep on the floating dock. Spending an afternoon in a Boston Whaler going off in search of Frye's leap...
Beautiful place, Moosehead lake...
Beautiful photo
Posted by Steve at July 6, 2003 08:08 PM
That trip to Moosehead Lake was one of the best memories I have of that time. I was thrilled to drive so far out into a remote area and the night was so still that the moon was reflected as clearly in the lake surface as if there were two moons. I had rented a canoe so that I could paddle along the coves in hope of photography a moose. No such luck.
Three days later my girlfriend and I drove to the coast and spent the day exploring Isle au Haut. Wonderful place!
Posted by Miguel at July 6, 2003 11:58 PM
Source URL: http://web.archive.org/web/20041206232452/butuki.com/archives/2003_07.html
July 1, 2003
By Bowen Island JournalHow are we defined and shaped by the places we live?
My response to the latest subject being contemplated by the Ecotone blogging community.
When [a bhikku] dwells contemplating the body in the body, earnestly, clearly comprehending, and mindfully, after having overcome desire and sorrow in regard to the world; when he dwells contemplating feelings in feelings, the mind in the mind, and mental objects in mental objects, earnestly, clearly comprehending, and mindfully, after having overcome desire and sorrow in regard to the world, then, truly, he is an island unto himself, a refuge unto himself, seeking no external refuge; having the Dhamma as his island, the Dhamma as his refuge, seeking no other refuge.-- Buddha, Mahaparinibbana Sutta
I am standing on a beach on the south east corner of Bowen Island in the protected cove of Seymour Bay. It overlooks the Queen Charlotte Channel that separates us from the mainland of continental North America. Out at the mouth of the channel, little Passage Island sits, battered by waves and wind rolling up the Gulf of Georgia from the southeast. To the east of Passage Island, the towers of downtown Vancouver rise in the distance against the darkening evening sky.
What becomes immediately clear is that this whole scene unfolds from the surf line at my feet moving further and further "out there." The limits of the view are defined by the rising peaks of the Cascade Mountains 100 miles away. I can take in the sight, but then I have to turn back to get home. It's clear that I don't live "out there" anymore. I live "in here" now.
This island is a rich psychological metaphor. We turn inward to go home, peering ever outward from our shoreline at the world beyond. Taking trips to the ends of roads that terminate in beaches that sink into the frigid waters of Howe Sound. Living beyond our boundaries is fantasy. Living within our skins is real.
Moving to an island affects us deeply. We cannot escape the idea that our connections to the outside world are severed, and we turn instead to the inner connections for our reliance and sustenance. For me, physically moving here was accompanied by an psychological and spiritual inward turning as well. It invited me to explore my inner resources and creativity. And this whole place is populated by many people who have taken this triple journey inward, so we invite each other to play with the notion continually. We hold storytelling sessions, coffee houses, concerts that marry classical music with Brazilian instruments and African dance. Poetry that accompanies art that depicts the landscapes we inhabit daily.
We are trained to wring meaning out of every experience. Our eyes become accustomed to reading the place as a canvas for the play of our spirits. We drink in observation and churn through ideas, looking for a myriad of ways to express ourselves. Our raw materials are the land, the people, and our connections. Our outputs are our art, our structures and our communities.
Everything about this island invites us to go inward. One cannot help but follow the physical journey with a spiritual one. We retreat into our selves, examine what we see there and find ways to bring it forth into the world. Being an islander does not mean isolation; it means knowing where your edges are and constantly creating connections, following trails and exploring details. You grow aware that the limited landscape in fact draws you deeper in so that it becomes an infinite journey through fractals of detail. The island and the soul become holograms, every part reflecting the whole and encompassing the perfect fullness of its presence. It's impossible to live for long on the surfaces.
Eventually, we take the shape of the island itself: windswept shorelines exposed to the elements, and rich and verdant interiors full of growth and solitude.
Source URL: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/miscellany/bijournal/2003_07_01_archive.html#1057043267342106207.01.2003
by Field Notes
Sometimes I think of this as the edge of the world. I live in one of the last homes in Inverness before homes give way to parkland and beyond that to the Pacific. We're only an hour and a half from San Francisco or Berkeley, so bookstores, restaurants and the shows of the city are easily gotten to. But the thing is, I don't want to leave. Many days, I never leave the enclave of Teacher's Beach, and mostly when I do, I only go so far as the town of Inverness: a market, post office, gift shop and an eatery. Driving to Point Reyes Station, fifteen minutes away, where the stores are slightly bigger and the produce is organic, becomes an event I work myself up to.
This feeling of isolation is helped by the setting of my home. Even the neighborhoods here feel rural, but within the neighborhood I'm in, my home is apart. To find us you have to travel a private road, and my cabin isn't to be found until the road turns downward. From here I look out my high windows over a sea of trees, and know that beyond them lies the sea itself. I rarely hear cars, or any of the sounds of man leave the quiet hum of my computer. When I walk down the path from my house to the beach, I am alone with the trees, the creek, the birds and the knowledge that only a few of us ever walk this path. As it slopes downward I see the water lying before me as I approach, and I know what the tide is. Prints in the sand are more often deer or raccoon than human. And I know by sight most of the humans who walk on this beach, even those who cross at low tide: I know their shoeprints.
I don't begrudge them their passage.
The people who share Inverness, Point Reyes Station, and all of west Marin, share this bond with the land. Walking with any of my neighbors and friends always includes a moment when we say, My god we're lucky to be here, or, It's just so beautiful, isn't it? I feel that every day. Every day I'm informed by gratefulness. It's a love for place that grows: it includes a fierce protective sense, a duty to preserve.
The people who live here include ranchers, artists, buddhists, naturalists, writers, craftspeople, and various professionals and workers. Each town has its unique flavor. In Bolinas, some folks I met said they refer to Inverness as Inwardness. It's quite accurate. They wondered where people gather, asked me where the center of town lies. You see people at the Inverness Store, but the gathering place would have to be over in Point Reyes, at the Dance Palace, or the Bovine Bakery. We have to leave Inverness to seek a gathering place, except for the most intimate of gatherings. That suits us. If you walk the roads of Inverness, much is hidden, kept inside. You see glimpses through blackberry brambles and viney garden gates of people's lives, but much remains private, solitary.
I haven't spent my whole life here like many have. There are long-lasting friendships and neighborhood links all around me. But informing those relationships is a tendency to the solitary. It's palpable. In Ireland, they say that it's the job of elders to be weird, to stretch your being out into the furthest reaches of your most particular self, in order to show the young that it's okay to explore the eccentricities of the soul. Well, you see a lot of that here. Even the flyers on the post office bulletin board reflect a rich, weird inner life.
For myself, I say that here I've found my voice. I'm listening hard to the songs around me, the rush of the northwest wind through the trees, and the rhythmic tapping of woodpeckers as they store acorns in my cabin walls; to my footfalls on a redwood path and the gentle parting of water around me as I swim. I'm following those voices that call my heart to sing, or that break it open into tears. I'm listening for ways to become weirder.
*
Please visit us at Ecotone today as we write about How We've been Informed by the Place We Live
posted by Lisa on 8:42 AM link | Comments
Source: http://field-notes.net/2003_07_01_archives.html#105707412940416397
Discussion
Offer your comments, remarks and opinions. Discuss the posts on "How we are shaped by place".
We also shape place; one of the great English local traditions is the invention of tradition. -- [D'log], 17th April '04.
I was talking recently with a very educated and well-traveled friend about the Ecotone. I had a hard time explaining to him what 'place' was, why it mattered, and why it was important to reflect on our shaping of place and it's forming some of who we become. I don't think I was that inarticulate in my explanation, but he just did not get it. Is he typical of people outside your immediate circle of contacts who have never considered any of the issues and interests we focus on in this group, or do you find your acquaintances generally have a understanding of 'place' as a matter of discussion? Just curious. -- fred
I just say "look around you. Describe what you see and how you feel about it." -- Joel
Just had an email comment re this week's group topic, will snip relevant parts...
..."Having read a number of these responses to the "about place" question, I find it interesting that quite consistently the reader learns more about the internal landscape of the writer than the external. And I've noticed a similarity in personality among the folks who think themselves the least defined by place. I did not expect the emotional responses this question has provoked. It's really interesting and thank you for making it so easy for us non-writing blogger-people to participate".
Just to let you know that we do have a few 'outsider readers' who are benefitting from our discussion. Hopefully we can work to widen the circle, once the final page structure is in place in another undetermined bit of time. -- Fred
To which I reply...of course it is about the internal landscapes. In fact, and perhaps this is coming clear with Ecotone and this topic in particular, landscape only really exists inside. It is the connection we make between the elements of the physical world and the meaning we give them that creates the landscape. Why is a mountain view beautful? It has nothing to do with the mountain, only with the meaning we pile on that mountain. In fact the word "view" should give it away. Our view of things first causes us to perceive the world around us and then we shape it, and in so doing, shape ourselves. -- Chris
Wow, Chris, that's good: this is why some people, who have developed a specific aesthetic, can see beauty in a garbage dump, for instance--it's all in your perspective.
I'd like to think this perspective can be altered over time and by the perspectives of others. If not, nobody would ever go to a photography or landscape painting exhibit -- we seem to have a need to see through the lenses of others. Which is why I believe this wiki is really on to something.
Who was it -- Nancy from the Fire Star -- who spoke of seeing the knife grinder through the "filter" of this assignment. That's kind of how I feel, at the moment -- everyone here, collectively, is giving me a new lens or series of lenses through which to view not only the environment here, with which I'm quite familiar, but the environments of others, some of which I've never seen. -- Alison
Being "outside" of my "own" place right now, I find myself looking at Montreal with new eyes too. I'm feeling grateful for our discussions and writing; it is making me more perceptive and questioning of my own notions, and also making me think more about how to communicate these inner relationships (thanks, Chris!) that are are so important to us but perhaps not to others. There's a huge photography exhibit here called "Je suis Montreal" and I'm looking forward to seeing that - if we actually go so far as to say "I am 'xyz' place", that is a real extension of our current topic, isn't it!
Hey that was a good collection of responses today 1/7/03. Coup de Vent......
Beth in Montreal--glad to see you made it up there and found a computer to work from! (You didn't sign your post but I'm sure it's you...) Let us know how the exhibit is. -- Alison
Chris really hits on something above when he talks about beautiful views being attached to the meanings we "pile on" them. I remember going to an art auction or antique store of some sort with my parents as a pretty small child. All of the adults were fussing over this picture of an Appalachian mountain in Autumn. I couldn't see what the fuss was all about. It was just what the outside looked like. (I thought the picture nearby of a strikingly red rose was much more beautiful, perhaps because I hadn't seen many roses.) Now, however, I would see the picture with different eyes. As children, we can't pile meaning on top of landscapes because we haven't fully separated out from the landscape into people who have to pile yet. As adults, we become more self-focused, and we must form meanings to relate ourselves to the outside world. Perhaps this is why people tend to connect so deeply with their childhood landscapes, the landscapes in which they didn't have to think as hard to start connections.--Wendy
To better see both landscapes, it is necessary to filter out the noise and write about what's there. I model much of what I write about landscape after Japanese nature poetry, concentrating on images and avoiding philosophizing except in very short bursts. To understand where we are, we must, I think, list. -- Joel
Joel, maybe this is part of the difference we see between younger and older writers about place. My list is old and long and more complete than one who has just opened their eyes to the objects in their place, and so I am more likely to want to understand their meaning, let those listed things help me put myself in context of the history, natural and human, and the economy of my place. This is harder to do when young, though some, like Annie Dillard, have have these visions of 'the tree with the lights in it' at an early age.
Shifting gears, I wanted to point readers to Notes from an Eclectic Mind where Rana Williamson thinks and writes (July 02) about ["Little Town"] in Texas and the role it has played in her coming to be who and how she is today. She kindly points her readers to the Ecotone, and I have encouraged her to enter our discussions and biweekly topic essays. Please contact others you surely know who could come and further enrich our exchange here, which, by the way, is most encouraging to me.
And re Chris's 'beautiful mountain' in the mind of the beholder, agreed. I was shocked the first time I read of the early pioneers, who crested the first peak in their westward migration into the Blue Ridge, and upon seeing ridge after blue ridge receding into the distance pronounced them 'most awful in aspect'. Mountain wilderness back then was not phrase carrying positive connotations, and promised difficulty, danger, hardship, not beauty and quiet reflection. -- Fred
The older I get the more I want to weed out the white noise that I call meaning. I wrote a lot about that when I was younger and more self-important. What does meaning mean anyways? Better just to live in and love the Universe, I think, that to lose sleep over interpretations. Those may or may not come, but the live oaks and the white alders are here when I look. I just be with them. Maybe they will tell me a secret. Maybe they will just delight my eye. - Joel
Fred, thanks for the pointer to Notes from an Eclectic Mind. I think we should pick up on her cue and add "Coffee Shop as Place" for a joint topic down the line... perhaps even "High Lonesome," though I'm not sure I can rustle up the necessary cowboy genes. But then, she's worried she doesn't have a creek or very many lizards, so it would be more democratic, maybe.
Several others have noticed us, by the way, not at all place bloggers: [Interconnected] (Matt Webb), [Braggadocchio] and [Interconnected ] by Matt Jones, via [Boynton].
-- Alison
I do coffee shops as place. At least once a week. Brownies or cheesecake are an important part of the scenery for me. Joel
Well at least it's not fried Mars Bars, or the American equivalent (fried Snicker Bars, fried Twinkies). I kid you not. I met today with four colleagues to discuss Harry Potter V at the local, for Davis, fish & chip shop (staffed by Asians) where they were offering these delicacies. I thought this was just an Edinburgh speciality, but apparently it's migrating. Nobody tried them. -- Alison [btw Joel did you get my email? Your spam software is VERY persistent...]
A tangent to the "coffee shop as place" theme: in the student union on campus where I get my lunch (very down-to-earth, cheap fare, prepared by the student staff), there's a little bakery where people get muffins, cookies, cakes and of course their coffees when they're running between classes. What is striking to me is my sense that this bakery itself is too small for me to consider it a "place", whereas the student union in which it is set I find I have a very definite sense of place. What is this sense of dependence on scale about? Is there some sort of minimum size or activity (or lack thereof) threshold before a spatial location gets promoted to "being a place"? --Allan
Hello all, Rana here. I was pleasantly surprised by Fred's inclusion of my post over at Eclectic Mind called "Riding High Lonesome" in my ["Little Town"] category in your discussions here. I have been lurking on Ecotone and trying to catch up with your flood of ideas, impressions, and interpretations. The mental energy here is staggering! Lord knows as the reigning queen of Starbucks I would be in a position to write about "coffee shop as place." I also appreciated the comments left by some of you on my blog pointing out that because I live in an urban setting I am not excluded from participating here.
As I read along with this discussion I felt compelled to say that I am currently being shaped by "places of memory." If you poke around my blog a little (from the November 2002 archives forward) you will find it to be a drawing board for my manuscript in progress of a small town memoir. All the places about which I write are real but to a large extent now exist only in my memories because the people who made them significant to me are gone. Since my father's death my mother and I have fallen on rocky times. She cannot see that the only Main Street of my home town I can walk is the one in my mind because the street that bisects the Little Town now is not the one that existed in my childhood. All the players, the sounds, the smells, the surroundings have changed and with it my perception of that "place."
These ideas might be a little ephemeral for what you are trying to accomplish here at Ecotone, but I suspect we all have a "place" we can only go now in our minds. Might be an interesting something to tackle out there in the future. I'll keep reading and lurking, hopefully participating more. I fully support this wonderful effort at insight and focus in the often chaotic blogsphere. -- Rana
Rana, welcome! I've added CoffeeShopAsPlace to our list of topics; you have a while to think about this one (Nov. 1). -- Alison
Alison: Which one? The last one I received was about a comment I left on your blog. You should have no problem as long as you keep using the same email address. (I like the persistance of my spam email software. But I've cleared both your email addresses so you shouldn't have any problems.)
Fried Mars Bars? Um....
In other news, since starting my participation here, I've found two long lost friends. Interesting how we arabesque into these encounters. - Joel
I primed for "Coffee Shop as Place" Have a look at the recent war of words I got into with Starbucks Customer Relations at [Parking Lot], one of my other weblogs. -- Chris
Fred: re the pioneers redefingin the word "crestfallen" (:-)
When George Vancouver ploughed through these waters off of Canada's west coast in the 1780s looking for the Northwest Passage and naming everything in sight, he stopped at an inlet up the coast aways, which is still kind of in the middle of nowhere. With the prospect of fjord after fjord in front of him and behind him, all of them ringed with impenetrable mountains he finally succumbed to his true feelings and named one of them ["Desolation Sound"]. Today it is a wilderness tourist destination, and a place I visit every year for its sheer beauty. But had I been half way around the world in a sailing ship during the rainy season with no prospect of my journey's end in sight, I might have felt the way Vancouver did. -- Chris
Fred;
When I was first working toward launching Faultline in 1997, I often telescoped the informal working mission statement into a phrase along the lines of "A place-based environmntal journal for California." I found that either people got it immediately with no explanation necessary, or did not understand it no matter how thoroughly I expanded on the elevator version.
And some people are outright hostile to the idea! At that time I had a friend who was working with a writer's group, and place was a continual bone of contention in the group. She grounded her writing in scene-setting to be told that the others weren't interested in "riding off into the sunset prose". Their work, it seemed to me, could have been set in Manhattan, the moon, or the bottom of a mineshaft in Idaho, and it would have made no difference to the story. It was noteworthy that the few times one of them wrote something set in some particular place, an important detail of that place would be gotten seriously wrong - like having Interstate 680 run through Livermore. Somewhere along the spectrum that sloppiness grades into inauthenticity.
Gary Nabhan has talked about this phenomenon more compellingly than I could, predicting that this rootless late 20th/early 21st century literature will eventually be thought of as an aberration, and that what we awkwardly confine to the insufficient category "nature essay" will constitute the chief English Language literature of the 21st. -- Chris Clarke
I run into that same thing in my writers' group, Chris. I tell people that I think it is important to set the scene and to describe the elements more completely than saying "low scrub covered the hillside". One guy tried to run me out of the group (he was insane). I am still there and still struggling to create unique works in which place and telling details figure.
Janet Fitch's White Oleander strikes me as a work in which the author includes a sense of place. She includes a wonderful character -- a little boy who loves to know the names of the plants and animals in the local wash -- in one of her bad homes. He is shown to be two things: compassionate and a survivor. It's clear that Fitch likes people who take the time to know their place. She's often cited as a pioneer in reclaiming California fiction. Folks like you and I should read and support that kind of fiction. -- Joel
Joel, I may be one of the participants here who writes more about "meaning" than is to your taste ;) but I am 100% with you about the importance of location- and detail-specific "place". Maybe because I am a visual artist too, it seems important to me to try to paint the picture, to really get it. You do run into the problem of "listing" a lot of plants, for example, and maybe there's a risk in that of losing some readers, but I think it's OK. Personally, one thing I love about good writing - even when it's not specifically "nature" writing - is good description. Tolstoy, for example. I can feel Russia and see Russia through his eyes; he framed it, immortalized specific times and places. Sure, it's work, but that's part of learning this craft. It starts with putting down the pen and observing. --Beth
I don't think readers will fully relate to or see a character unless that character is in a specific place that is made to live through the writer's description. Place affects people on a grand scale and a small, daily scale, so how can real characters exist outside of it?
I've been thinking about "meaning" lately, in response to the discussion here and elsewhere. I recognize that our meanings are artificial, but I find it hard to discard them. In some ways, the need to find meaning can harm our relationship with the outer world. We find it easier to ruin and abandon that to which we don't connect, animals that aren't cute or flowers that aren't gorgeous, people who rub us the wrong way. We'd be better off if we could see things cleanly. Yet, I am attached to my self and the meanings through which it sees the world. I feel things, just as I did when I was a child, yet I can't stay connected with them as long. I am separate. My mind moves on, but I can remember the connectedness because I can think about it, and attach lovely words and feelings, my own special importance, to it. (These attachments do not exist outside the mind, but we are mental as well as physical creatures, and our imaginations create new worlds and new effects in this world. Our mental worlds are just as real as the outer world, sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly. Reflection is one of our ways of "being.") I see connected moments as times when I am fully living, without the veil of thought. Yet, I am glad I can think about these moments later and see their reflections, when I have other quiet moments away from the bustle of daily life and mind. Some people define escaping from the bustle as releasing self, but others (like the "weird" Irish wise ones Lisa evokes at field notes) seem to define it as escaping into the self--perhaps as releasing the real self, or mind, from the "put on" self that plays games in the social world. If you become comfortable with your loosest, truest, most connected self, with all of its whims and contradictions, its unique reflections, and live in it despite fear of alienation, perhaps you're approaching the same sort of oneness that people approach when they seek to forget the self. --Wendy
Beth: "Joel, I may be one of the participants here who writes more about "meaning" than is to your taste..."
Beth, how would you differentiate "place" from "meaning"? Not nitpicking here: honestly curious. -- Chris Clarke
Beth: Thanks for seeing that it's a matter of taste and not a commandment when I state how I go about it. -- Joel
Chris, it wasn't so much "place" vs. "meaning" as a question of whether to write about "meaning" at all.I was referring to Joel's comment earlier in the thread: "The older I get the more I want to weed out the white noise that I call meaning. I wrote a lot about that when I was younger and more self-important. What does meaning mean anyways?" Joel has a somewhat different approach than mine (and I happen to like his a lot). What I think he is doing is trying to let an oak be an oak, a branch be a branch, and not go a lot further - in other words, point the reader toward the importance of SEEING, the kind of non-thinking, senses-only, fresh, initial thinking that Zen stresses: what happens before we start to interpose labels, associations, and interpretations based on our own set of filters. (Joel, forgive me and correct me if I haven't got that right!) My own personal take is that you can't write well - no matter where you intend to go in the writing - if your view doesn't start (or try to start)with this kind of swept-clean, fresh, "beginner's mind" observation. What I often do in my writing is to go further and find associations, relationships (Wendy, I like how you describe this process)...and I think that territory is what Joel may be calling "meaning". I threw out thousands of words earlier in my life because that kind of writing was just what he objects to: self-important and self-conscious. I think writing that says, essentially, "Look!" is wonderful. I also think some people need and want to write (and hear) is "and this is why" or "and this is what I find in it." Both approaches are valid, but only work when they come from a very authentic place within the author. --Beth
Just want to add my thoughts to yours on this. As I'm thinking about it, the difference between writing about "place" and writing about a spot on the earth is the insertion of the "I". Place is where I intersect with the earth. I bring my history as a fourth-generation californian and my personal history as an expatriated los angelena, my memories and sensibilities, my love of the water, my hitherto unknown proclivity for the community of a small-town life, the ideas that spring forth between the authors I'm reading today and the particular shape of the land I'm walking. And I'm intersecting with a community of people who also inhabit this place, whether they're full-time residents of park visitors just passing through. This culture informs the place, just as the place informs the culture.
I think it's a valid approach to try to separate one's self from writing about an object in nature, like image poems attempt to do. For me, it's extremely difficult. But what I find most interesting in writing and reading about place is the interplay between culture and nature, like Wallace Stevens' jar on a hill in Tennessee. --Lisa
I like what Beth and Lisa have said here. And speaking of guys named Wallace, Wallace Stegner [felt much the same way] Lisa does.
Maybe it's my journo job, and all the time I've spent arguing about the Myth of Objectivity, but I don't see any way of completely divorcing the first person from writing about a place. Even a very technical, dispassionate list of flora is shot through with human perspective. I think further that most people aren't at all interested in reading material that isn't a story, and stories have protagonists. Not always human protagonists, as Rachel Carson showed well, but someone to whom events occur, even if those events are entirely mental.
That said, there is a hell of a lot of goopy, drippy, sentimental, self-indulgent writing out there that claims to be about nature but which is actually mainly about the writer's obsession with self. Some of it isn't even on MY blog. The point is balancing the narrator with the story. [Ellen Meloy] comes to mind as someone who - while she does show up in almost every paragraph she writes - balances this well. [Colin Fletcher] comes to mind as someone who doesn't. -- Chris C.
I have no problem with people writing about the inner landscape, the thoughts that pass through them as they view a landscape. Nor do I have problems with writing in which the self is the center of focus. Writers such as Wallace Stevens and William Wordsworth both cagily hid personal philosophies inside of their "nature poetry". There's no erasing them from literary history and there's merit in examining what they did and emulating it.
What bothers me is when someone sees a rock in the sea and thinks "Oh dear. I'm going to write about it. What does it mean?" This is where what Beth calls my "Zen sensibility" comes into play. If we honestly record the inner landscape that occurs when we view the object, we may find very little. For the rock, I think what you would extract from my mind is a sense of the waves sometimes swamping the mosses growing upon it, sometimes retreating to make it an island or headland at the end of a penninsula. There are emotions associated with that. The best way of exciting them is to tinker with our words and to describe the sensations of viewing that rock.
I'm one of those people who writes very freely about the emotions in his head, the angers and the joys when it is appropriate. If this turns out badly at times, it turns out badly at times. "Do I repeat myself?" Walt Whitman exclaims in Leaves of Grass. "Then I repeat myself." The writing continues, pouring all over the landscape of my weblog, perhaps frightening some.
As for Chris's fable of the impossibility of objectivity, I must treat this as a journalist cliche. I believe that there's Truth out there and that we see it. But in my reviews of literature through time -- keeping in mind that exagerrated metaphor is a device used by many to touch emotions that the mere recitation of the facts cannot elicit -- I must conclude that the facts and the account are not necessarily mutually exclusive -- as in the case of Creationism vs. Evolution where the latter theory and its associated Law of Species Changing Over Time do a far better job of describing the world as it is. Not all accounts are equal, not everyone lies or misperceives. Clearly, some do a better job than others. We as writers should strive for that when we write factually. -- Joel
Joel--I don't think Chris's raising of the impossibility of objectivity was a journalistic cliché, but rather the major ontological debate of the twentieth century. I for one am hoping for a plurality of views on the wiki. Everyone is welcome to express their opinion on their own blog, and I think we all do that. But a statement such as "we must be scientific" is fraught with problems, not least of which is that we didn't agree collectively that the wiki was a scientific endeavor. We may yet do that, but it's clear that there are different (and, I'd add, valid) approaches to place. Nor is it clear to me we've agreed to write "factually." We are all welcome to do so if we choose, but it doesn't mean that other approaches are "wrong" or "bad" or "less."
What is so exciting for me in the two collective blogs we've done so far is precisely these multiple approaches we all have to place and the discussions they have generated afterwards. I don't see people here agonizing about what a rock in the sea means. Maybe I've missed something??
-- Alison
Alison: I didn't seen many people putting out "goopy, drippy, sentimental, self-indulgent writing" for my part. I figured that Chris was just using example to express his philosophy of writing. I didn't take it personally and I used the metaphor of how I look at a rock to explain how I went about it. Believe me, when I mean to criticize specifically, I point. (And I pointed to the one thing that I disagreed with Chris on. Are we in this collective not allowed to disagree?)
[Removed as an act of reconciliation] -- Joel
[removed in like spirit] - Chris C.
I'm shrugging my shoulders over this whole thing. I'm giving it twenty four hours to think over. -- Joel
In less than 24 hours, I've come to this inner peace: I never meant to "attack" anyone else or misrepresent them, merely to express where I stood, the emotions I had, and how I personally resolved issues. I respect diversity.
I have decided to do this: I am withdrawing entirely from any discussion about the direction the leaders of the wiki seek to take it. I will make no more suggestions for future topics nor respond to anyone's writing here. I will not take part in discussions about topics or anything else at this wiki. I will only post excerpts from my blog. I will not initiate anything new.
The feeling that I have is of being unfairly singled out by some, attacked bitterly by others for unknown things that I did ten years ago. It has been repeatedly insinuated that I am trying to control conversation and repress "diversity" which is simply not true. It seems to me that there are a vocal few do not want constructive critical input of the type that I have to offer.
For any of us to speak our mind entails the risk that someone will not like it. Chris Clarke -- whose reasons for disliking me from ten years ago remain entirely dark for me -- went too far last night on expressing her/his dislike not just of what I said, but of me. No one has the right to dismiss another person like that. But that's my last say on that whole matter. I will no longer participate in these things because it is unhealthy for me to dwell on the hurts.
It remains healthful for me to write to the topics.
I see nothing that I need to apologize for. You have the right to disagree with my take and I honor that right.
The floor is open for either response or silence. If you expect answers from me, send email to gazissax@best.com. You will receive private responses. -- Joel
This is Lynn Gazis-Sax, Joel's wife. This is my one and only comment here (since I don't seem to be able to communicate with Alison by email).
Chris Clarke has gone completely overboard, and read an attack where one was never intended. Neither of us has a clue who he or she is, or what incident from ten years ago he or she is still so angry about. It wasn't at all clear that "goopy, drippy, sentimental," etc. was something Chris was referring to him/herself, saying that people haven't been writing a lot of such is hardly the kind of blast that should bring charges of making the site unsafe for Chris to post; I was even sitting right next to Joel when he posted that, and he wasn't the least bit angry at Chris. Joel sure wasn't carrying any grudge form ten years in the past. Now, after flying off the handle and accusing Joel of a violation of trust (as well as sending even nastier private email), I really think that Chris owes Joel an apology.
That's all I'm going to say here. I'll note that Joel, for his part, has recused himself from public discussions here.
Lynn
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20051221155518/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?DiscussShapedByPlace