Bi-Weekly Topic for June 1, 2004
Just As He Pictured It
By Fragments from Floyd
Imagination is a peculiar place of the mind: a balmy desert island; a glowing cavern deep in the earth where dragons live; a jungle populated with talking animals. These places exist in childhood when our imaginations form much more of our understanding of how things could be than later experience informs us of how things, in fact, really are. Life is either much better or much worse in imagined places than the place where we live. Places that are worse than where we live make us happy for our own warm beds and even for our scolding mothers who are much more to be desired than the green-complected witches who lives beyond the dark forest in that other land. Better places--even if in a land far, far away--allow us to tolerate the annoying younger brother and the bully who lives at the end of the block, because someday, we'll be kings or knights or super-heroes; we'll find chests brimming with rubies and doubloons in a land of eternal sunshine and perpetual desert. Maybe then, we'll live in those imagined places, happily ever after.
Imaginary places are future places we have never been--beyond, above, below, or within other realities. We place our greatest hopes and greatest fears in imaginary places. Then we grow up, grow old and perhaps, lose our imagination, and too often, our hopes.
Once upon a time, after the boy had grown up, moved away and learned what science said the world was really like; after he had a family and a house--had lived in many houses, really, in many different places--he began a new job in an empty office. They told him about the warehouse where cast-off things were stored; he should go there to see if there was a desk or chair or goose-neck lamp he could use.
In a far, dark corner of the dingy old warehouse, covered in dust and obscured by filing cabinets and tall bookcases, was a picture on the dull water-stained wall. It was unlike any other picture the man had ever seen. In it were trees and sky and water--ordinary things, to be sure--but the man swore that he could see himself in the picture. Not really see himself as much in it as from it. He could enter the picture and look all around him--up at the sky, down into the water, at the plants in the forest that he knew by name. He remembered as a boy, in the land of his imagination, he knew of a place just like this one. The creek was full of fish. Under every log, a brightly colored salamander lived. Brilliant birds sang in the trees. And it was always different, each time he went there. The light shimmered in the leaves overhead--first leaves of spring, then late summer. At one moment it was sunny and fair, the next cloudy, threatening, smelling of rain.
And he knew he must have this imaginary place, inside its frame, above his desk in his new office.
It remained there on his wall for him to see, every day--good days and bad: days he was happy to be where he was and days he longed to find his place, out and far away from the jangled congestion and unpleasantness of noise and clutter; away from cities, hiways and shopping malls. He hoped someday to find this place where he spent so much time each day in imagination--on the banks of the silver creek under golden trees with the ever-changing sky overhead.
In time, he moved again. "One last time" he told his wife. And they moved into a small cabin in a beautiful country place. But it was not yet home to him. While he enjoyed his walks along the peaceful lane down to the edge of the mountain where he could see forever, there was not a trace of his beautiful creek with the silver sky that he knew from the picture. It now hung on the wall of their modest cabin. They had almost given up hope of finding the home they longed for. And just when they gave up struggling to find it, it found them.
At first glance, it was not a place the man even wanted to stop and inspect. The old house looked as if it might fall in from neglect. The land had been beautiful at one time, but the most uncaring of loggers had left behind little of that beauty. "No, No!" insisted the wife. "This is the place". She brought the man back many times over the next few days to see what it was there that called to her. One day they walked on the land through briars and tangles along a grassy road that had seen few if any travelers in many years. It followed the slender valley further and further back where the valley grew narrow. At last, they rounded a bend where the forest had grown tall and escaped the logger's axe. The trees arched over the creek. The creek full of bright fish glistened as if it were made of polished aluminum. Shadows dappled the dark earth under the grand old trees. And all at once, he knew.
"This is the place in the picture. This is the forest and creek I have dreamed of since I was a small boy. This is the country place I longed for all these years while the picture hung on my office wall, both taunting me and giving me hope that there was indeed just such a place." They moved to the place and they live there to this day. The picture is there, too, across from the hearth, above the old piano where its travels have come to a pleasant ending.
The man wondered the day he first saw the creek of his dreams--wonders still--had he not held this image in his mind and in his heart so tightly and with such hope all these years, would such a place as this have become real at all? Would this peaceful valley along the silver creeks even have existed for him to find? Did this place come into being by the power of imagination? This is a thing that he almost believes, and something that he will never know for sure.
"Imaginary Places" is the biweekly topic at Ecotone this time around. This is a true story where imagination finds reality. The picture above hangs over our piano.
Comments
THAT piece of writing was beautiful! I am going to print it out and have my youngest son{9} read it. He needs to read it. He is your first paragraph and I am his keeper of dreams. Sometimes he loses hold of what dreams are. Life is about hope and imagination. If we loose that part of us we grow old and soon die. Thank-you for making the beginning of my Monday(oops)Tuesday a special one.
You showed us your beating heart here, Fred. Not only showed us, but let us hold it in our own hands. Entrusted it.
Thanks for a memorable story.
Thanks, Fred for a beautiful piece of writing! This strongly shows the power of imagery and how it supports our hopes and dreams.
Wonderful! This reminds me of the film *Shadowlands,* about C.S. Lewis and his wife Joy Davidman. The title comes from a picture in Lewis's study that he & his brother always dreamed about, a place they called the Shadowlands. When Joy is diagnosed with cancer & knows she is dying, she & Lewis go on a honeymoon to the place depicted in the picture. It's a beautiful but heartbreaking movie. Part of the poignancy of imaginary places is the fear that you'll never find them (or you'll find them too late). Thank goodness you found yours, and thank goodness you've shared it with us.
I'm glad you followed your dream to a happy conclusion. Thanks for sharing it with all of us.
By Switched At Birth] "Looking at this old photograph I found of myself while packing up the picture albums, I am struck by this young girl's clear-eyed serenity. She is me. I am she. What did she know, I wonder, and when did she know it?"
I seek a certain place¡ªnot so much imaginary as imagination itself. Days on which I write, I hope to sidle in unseen, as a backwards glance in a reflective window reveals a movement, a stream of sunlight¡ªa glimpse of memory. (Also featuring lyrics from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!)
By My Head and Welcome To It] Why I would write that there's an echo in there beats me, but there it is. -- P.
Conjuring place
By Via Negativa
The bi-weekly topic at Ecotone Wiki is "Imaginary Places." Go there.
All places are imaginary.* It's how we imagine them that makes all the difference. Do we come in peace?
Do we come to conquer, to colonize, to pioneer, to inhabit, to celebrate, to lose ourselves, to find ourselves?
When we move, do we move as the Amish do, following careful investigation and in full consideration of the needs of the community that will move with us?
If we move in answer to the demands of job or family, do we look for places that remind us of the last place we lived? Do we seek a new version of the first place we ever knew, having perhaps imprinted upon it like a newly hatched chick upon its mother?
When we arrive, do we test and taste the air, the soil, the water? Do we come to a place with all our old dreams intact, convinced that if we can find our own quiet little corner, all our unhappiness and anxieties will melt away?
Are we passionate, casual, indifferent? Surely the places we inhabit will reflect the level of intensity we bring to them. Do we arrive in a new place like a suitor looking for his one true love, or like someone on a quest for the ultimate orgasm? When we fantasize about getting away from it all, do we picture a tent or a cabin in the midst of the perfect, airbrushed, Sierra Club calendar pin-up? Do we come like a hermit or a monastic community, looking for the right combination of sublimity and enchantment to lead our minds away from more worldly temptations?
Do we imagine the land as a stage for individual or divine action, as an environment, as an ambience? Do we pledge ourselves to the cherished wild only to domesticate it, like the stereotypical Southern woman marrying a rogue? Are we seeking a powerful or distinguished father- or mother-figure, or a charismatic teacher who will know just what to do with the confusion of desires that follow us around?
Do we seek a laboratory for scientific, spiritual or aesthetic experimentation? Do we seek symphony or silence? Natural complexity? A blank slate?
If we concede to places the right to elude human control, can we be comfortable with the uneasiness, the sense of permanent homelessness this might inspire? Can we preserve open spaces within our own hearts?
Can we become, as Aldo Leopold suggested we must, just plain citizens of the land community?
Can we imagine the land finally as its own person, imagining and inhabiting each of us in turn?
Do we dare?
__________
*That is, spaces can be delimited and described at varying scales in a theoretically endless number of ways, within the limits of human observational skills, sign systems and/or trans-human revelations.
For related discussions, see Ten Thoughts About Possession, Learning language, learning poetry, and Holding forth (among others).
permalink posted by Dave @ 6/2/2004 09:50:29 AM
Foul Weather or Natural Causes
By g r a p e z
In New Hampshire the Old Man of the Mountain is emperor. Its image is on everything from license plates to road signs, and even supplied the title of a Nathaniel Hawthorne story. The Old Man was made of five slabs of Conway granite balanced atop one another high on a cliff on Cannon Mountain in the Franconia Notch. It took no imagination to see that Old Man when viewed from the north; he was real. Last May 2003, he came tumbling down. My daughter and I viewed the scene of the crime for the first time this weekend.
The autopsy reported that there “was a cavern, about four feet wide, behind the Old Man's chin that ran almost the entire width of the Old Man's face. About 80 percent of the chin block hung out over the cliff… Thus, just about two feet of the chin was anchored to the cliff, held there only by the weight of the four slabs above it. Amazingly, the other four slabs were positioned just so, so that the center of gravity of the chin block was within that two-foot span, allowing the entire Old Man to balance on its chin for centuries.”
Supposedly the death was caused by “the physical and chemical damage to the Old Man's granite through the years, especially in the cavern, eventually [wearing] away enough rock just behind the chin that the center of gravity of that block moved slightly forward, past the cliff face. When that happened… the chin tumbled down the cliff, and the rest of the Old man quickly followed.”
Oh sure. The fact that an interstate rolls through the Notch now had nothing to do with it. Acid rain through the years was not a contributing factor. And the fact that it all happened during the spring Iraq War was just coincidence.
Marge Bruchac, a Missisquoi Abenaki, wrote:
When you inhabit a place for thousands of years, you learn that change, even in great earth formations, is inevitable. Some traditions call it a good sign when certain of the old rock people decide to move around. Many of my kin believe that the spirit of the old chief embodied in the rock face has been freed from his modern imprisonment, and is walking the land again. On Sunday, May 4, an Abenaki drum group, including members of the New Hampshire Intertribal Council, gathered by the lake, at the foot of the mountain, to sing honoring songs. Some of us wrote poems for the Old Man.
Nanibosad, the night walker, whispered to him that night
when the caretakers were looking away,
the turnbuckles and chains and braces broke
the Old Man yawned, and smiled, and dove, headfirst, into the lake
ah, kadosmida,
he is saying,
wligonebi, the water feels good
the people need me
Enjoy your swim Old Man.
Imagined Places
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)]
Lilliput and Brobdingnag. Earthsea. Wonderland. Middle Earth. Eden. Imaginary places have shaped our culture since before it was a culture. Idyllic or otherwise, imagining a place with specific topography and characteristics allows writers to tell stories that couldn't be told if they were set, say, in Watford.
For a time I was hooked on Star Trek, where a different imaginary world appeared each week. How will this new place affect our heroes? Sometimes the places were there only by inference--the Borg collective is more of a psychogrouping than a physical locale--but every new setting allows the writers to play creator of the universe, week after week after week.
Stomping around the Salton Sea this weekend, where the salt and heavy metal smell combines with the pink algae that can only survive in such extreme conditions, put me in mind of Mordor (or its comical offspring, Terry Pratchett's city of Ankh Morpork). For some reason it's easy enough to imagine dystopias; it's having the courage to imagine a future where there's no poverty, no environmental crises, no hatred that seems really tough.
Why is this? And, more to the point, what happens if we can't?
This is a contribution to the Ecotone Wiki's joint topic of Imaginary Places
Posted by Pica at June 2, 2004 10:11 PM
Comments
You should read some of the later entries in Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" series; the dystopia becomes a mere background to well-rounded characters and lively adventure. But you're right that science fiction and fantasy have lost their optimism. I like to imagine it's a fashion thing, but I suspect it isn't...
Posted by: P at June 3, 2004 03:51 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/06/02/imagined_places.html
carless in marin
By alembic
This post is my response to ecotone's (June 1, 2004) biweekly topic: Imaginary Places
I drive on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in Marin every day, sometimes five or six times a day. My car is one of the many that hurl relentlessly through the blocks traffic permitting at high noon or past the full moon, in wind or rain, and through the seasons. The stretch of the road that I travel on daily has sidewalks, but not on both sides. These vestigial paths are extremely narrow, protected by metal barriers in places where the turn in the road could easily propel the car of a careless driver to careen up and crash into the long line of uniform fencing that separates the backyards of houses from this main road.
I rarely see anyone walking on these sidewalks. Occasionally, when I am not too lost in my own thought processes behind the wheel as I drive along this stretch of the road, I will see a Hispanic woman walk toward the bus station. At other times, I might catch the odd bicyclist pedal by, as well as kids going to and fro from school though there arent that many of them walking (which is one of the reasons why there is so much traffic on the road; all those parents ferrying the kids from school to home and from home to activities).
Well, today I was forced to walk that stretch of road myself. My car broke down yesterday and is undergoing some very expensive surgery at the moment. So, I set out, on foot, around 9:00 a.m. in order to deliver my work that was due at the office thats less than 2 miles from my house. It was already past the time for rush hour traffic around here, what with some of the schools out already. Still, there was a constant stream of cars that generated a mighty wind that carried generous wafts of exhaust fumes, delivering a range of acrid smells I didnt think was possible for a nose to register.
As I trudged along, straining to hear in the din of traffic Roy Orbison on my iPod, I also found myself struggling through what almost felt as wild brush the vegetation that seeped from gardens past the fence spilling every which way on the sidewalk, this no-gardeners land. There were straggling remnants of perennials that were seeded from packets handed out by the homeowners association some time ago, and there were aggressive branches of what looked to me like some kind of a bamboo, all of this green bounty making it difficult to negotiate this tight path between the river of cars and the wall of fence.
So here it was, I thought, this part of Marin, the untended narrow sidewalk that falls between imaginary lives. There is that constructed life on the other side of the wall of fence: the landscaped gardens, however small, surrounding the houses, that realm of the private life. There is that imagined freedom that is associated with mobility: the drivers of those cars whizzing past the sidewalk, lost in thought or reveries about the great chain of schedules that tied them into a parallel (and imaginary) road to and imagined success of sorts.
And there I was, between the fence sheltering all that was private and the road, where without wheels the destination seemed unimaginably far, hoping for a ride or an opening through the fence anything to get me out of the middle, that place that seemed so hostile to both the imaginary and the real that surrounded it.
Posted by maria at June 09, 2004 04:58 PM
Comments
Spaces like this where the constructed environments don't quite meet up with each other are interesting. Nobody really sees them or takes responsibility for them.
Posted by: bill on June 10, 2004 06:14 AMI'm particularly interested in the volunteer vegetation. I suppose it's only a matter of time before someone is dispatched with a container of Roundup.
Once when I was visiting my brother when he lived in Los Angeles I asked whether there was a bus from A to B. He looked at me, uncomprehending. (This was the little squirt I used to ride the number 72 on to school, the number 40 to downtown, the number 27 all the way down the Castellana in Madrid.) The response: only poor people ride the bus. Meaning, I assume, that it's not done, or it's not safe, or whatever other realms his imagination as a temporary Angelino could conjure up.
Posted by: Pica on June 10, 2004 07:01 AMThis reminded me of Castaneda's "crack between the worlds," the path a warrior walks that is not defined by anyone's conventional wisdom. A warrior, I presume, because it is such a dangerous place...
Posted by: Denny on June 12, 2004 07:50 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20041014095223/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000365.html
In Search Of Snouters
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on imaginary places.
On an island in the remote and unexplored South Seas archipelago of Hy-yi-yi, a fleeing Swedish prisoner-of-war in 1941 made a discovery that startled the zoological world. This was the existence of an entirely unknown order of mammals, the Rhinogradentia. This group of about 150 species is remarkable for the adaptations of the snout, the nose being modified to serve an amazing variety of functions ranging from fishing lures to aerial locomotion.
Unfortunately, the entire archipelago was destroyed in 1957 in an earthquake accidentally set off by an atomic test some 125 miles distant. The only surviving record of the rhinogrades was a publication by a scientist, Harald Stümpke, also lost in the earthquake, entitled Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia (republished as The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, 1981, U. Chicago Press).
Happily, a recent expedition to the deep forests and caves of Slovenia produced evidence that members of this order still survive, taking a remarkable photograph in July of 1999.
Posted by Numenius at June 3, 2004 11:04 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/06/03/in_search_of_sno.html