Stretching Place

Place is what I started with in Geography, place in relation to responsibility for one's immediate surroundings.  I haven't gotten very far, or at least, not very productively.  I tend to doubt most of what I've found out.
    

Place--the usual notion is probably of some physical area where we can walk around, see stuff, either love it or hate it.  Maybe it's small and intimate, like that corner of your room as a kid or that treehouse or a favorite table at the coffee shop.  Maybe, sometimes, place is bigger. Maybe the earth as a whole is some dream-of Eden in some far future science fiction, but usually place isn't a whole state or a region.  But place--something more or less solid, something we can be nostalgic about, often as the bulldozers move in and wipe out our childhoods.

   

Here are some standard ways to think about place.  Here is a quite popular education scheme, 5 Themes of Geography, which tells us about place, sandwiching it between those tried-if-not-true gems, location and region:

A place is an area that is defined by everything in it. All places have features that give them personality and distinguish them from other places. If you refer to your school as a place, then that place would include walls, windows, gym, cafeteria, classrooms, people, clothing, books, maps, mops, brooms, hallways, mice (if you have them) and everything else in the school, including the languages spoken.

Geography will either put place on a grid, and likely then start talking about space, or, quickly shift to 'sense of place':

It is a combination of characteristics that makes a place special and unique. Sense of place involves the human experience in a landscape, the local knowledge and folklore. Sense of place also grows from identifying oneself in relation to a particular piece of land on the surface of planet Earth. Another way of looking at sense of place is contrast: places like strip malls have little sense of place because they more or less all look very similar, often have no name and no one who wants to spend any time there or write anything about them. Whereas places that exhibit a strong sense of place have an identity and character recognized immediately by a visitor and valued deeply by residents.

Some geographers, like Don Mitchell, will go beyond place identity to talk about power as crucial to issues of place, especially public places (a direction I'm not interested in).  

There is a lot of academic material, if you want to explore this concept.  Here's a vast survey, called "What Should I Read First?" I'd point especially there to Edward Casey's The Fate of Place, which Soren took me through when we started reading a couple years ago.  Casey has a bias, 'anti-modern' I've heard it called, and isn't exactly light reading--racing through the myth of Tiamat, Aristotle drawing a defining line between object-outside, Plato distorting everything (ok, that's my bias), the West adopting concepts of space to secure their definitions of an infinite god, early science developing 'the grid,' phenomenologists both embracing place and pushing it ever further out of grasp--but Casey provides the needed complication for what has never been as obvious as we want to believe.  

For a contemporary take on this, Matt much enjoys the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, especially his book, Topophilia and Space and Place. And Matt knows stuff about geography! 

   

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Well, that was just preface.  Deceptively, I'll say I just want to look at a few not-local engagements with place and see what happens as we stretch our idea of this illusive concept.  When really, here's the plan, my hidden agenda--we need to test the idea that as we take in these different experiences, that place itself changes for us.  Not merely our 'sense of place,' but place as a mode of reality.  We might wind up somewhere kind of interstellar...if we're still in  a where at all.
  

First, Lee pointed out to me Elsewhere, A Journal of Place. It's newly launched, this summer, from Berlin.  From its prospectus, I was ready to go ahead and subscribe, but it costs 12 pounds, which is an awful lot of Ramen noodle soup and turnip greens, and it wouldn't take my credit card, insisting instead on Pay Pal, a system I don't much trust, and at that point, I quit.  But there is a blog, which seems to be the forerunner. Currently, you can read there about a forest walk in Germany, a review of a book about living in the Shetlands (those little high north islands I couldn't quite get to, either from Norway or Iceland), a boat tour in Bangkok, interviews with writers (one here who is currently reading The Sixth Extinction, which I plan to start later this week), a visit--'postcard from'--Duino Castle (and I do enjoy Rilke's poetry, even if I've never found a good way to get students excited about it), a sketch of walking in Albania...

https://www.elettra.trieste.it/XISILS/uploads/Main/castle_v.jpg 

It's all pretty and concise.  Why is it I'm not excited? I've been to several of these places, and want to go to all the rest (well, I want to go everywhere).  So why doesn't this journal, this blog, this style captivate me?  What am I looking for more than a quick impression of a distant place?  I sent Lee a link to You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, produced by the grad students of the University of Arizona.  It publishes essays and poems that seem more personal, more idiosyncratic, more linked to actual places spun out of the experiences of real people.  And closer to home, we have Missouri Life, which deals with place and state-related topics.

I should ponder all this, what works or not, if I keep scribbling...

Now our next exercise in stretching place--Ken, once owner of Acorn Books (a place just down 9th Street, which I much loved), urged me one afternoon at Lakota, to web-tune-into an international performance that his son was participating in.  That was six weeks back, and I was mis-remembering this as Everywhen, so the computer only took me a 2013 Norwegian fantasy movie.  The movie sounds interesting, despite it's 3.1/10 star rating on imdb.com, but that's not what I wanted here. Keywords, keywords. Our reality is already warped and translated by Google...
  

  http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/02/cardboard_diy_cover-100567369-gallery.idge.jpg

A different search, and I found what Ken had steered me to--Every When At Once, A Space Opera. The web-blurb for this event announced "3 simultaneous performances," "9 time zones"--a combined 1-hour show from Valencia, Boston and LA:  

On June 20 2015 Loudon Stearns presented a one hour space opera titled “Every When at Once”. The opera was performed in 3 locations simultaneously..., with each location performing different parts of a science fiction epic. Audio-visual streaming was used to synchronize the three locations, and large projections were used in each location to coordinate the performance and show the audience what was happening at the other sites.  In each location a small band and audience were present. The story was created specifically for a long-distance performance, placing the main two characters on opposite ends of time and opposite ends of the universe. The vast distances between the performers reflecting the vast distances of the characters.

So I did log on and watched, from the same table here at Lakota where I'm writing today--my own little micro-omphalos.

http://baselandscape.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/omphalos.jpg

The Every When site, set in motion at 3 pm our time, had 3 screen images, one for each location, with a not quite smooth expand and contract way to focus on one at a time.  I watched all three small screens together.  There was an occasional narrative voice booming through, music that synced up across all the zones, several dancers, a background light show, a painter in one screen, creating, um, a green womb? a comet? seeds?  I liked that though.

I wish I'd known about the whole event earlier, early enough to read the background.  I couldn't follow the story on my own, or maybe my how-to-watch-dance-abilities are undeveloped (I've still never been to a ballet). So, it would have been useful to know that all the contortions meant this (character and story background):

Cirque lives on a distant barren and primitive planet. She is an apprentice to the village elder and every day they measure the cosmos waiting for something new, but what appears this time for-tells the destruction of her entire planet. The village shaman provides an alternate perspective to the elder's grim predictions; a perspective Cirque can no longer ignore as the shaman's stories begin to match her dreams of a mysterious man, Rae.The story starts with Cirque as a young woman with total faith in science who never really makes a decision for herself. Faced with the destruction of the planet, strange hallucinations, and nightly dreams of Rae, she begins to question science, but in following the shaman she sees both the beautiful and destructive force that religion can be. Torn between these figures of religion and science, compelled to save an innocent boy, and guided by her dreams of Rae, Cirque discovers a way to transcend space and time.

AND that...

Rae begins a genius biologist witnessing the Earth on the brink of environmental collapse. His ever-present dreams of Cirque, a mysterious and primitive woman, drive him to evolve beyond human form, consume the Earth, and propel into the cosmos in his billion-year journey. Over and over he must sacrifice many to further his search for Cirque. Rae’s dreams of Cirque provide both his drive to consume all and his compassion to save the few he can as humanity itself is caught in the path of Rae’s relentless evolution.
     In Rae’s story we also see the evolution of man from human, to highly evolved and specialized post-humans divided into the factions Engineers and Builders. The apex of human evolution is seen at the culmination of act two. “Unite” is a unique and almost separate story within the opera: the climax of the story of Man.

I liked the idea of this project.  It didn't feel like I was stretched to all these places, but the idea seems a real evocation of how we relate to place.  Hmm.

Moving on.  Here's the 3rd stretch, the Future Library.  This is a visionary project by Katie Paterson:

A forest has been planted in Norway, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in one hundred years time. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unpublished, until 2114. The texts will be held in a specially designed room in the New Public Deichmanske Library, Oslo. Tending the forest and ensuring its preservation for the 100-year duration of the artwork finds a conceptual counterpoint in the invitation extended to each writer: to conceive and produce a work in the hopes of finding a receptive reader in an unknown future.

And it's begun:

The prizewinning author, poet, essayist and literary critic Margaret Atwood has been named as the first writer to contribute to the project. The multi-award winning British novelist David Mitchell follows as 2015’s author.

http://hypervocal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/norway-forest-2.jpg 

Here's a Vimeo interview with Margaret Atwood, which I don't quite know how to embed...

This Future Library carries us to a place, but a place in process.  It invites us to consider our relations to our own books, our forests, our futures.  Can we tag a future place like this and demand that it exist?      

I wonder exactly where in Norway this forest is.  Someplace outside Oslo.  Could I visit?  Will the forest survive the coming climate shifts?  What would it be like to walk inside a specific future?  Ah, but perhaps we do that everywhere, 'everywhen,' though on a frantically shorter time-frame, doggedly unaware.  Given some cataclysm or simply our love of stories, could this forest become a place of legend, of devotion? A place of tribal prophecy?  A forest-place that is not turned into books, but becomes the sacred ground for dream-vision?

Ah, to be present for that harvest of trees, for that production of books.  Another hundred years.  I'll have to exercise more, and swap out the cheap beer for cheap red wine.

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Above, we looked at a few artistic ways to stretch place.  Here's that other human enterprise, equally determined to stretch our places, to boldly go where no one has gone before...

Recently, we've followed the "New Horizons" ship as it passed Pluto, pulling us close to our once-9th planet, its odd moons, its comet-like tail, spun from its atmosphere streaming out on the solar wind.    

http://cdn4.sci-news.com/images/enlarge/image_2749_3e-Pluto.jpg

And other missions are planned--the European Space Agency will explore several of Jupiter's moons, while NASA will look to Europa. Their goals?  Most immediate, to look for life.  And someday, for humans to get there, perhaps construct our further outposts.  Impossible?  Do check out this series, the ‘what would it be like to live on …' series from Space.com, for instance, this post about living on Europa.  That points out that we really couldn't live on Jupiter, alas.  (Ah, for fun, look up that older SF story, "Call Me Joe," which my students identify as being ripped off for the plot of Avatar.)  But on those moons?  Who will be the real estate agents there?

         

http://overmental.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Avatar-cap.png

Consider--what would it mean to know of a specific destination, where life-not-from-earth exists?  Curious, deep-cold shrimp, or microbes with a different origin?  Would they leap at the chance to swap genes with our eager and promiscuous bacteria? 

And not just these missions.  Even those farther reaches of our solar system are just a beginning, as we keep extending out into our galaxy.  Not long ago, we read "NASA's Kepler Discovers First Earth-Size Planet In The 'Habitable Zone' of Another Star,"  this one only 500 light years away.  And last month, news of 'another Earth,' a daunting 1400 light-years away.  Daunting, but there it is, drawing us closer, 'teasing us out of thought.'  Cold Pastoral, indeed.  With these distant places, we don't simply catalog the solar energy, the chance of water, intriguing landforms, speculate on chemistry and life.  Rather, we envision going there, living there.  We test out alternate homes, we extend our mental maps, we project ourselves to those distant reaches.  They become part of us.

   "Dark They Were, and Golden-eyed" narrated by Paul Frees 
[not quite what I mean about how our places surge and change--but fun...]

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Postcards...  I've sent thousands now, from many countries, many cities.  I trace lines to post offices, to vendors, to the usually iconic photos on the "front" side.  And I scribble my own narrow walks and sights on the other side, always with a date and place as a heading. What happens here?  How is place created by this activity?  Does this simply expand my "place," or also the place-world of those who handle the cards, who receive them?  Tim as a Marine officer in Afghanistan getting a postcard from me in Iceland, his corporal astounded, Lucia stitching my postcards together for a mobile in Stafford Library, my postcards on friends' fridges...small seismic events, folding and reshaping, shifting the seeming solid earth...

* * *

Be careful here.  Once you let me talk about place this way, place leaping out, place not defined by a line you can draw around it, place not the same for any two of us, nor the same moment to moment, nor place limited to any one now--once you give me that, this world you know becomes unstable, open, real, dangerous.  

And who will you become, without the world to hold you together?

 

later, bob