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We also shape place; one of the great English local traditions is the invention of tradition. [D'log], 17th April '04. |
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We also shape place; one of the great English local traditions is the invention of tradition. -- [D'log], 17th April '04. |
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...
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...]
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
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, 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
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