I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and one of the things that every Utahn learns in school is that "this is the place"--an utterance attributed to Brigham Young when the tired Mormon pioneers decided to give the unimpressive valley of swamps and rocks a go. That place is gone, replaced by the place the valley has become under the stewardship of time, growth, and progress. It sticks out of the desert like the dream that started it all.
Now having lived outside of the belly of the whale of my youth, I find that every place is the place, at least for me when I take up habitation and especially employment. For example, I spent 9 months on the big island of Hawaii over 20 years ago, planting coffee trees and serving seafood in a tourist-trap restaurant dressed like a sailor in a Popeye cartoon. The island had no roads home, no way to hitchhike out in case things turned sour. I will always remember to buy a return ticket when going to an island.
When I came back to the mainland (Hawaii gets boring for a 21 year old with few job skills and a full tan) I had a slew of dreams showing me how I could get back to Hawaii by simply taking a few back roads never before taken near my house. These uncommonly used roads that could take me to the middle of the Pacific Ocean were there all along. The Hawaii in my dreams was only remotely similar to the physical place I had been, but more like an idealized village of how I wanted the whole world to be. Even so, the dreams showed me how “place” is at the crossroads of reality and wishful thinking, real things and imagined things. Place physically distant is somehow accessed by emotion and instinct. As long as you touch the ground, even if only once, the ground touches you back whenever it wants.
2 comments:
Tropical places and travel writing reminds me of The Rum Diary -- especially after today's class discussion .. not so much the robust science.
I wanted to reply more compellingly to your invocation of Hunter. Strangely enough I had just posted a Hunter riff on Toriah's blog. Anyway, I think authors like Hunter and Taussig, in terms of ethnography, appeal to the "ethical" criterion. Authors and writers have ethical responsibilities to their genre and audience..and as Amir mentioned, 95% repeatability when it comes to ethnography seems like it could breed ethnocentric science.. hmm...
Cool blog lay out and Go Hunter S. Thompson!!
Jerry, I love the phrase "every place is the place." It's that kind of openness I responded to in the Romantics, I think, so many years ago. For instance, Wordsworth hated the industrializaton of the city and so built a number of rural retreats from which to write his poetry. Even so, when he found himself standing on Westminster bridge, he couldn't help but embrace the place, with that wonderful line:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
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