I’ve been thinking lately, after reading Susan J. Matt’s magnificent Homesickness: An American History, about nostalgia’s role in Modernism: all those selves adrift in fast-growing cities, cut off from their traditional sources of identity like family and place. And it’s hard not to wonder, sitting through a nearly snowless, too warm New England winter, if Albrecht’s “solastalgia” might spark — or already has sparked — a comparable outburst as writers and artists confront a fractured sense of self even while staying put. No longer able to mark time by familiar signs of seasons, of weather and bird migrations and crops — as migrants to cities no longer know themselves by the familiar — what will we know ourselves, and write ourselves, with?
So much eco-fiction seems caught up, still, in outmoded myths of the pastoral, or oversimplified dichotomies of savage and civilized, or landscapes as foils for and reflections of human psyches. Stories rarely acknowledge that “natural” landscapes are as enmeshed in capital, power, politics, and technology as the cityscapes depicted by Kafka, Hamsun, and Benjamin (among others) as far back as a century ago.* The story of characters replenished by a “return” to nature is so familiar, and so often absurd — a kind of prescriptive nostalgia for what never was — yet there seem to be few alternatives. Whither the wilderness flâneur? The trailside Bartleby or mountain lake Meursault?
I don’t have anything more cogent than questions about all this, but that’s where my mind is at the moment. Walter Benjamin projected James Fenimore Cooper’s forest onto the city for his Arcades Project, and I suppose I’m wondering what happens if we reflect that projection back on itself.
* There are exceptions, of course: Julia Leigh’s The Hunter; Johanna Sinisalo’s novels, and perhaps the “rural noir” of Daniel Woodrell, TV’s Justified, and others.
In all the best stories, initiation is never a comfortable process. To be initiated we have to sever ourselves from the comfort and security of what Shaw calls the Village — the ordained track — and head off down the Road of the Forest. We need, he tells us, to go into the darkest wildest woods, to climb the unclimbable mountain … we need to become the Wanderer. ‘To find an authentic centre we have to wander lonely beaches and sleep under hedges, longing for something we know is lost.’ And so Shaw’s initiation is a kind of vision quest: a journey into the heart of the wildness that lies within each of us — because wildness is not just a place to visit, but something inside ourselves that is in desperate need of nurturing. In other words, we need to become familiar with our own depths to be able to look at the natural world and see it as it is, to understand our deep need for wildness, ‘to recognise its mirrors’.
@ Earthlines
The word “Panic” derives from Pan, the Greek god of flocks and herds. Legend has it that he would descend, “out of the blue”, on Arcadia at noon to frighten the animals, shepherds and nymphs. One of the latter, Syrinx, froze out of terror and became a reed from which Pan purportedly cut his pipes, a paradoxical symbol of “bucolic calm”. Panic as a medical entity (albeit not the word) entered the literature as early as 1866 and De Costa described a condition prevalent in American Civil War combatants as “irritable heart” in 1871. Simultaneously, Westphal recorded cases of “agoraphobia” — literally fear of the market place — while Benedict coined the term “Platzschwindel” for “place dizziness” encountered in Vienna. In an entirely different setting, early twentieth century Danish explorers found Greenland Eskimo hunters who suffered “kayak angst”. While awaiting seals to hunt on a sunny day out on calm seas the afflicted would, out of the blue, have difficulty breathing, experience racing hearts and fear imminent death. The subjects would race back to land and flee into their igloos, some never emerging again.
~ Dave Swingler
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from How to Hunt A Glacier
2.
Find your target. Sight your scope.
Take account of the distance,
the wind speed and direction.
Use the word “clicks.”
3.
Lead the target, 10-20 years at least,
a few inches, a foot,
maybe more. Track the terminus,
measure the weather, the rise and fall
of oceans, the advance and retreat,
all we do not know.
Consider the awful possibilities.
~ Christopher Newgent @ Punchnels
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As a kind of semi-agoraphobe who spends massive amounts of time in my cabin, I come to have a really complex dependency/shame relationship with Cabin Service. Since finally getting around to reading the Services Directory and finding out about it Monday night, I’ve ended up availing myself of Cabin Service every night — more like twice a night, to be honest — even though I find it extremely embarrassing to be calling up ×72 asking to have even more rich food brought to me when there’ve already been eleven gourmet eating-ops that day.
[…]
This was primarily because of the semi-agoraphobia — I’d have to sort of psych myself up to leave the cabin and go accumulate experiences, and then pretty quickly out there in the general population my will would break and I’d find some sort of excuse to scuttle back to 1009. This happened quite a few times a day.
~ David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
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THE WHITE REVIEW — Do you have a structure worked out when you sit down to write?
WILLIAM BOYD — Yes. It takes me about three years to write a novel and I spend roughly two years figuring it out and one year writing it. Iris Murdoch, who worked in the same way, called it the period of invention and the period of composition. I think that’s quite a neat division. It’s become absolutely rigid for me now.
I get an idea for a novel, which is usually one sentence or a concept. Then I spend a long time thinking about it, filling out notebooks, travelling, acquiring the library I need for the book. I set about making more and more elaborate plans for the narrative and making lots and lots of mistakes, going up blind alleys and developing characters or sub-themes that fizzle out. Even then, I haven’t actually started writing the book. That whole period of invention is absolutely crucial in my work. Eventually, and usually when I know how the book is going to end, I will write a draft of the last paragraph or the last few lines – so I’m that sure of it – and only at that stage do I write chapter one and start the book.
~ Interview @ The White Review
Of course, the Arctic is not blank, or featureless, or uninhabited. There may have been less tangible incentive to explore it than there was for other areas (although whaling tended to follow exploration in the Arctic, as trade followed the flag elsewhere around the nineteenth-century globe); the expeditions nevertheless returned a mass of data from their encounters with a landscape rich in its own peculiar properties. The Arctic demanded swift attention to the behavior of the ice that so dominated it scenery. It can even be argued that the success and failure of different British expeditions of the period reflects the degrees to which they were, and were not, imaginatively captured by a vision of the Arctic as bleak, blank, hostile. Those explorers least able to perceive the Arctic as it was — indifferent rather than harsh, full rather than empty, a problematic dwelling space rather than a moral playground — were also least likely to survive there.
But the perception of Arctic emptiness also allowed much more wild and florid ideas of the region, for blank space, like blank paper, can be scribbled over with the wishes of the onlooker. There was a steady thread of fantasy concerning the poles in the nineteenth century, ranging from tall stories to mad geographical theories: and this is leaving aside the deliberately fanciful use of the frozen North in children’s stories and fables. The kind of fantasy I mean involved real belief, even if only in the form of a con-trick, or a transparent delusion. It is as if the acknowledged status of the North Pole (and the South) as points both known and unreachable, real and not, allowed ideas to attach themselves to them that were likewise half-respectable, half-real, half-baked.
~ Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination
The point about weather is simply that it can’t be divorced from place. Weather is an intrinsic part of the character of a place. It’s not just a question of weather being what happens to you every day when you are in a place: it goes much deeper than that, in a number of different ways.
First: weather shapes a place. The Outer Hebrides are what they are precisely because of centuries of wind and rain. The land is boggy, treeless, hard, pared back to the bones and vivid precisely for that reason. It seems like an obvious point to make, but it’s surprising how often people come to live in the Outer Hebrides and start to long for periods of hot dry sun. Hot dry sun isn’t the Outer Hebrides, it’s Provence, or Tenerife. And I mean that literally: the weather IS the place, not something superimposed on it. The Outer Hebrides IS wind and rain, rain and wind, and more wind and rain. If you can’t love wind and rain, you can’t love the Outer Hebrides for what it really is, and then it really isn’t a very smart place for you to live. And if you live in a place and won’t go outside because you hate what that place is, then there’s a very strong argument indeed that it’s not a healthy way to live.
@ Earthlines
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The photograph of a sunset is an image that is reproduced over and over again in contemporary culture, and has become a symbol that represents concepts of beauty and tranquility. I am interested in the power and authority that these cliché images have over one’s ability to see and understand the natural world. By slightly altering these appropriated images of sunsets, a dialogue is opened that raises questions around the authority that these images hold. The images that make up the series Obscene Sunsets call attention to the fact that concepts such as beauty are complicated structures that are understood not solely through the experiential, but through a long history of images that teaches us how to make sense that experience.
~ Ryan Feeney (via)
Like many other people, I suspect, I’ve experienced a bit of Kickstarter fatigue owing to the number of requests I receive every week to support one project or another. But Colin Marshall’s new project Notebook on Cities and Culture is definitely one worth our support. Colin’s public radio interview show The Marketplace of Ideas is one of the best podcast series I’ve encountered, and I was honored to be part of it. But never mind me: his interviews with Peter Toohey, Lee Rourke, Gabriel Josipovici, Sarah Bakewell, and Tom McCarthy — among many others — are the kind of smart conversations bound to give you ideas and inspiration. I’m sure the new series will be just as engaging, so I hope you’ll consider lending your support.
It is at lion rock that i catch my first glimpse of the southern coastline and get a taste of what it actually looks like. After all that park-like landscape, the rugged desolation really takes you aback. New Zealand was one big dramatic postcard, as though a top Italian designer had drawn the landscape on a computer using top-of-the-range software with the aesthetic-maximizer function cranked up. This is different: primitive and rough, so beautiful, in a way I’ve never seen anywhere else, that at first it’s hard to call it beauty at all. The southern coast of Tasmania is beautiful in the same way as the rocky fells of Lapland are beautiful. There’s nothing inviting about it, nothing alluring; it’s a landscape that is perfectly aware of its own qualities and doesn’t feel the need to try to please anyone. It can afford to be aloof.
~ Johanna Sinisalo, Birdbrain
~ Karen McRae, Winter Wrapped Trees (via Helen McClory)
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So I decided to look for some place to eat something — anything — and that wasn’t easy. To the north was Tiananmen Square, to the east was the Chairman Mao’s Memorial Hall, and to the west was the Great Hall of the People, where the ceremony would be held. So my only choice was south. I went south. I passed several soldiers, with their eyes steadily fixed on the same spots just like some wax statues. Then I passed an old, high, western-style building, whose windows were broken, like a gothic haunted house. Then a beautiful public convenience, like a temple. Nothing to eat. I decided to go on. I crossed by the subway. In the subway I was quite taken aback by what I saw. Three monstrous beggars — maybe demented, maybe deformed, maybe just dirty, I couldn’t be sure — lying on the ground, covered with rubbishy quilts (obviously, they slept there in the night). I had no choice but to pass them, quickly, I must say. And at last, when I returned to the surface of the earth, I saw the KFC across the street. I had a great breakfast at KFC. These were just like a series of symbols, I told myself.
~ Kong Yalei @ Granta