Place Journals, 5-6

I forgot I hadn't yet posted these. I turned them in on Monday and look forward to reading the professor's response.

~~~

Entry 5, 11 February 2011

I
A compass rose points
north, but what directs us home?
Where do I find that?

II
Keen sunlight shining
on winter's slumbering crop
while the lizard bathes.

Today we went to Willow Bend Environmental Education Center. The building is simple, long, straw bail construction, and regionally xeriscaped. In the garden a large stone has been cut smooth and a bronze, strangely insect-like compass rose has been set atop it. The compass rose, one of the first things I noted when I circled the building before the tour, has a particular symbolic gravity to it. While Willow Bend is a straightforward and effective piece of architecture, and Thoreau's mission humming in the back of my mind, the compass seemed to point not just in the cardinal directions, but to ourselves and to our simplified future.

That said, how? I do not like posing rhetorical questions. They tend to feel trite and inconsiderate. I have difficulty escaping the tension of what I am studying, where I am, and where I see myself going. The compass embodies this sense of guided directionlessness. So much of the course for this Construction Management: Sustainability course has been cutting edge, high tech, and grand-scale designing. Our first tour guide, the site architect, informed us – somewhat condescendingly – that green building is not cheap. I don't want cheap, I want effective and affordable. If we want to live simply, live well, and live affordably, we have models of the last few thousand years to draw on. We are not doing anything new, our tour guide commented today, in building this way. In fact, I would chime, we are doing something exceedingly old.

In what direction does our compass point? Does it point forward to the time we are engaged in making? Does it point backward to the lessons we can glean from the past? Does it point outward to contain the abundant models and triumphs surrounding us? Our compass, I believe, points in all of these directions. The direction that it inevitably fails to point, likely the most important direction, is inward. Within we can perceive and understand, even sculpt and direct our expectations and values. If I want to live simply, live affordably, and live green, doesn't that mean removing the fat of life and enjoying the lean cut that is left?

In The Omnivore's Dilemma by Pollan, he remarks that “marbled” beef is the nice way of framing fatty, less protein-rich meat that comes from cows unable to exercise or move freely. Marbled is even faintly positive; it reminds us of marble pillars and sculpture, of elegance and class. Marbled certainly doesn't suggest the unhealthy repercussions of an industrial food system that become enmeshed in the flesh of animals and the food stuffs we purchase and eat. Perhaps we have become too enamored with the fatty parts of our lives and ought to expect leaner, more wholesome cuts.

This is all coming from a vegetarian, after reading Thoreau who brags about his vegetable-based diet, and even noticing the fantastic National Geographic info-graphic a professor had posted about water consumption for various food products. Our language is rich in the metaphor of meat and its apparent virtues, I can't turn a good one down if it is glaring, or rather glistening, right in front of me. What I hope to emphasize is the way our homes and our eats are not separate. I want to eat a particular way for ethical reasons, I want to dwell in a certain way for ethical reasons. I even want to date in one way and not another for ethical reasons.

Well, that may be misleading. My ethics is about becoming, about crafting myself into the type of person who lives in a sustainable, regenerative, and interwoven community. I try to fashion behaviors therefrom. If someone were to ask, “How does a good”– that is, recuperative, mutualistic, and interdependent –“person eat?” then someone else might point in my direction, or at least to my crowd. This act isn't intended to be laudable. What could I do with that praise anyway? Rather, it is an act of modeling, of positive participation in the world of others, both human and non-human.

When the question of sustainable living comes back to the home, to lifeways and housecare and quality of life, I am challenged more and more. How do I model that behavior? How do I cultivate it in myself? To whom can I look for guidance? In one way, I can look around, just as the compass directs me. Another way, though, is to see what is already before my eyes that otherwise might elude me.

This latter is one interpretation of the second haiku. Roles of dormancy and solar usage are just about universal in Nature. Besides my stint in Brazil, everywhere I have lived the landscape goes through periods of activity and periods of quiet. These periods relate to sunlight, water, temperature, the length of the night and so on. What time do we make for dormancy? What space to we make for rest? How do our buildings reflect or fail to reflect this need and this space?

Right now, my mattress is on the floor of my new bedroom. I think that this is making my sleep less substantial and satisfying. I have failed to cultivate proper space for dormancy. In addition, this is the result of inadequate finances despite a rather hefty workload, suggesting an overall over-expression of activity and an absence of dormancy. What would it mean to include space for quiet, reflection, meditation, and rest in a home or life or community?

We also have the swift but patient lizard. He reserves his energy for proper use, though is often still. Why do offices all over campus and all over the planet run computer terminals when no one is using them? Why are office lights left on all night? Why do we let rainwater run away from where it can be used for landscaping and allowed to infiltrate? What of the escape of heat through poor insulation or the chill rush of an improperly sealed home? Wherever we look we see the inability to act like a simple lizard who is all the time teaching us. We have so much yet to discover from what is in front of us, I hope we begin to look for it.

~~~

Entry 6, 13 February 2011

I
To become walker
in this space and measuring
distance by footfalls.

II
The sharp mid-day light
singes by faint degree with
marked affection.

III
Skin a-hum – neither
pulse nor tremor – intoning
subtle songs of flesh.

IV
Listen for blue-sky
songs, the music of daylight,
cloud, & whisper wind.

So, first order of business is that I did not journal yesterday. With that said, my first haiku is adapted from meditations this morning on my pre-dawn walk to work. Perhaps I am inspired by Thoreau's reflection on walking rather than working to pay for a coach or train ticket in order to travel, or I am taken by the walkability of Flagstaff, but for whatever reason I am newly determined to walk my way more often. Early last semester, my friend and classmate Katherine shared her love for walking around her new neighborhood in Sunnyside. She wrote a personal essay on the sense of knowing a place, through physical contact with that place. I am taken, more and more, to this notion of physical connection and materiality. Here I am. Here I touch the Earth. Here is where I walk. What power resides in that understanding.

Especially in the darkened morning hours, with the particular darkness – deeper, thicker, sounder – of the Dark City of Flagstaff, walking and reflecting has its own spiritual dimension. Recently, I read an article in a 2008 National Geographic on light pollution. Flagstaff has a tradition of dimming the lights and maintaining clear skies for astronomical observations, but the import of dark spaces is more profound than that. The article goes on to point out the physiological and psychological roles of darkness, of sound darkness in our well-being. Thoreau would have been unaware of this importance as he still lived in a time of almost solely natural light. Though he does deride the artificial flame when the solar light is still about. Should we so easily forget the natural dark?

Today has been a beautiful day. From the clear and crisp five a.m. Dark, to the clean and uncomplicated sunrise, and to the rich blue and whispy clouds and sunlit warmth of the late afternoon, I have been struck with the sincere delight of the day. Outside, reading Walden, sipping tea and munching bread, I saw the sky and awoke to myself and to the space around me. I wrote II-IV in quick succession, first feeling the uncommon pressure of the day on my neck, hair, and scalp; then sensing a strange vibration in my own skin and being struck by the celerity of its rhythm, the strange music lying therein; and then finally coming back to the sky and meditating on a music resonant with my own body. Merleau-Ponty writes that despite the different sensory organs, the act of sensing is unified and whole. I think I was attempting to bridge the distinctions of sense and appreciate the sensual moment of perception.

Also, as I continue the practice of haiku, I come up again and again to the boundaries of the anglicized rules of haiku. Haiku, in the Japanese, is not a matter of syllabic concision or limitation, but capturing a scene or moment – some microcosm of the whole – with as much brevity as possible. In a way, I think that haiku itself recognizes the unification of the senses that Merleau-Ponty identifies. When we attain understanding of haiku, either in the act of writing or reading, it is a full, sensual understanding of the scene, that moment, that pulls us out of ourselves and into the world. Effective haiku knits us to the world and provides a model for active engagement thereto.

To turn back, but also to take with us what has been said, a friend of mine and I long ago discussed night. She thought of night as exhibitionist, a place to display despite the absence of a clear audience; night supposes a clearer stage onto which we play as actors. In one sort of way, I understood and appreciated this sentiment. What I said, and we later agreed on if memory serves, is that night is thick and substantial compared to the lightness of daytime. When you walk in darkness, it is immediate to your senses, unseparated from you.

This is, in effect, a reflection on sight as well. Sight and sound are “distant” senses, they place the subject away from the object. That is because light and sound travel to our senses as energy, whereas smell, taste, and touch are immediate. These latter three come to us through contact with the stuff of the world. In the darkness, even sound becomes more immediate as it displaces sight as our primary perceptive faculty. Our bodies are more prone to responding to the audible messages we receive, making physical the sensual information we receive.

Thoreau at Walden Pond is, in a different way, knitting himself to space. He reflects on fishing in the dark after dining with friends, planning for dinner the next day, and the mercurial qualities of the darkened pond, the rich life he finds there, and the mystical, even divine reality of “earth's eye” watching him. Though I still find his writing rather long-winded and verbose, a quality he himself derides in others, I am touched more in the harmony his own reflections have with the conversations and behaviors with which my own friends are engaged. His rich poetry is delightful for its celebration of place, in the spiritual and even transcendent qualities of Walden Pond; occasionally even criticizing the inferiorities of other small New England bodies of water as he raises Walden Pond to the character of the Ganges and scoffs at the idea of carrying the water away to town via pipe.

With the Dark City Ordinance – recently raised due to Best Buy's daunting interior lighting – and the spiritual and political brier patch of The Peaks, not to forget the tradition of wilderness tourism, preservation, and recovery, Flagstaff seems primed for its own fleshy, sensual thickness. We are, strange as it may sound, closer to the stars here than in other cities. They represent a sort of “real estate” in this town that everyone else must pay homage. Thoreau brings in Greco-Roman deities to whom he gives sacrifice – he burns an old fence, built for Terminus and in ode to Vulcan – while Flagstaff brings in our own mountaintop entities. The Peaks suggest a rich rootedness to place, a soulful fullness despite the political and economical rhetoric; I would go so far as to say that the rhetoric for development substantiates the tension embodies in conflicted space. An argument therefrom is for another forum, though.

I suppose this is coming to a close, though I hope the regularity here has trained me to maintain my own blog with greater rigor. With a certain consideration, I hope that I have touched on place with enough detail to fulfill the expectations of the assignment. That said, my thoughts are often bound to place in veiled or esoteric ways; that is not to suggest that they are any less present and immanent. Rather. I think of the experience and conceptualization of place as more and more the crèche from which my esoteric understanding flows. I think differently here than I have in Lincoln, Nebraska or St. Peter, Minnesota. In Rivers and Tides, Andy Goldsworthy speaks eloquently of his need to acquaint himself to the new places before he begins his commissions, that the work of travel is disheartening and dislocating. I can understand this, though I am less skilled at the work of place-acquaintance than he. The realities to which I am awakening are not different from the things I have otherwise considered and written on, rather, they are like seeds that grow differently in different climes. Give a seed water, soil, and light and it will do what it does best: Grow. Just how it does so, though is up to its own conversation with the magic of that place.