SENSE OF PLACE/LESS

When so much of life has become globalized, these two terms--sense of place and placelessness--both relate in some way to the renewed focus on place, whether place is considered as the location (or locality) of life in a town or city, or how places/localities relate to the whole world.

Sense of place is the collection of meanings, beliefs, symbols, values, and feelings that individuals or groups associate with a particular locality. With high rates of mobility, increasing tenuousness with the natural environment, increasing mediatization of the lifeworld (TV, computers, cell phones, IM, texting), it is thought that people are losing much of their rootedness to where they live. Thus, they do not have, if this is correct, a deep attachment to place--their sense of place is underdeveloped.

Placelessness, then, has two meanings: Places themselves are increasingly homogenized in a McDonaldization of the landscape (cityscapes with their chain businesses look similar). And, people themselves experience placelessness when living in a placeless, homogenized landscape.

Refer to sense of place above and you can see that the two terms relate in reverse: Sense of place provides identity to individuals and collectives; placelessness occurs when an individual or collective experiences little emotional connection to a place. Sense of place measures attachment and identification to a place; placelessness measures the lack of connection and identification to a place.

BURNING BUSHES AND LOVER TARANTULAS

I am reminded of the other southern Cal natural hazard (no, not the drive-by shootings!), besides the one when the very earth beneath one's feet performs its liquefaction dance and reminds one of the fragility of life and Earth: I'm speaking of wild fires that drive all God's creatures before them or be toasted. Moses himself must have witnessed something like the impossible-to-chop-down manzanita bush exploding into a fire ball before his eyes. The Eleventh Commandment (at least for southern Cal) should read, "Thou shalt not play with incendiary devices in the chaparral."

Then there are the landslides, especially after the wild fires (one hazardous thing leads to another!), that block roads anywhere there's a road beneath a cliff, like up in the Santa Monicas.

Yes, the tarantulas are interesting, especially when the frisky males migrate across hill country from Trancas to Topanga canyons and beyond (looking for fine, hairy multi-eyed females sitting and waiting before their rocky lair tunnels!) and I, as an observant driver not wanting to cause more ink spots on the roads and not wanting to interfere with romantic arachno-trysts, would swerve like an amped surfer carving the barrel.

Close behind where I lived up Decker Canyon there was a straight volcanic sill [a tabular body of igneous rock injected while molten between sedimentary or volcanic beds], cream- and apricot-colored (I have a piece of it resting on my window sill--ha!: the word "sill," with different meanings, used homophonically twice in the same sentence!) where I would look for the darlin' tarantulas.

Otherwise, I spent my last year there muttering to myself, "This is insane!," after I became a freeway-flier inching my way on the Santa Monica Freeway. By the end of that harried year, I was sitting rather culture shocked in the backwoods of Mississippi in a cabin-like house, just like the one Goldilocks discovered, as depicted on the cover of daughter Sanjina Marie's book. I am not making this up.

CALIFORNIA WHALES DREAMING AND BREACHING FOR THE HILLS

The following are some thoughts uncovering my sense of place of California.

I lived in Malibu four years (and also San Luis Obispo), first across the road from the beach (and Carroll O'Conner, close to Cheech Marin's), on Malibu Road, and later up the Santa Monica Mountains where my daughter Sanjina Marie was born at home and where I planted a young pepper tree over the bloody, fresh placenta (like the South Sea Islanders), at about 1,000 ft. elevation, in coastal rattler and coyote country, on Decker School Road which ends in that county park on the ridge high over the Pacific, the setting for many old Western films. I used to drive over the ridge down into Simi Valley and down coast on PCH to Pacific Palisades.

To the subject at hand, you know that northern Californians (I have a brother there) quite smugly claim that southern Californians (I have a brother there) exhibit the Hollywood-glitzy, beach-sunshine, Valley Girl, freeway-flier, superficial/artificial surfing culture. One of the French philosophers wrote of the simulacrum of reality there.

Second, there is the self-perception that California is a separate country, fenced off by the Pacific Ocean to the west and deserts and mountains and long, Death Valley distances to the east--a separate place, a separate mentality. Whenever I traveled from the West Coast to the eastern U.S. I felt I had re-entered America.

Third, there's the lack of concern or even consideration (consciously?) of earthquakes, occurring by the thousands each day and possibly sensed subliminally. Is it a gallows-humor mentality or simply a desire to banish the unpleasant and unsettling thoughts? After all, Hollywood produces facsimiles of any reality. Just pretend.

Next, Joan Didion, I believe, wrote of the dire mood changes southern Californians experience when the hot, dry Santa Anas blow over the mountains from the high deserts to the east and dessicate any civility and pretense of enlightenment--the thousand-petaled southern Cal buddha waxes cranky and the murder rate is said to spike. Times, those were, to head for the Beach Boy beaches and escape the mayhem and drive-by shootings on the 14-lane (un)freeways.

But, then, there is the facticity of the climate, such that on approximately 320 bright, glorious mornings each year I would awaken and announce to the avocado and orange trees, to the wild yuccas and anise, to the scorpions and tarantulas--yes!--to the breaching California gray whales offshore and yipping coyotes onshore--that it was "another PERFECT day in southern Cal!"

Finally, I'll remind you of the image of the autumnal, golden California hills popping out green in spring and covered with the bright, slightly greenish-yellow, wild mustard. I'm thinking also of the times I hiked behind Santa Barbara in the seasons of blooming wild flowers. And, of the deep green-gray of the cold Pacific, flowing south from Alaska and swirling with long strands of unseen green kelp, on the lookout for whales and dolphins which I saw often, even while descending tightly winding Decker Canyon (toward Whoopi's house at the bottom). Many times I strolled with the quickly sleeping, infant Sanjina in a baby sling, on the long, crashing beach at Trancas.

Superficial/artificial/simulacral and seismic or not, California has got to be one of the most exhilaratingly beautiful places on Earth.

You can see I'm California dreaming.

MIDDLE EARTH IMAGINARY

Having recently visited England, I disagree somewhat with J.R.R. Tolkien's statement that "subcreation" is the invention of a totally imaginary, fully articulated world. In truth, it seems to me that the "subcreation" springs from the physical world and landscape in which one already lives and usually is not "totally imaginary." At least in Tolkien's case, the philologist of medieval Scandinavian languages lived in a land of ancient trees and ancient Druidic mysteries (England) which informed at least some substrate of his fertile imagination.

Could Middle Earth have been subcreated in the Outback of Australia, if one had no knowledge of rural England? Tolkien, it seems to me, remade--subcreated--the England he knew into a fanciful fantasy land and used biblical themes of the ultimate struggle between forces of light and darkness. His English sense of (real) place became the Middle Earth sense of imaginary place.

To me, England wears antiquity like Sherlock Holmes wears his overcape (coming to a theatre near you [starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law]).

AUTOCTHONY COMING AND GOING

From dirt we came. We, I'll say it, perhaps as would Kentucky essayist, novelist, poet Wendell Berry, are autocthonous beings, as are all creatures, or at least we should be. Wonderful word, autocthonous: "formed or originating in the place where found," as we miraculously spring up from the soil of our home place. Native American literature is largely a discourse about place and one's spiritual connection (or not) to one part of the Earth.

When we are alienated from our place we experience solastalgia, a term I found in the journal, Australian Psychiatry, that indicates environmentally induced distress. I speculate that as we are exposed to greater environmental change, we will experience more solastalgia, more alienation from the place we live. The remedy: engendering the feeling and practice of living as autocthon, a creature who truly dwells in place. For me, perhaps I should return to playing marbles. To dirt we shall return.

COUNTERING PSYCHOTERRATIC ILLNESS

I wonder whether we are all headed to a Truman Show artificial reality in what some are calling a "post-human" world.

Seems the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has recently perturbed three groups of Brits: Christians, naturalists, and historians. One thing it has done is to drop all references related to nature. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/081209/entertainment/axed_from_oxford

This reminds me of the discussion and controversy surrounding the publishing of E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), which included as an appendix 500 facts (I believe) that Americans should know to be "literate" culturally, so as to be able to take part in public dialogue. (Later, Hirsch would publish dictionaries of cultural literacy.) We in education at that time (I was working on an MEd in secondary social studies while teaching high school) were strongly skeptical of his pedagogical recommendation to simply teach cultural facts. The teaching of facts is not effective pedagogy. But now I wonder how young people are to absorb sufficient cultural background, or cultural literacy, for continuing social cohesion. This, it seems, has not been resolved, and today does not appear to be on anyone's agenda. That a dictionary drops references to nature is not encouraging.

In a related matter, I ran across an article in Australian Psychiatry (2007, vol. 15 Supplement) in which the researchers studied people in New South Wales, Australia, in terms of their psychological stress induced by the persistent drought there. The researchers were applying the new (since 2003) psychiatric term solastalgia: the earth-related mental illness where people's mental wellbeing is threatened by the severing of "healthy" links between themselves and their home and territory. Geographers call this a loss of sense of place or placelessness. In the U.S. data relate that Americans get out into nature less; e.g. there are decreasing numbers of hunting and fishing licenses issued each year.

The connections I am making between a British dictionary that drops vocabulary reflecting the natural environment (flowers and landscape terms), and the loss of cultural literacy in America, and the great changes that both our local and global environments are going through is that we are headed toward increasing experience of solastalgia. In these times, it seems to me, we need greater emphasis on solidifying our experience of where we live, the localities in which we are embedded, our sense of local places.

I know many people revere the beauty, even sacredness, of nature, etc. Perhaps we, and many other adults who understand, will someday become docents to reintroduce younger people to their natural environment. Perhaps we are the reserve cadre of wise old ones--who feel "at home" in the world--who shall one day help to combat the widespread lived experience and pathology of solastalgia. It will be therapy for those missing the nurturance of their "mother"--Mother Nature. Nature is not only beautiful (and sacred), it is needed for human mental health.

ECOSYSTEM DISTRESS SYNDROMES

Albrecht, G., G.-M. Sartore, L. Connor, N. Higginbotham, S. Freeman, B. Kelly, H. Stain, A. Tonna, and G. Pollard. 2007. Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change. Australian Psychiatry 15 Supplement:S95-S98.

Relating ecosystem health, human health, and psychological outcomes, the concept of solastalgia was created (in 2003) to describe place-based psychological distress when people negatively perceive their home environment. The article applies the concept to the experiences of people living in two distressed environments: areas of persistent drought and open-pit mining in New South Wales, Australia.

Solastalgia is placed under the larger concept of psychoterratic (environmentally induced) mental illness, which also includes nostalgia: diagnosable mental distress produced by separation from home (“homesickness”). The researchers found that the mining landscape produced solastalgia and loss of sense of place.

BODY AS WARRIOR

After some decades of serious counter-cultural antiestablishmentarianism, including likening American football games (especially professional) to the bread-and-circuses of Roman gladiatorial spectacles imperially and deviously designed to distract the masses, I have returned to near where I began life as a natural athlete and again enjoy watching the pure athleticism of it all, like semi-choreographed, yet spontaneous, grace-in-motion and Greek theater of tragedy and triumph. Sports is life as much as anything else is.

Yet, spectator sports is largely a waste of time, I still believe. Nonetheless, when one roots for a team, sometimes local or one from college days or from whence one came, one's identity is part of the mix. For example, my following the University of Kentucky sports programs--many of you can identify with this sentiment--has a great deal to do with MY IDENTITY as a Kentuckian (but I do not live there any longer) and my sense of where I come from--my sense of place, my sense of who I am. It also affords me a sense of community, as I am part of the diasporic "Big Blue Nation" and I look for other people around where I presently live who have the same roots. Sports is a way of connecting to the world.

As I related above, I was a severe critic of this sort of thinking during the later 1960s through the 1980s. Several things changed my thinking. One was a thin anthropological study about Native American "spirit running," where present-day warriors cover preternatural distances in a single run, say over a hundred miles in a few hours. Yes! They claim they run above the ground. It got me thinking about physical regimen as spirituality. It got me thinking about mind over matter.

Another influence was the books by Dan Millman: Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior, and The Inner Athlete, and its revision as Body Mind Mastery: Creating Success in Sport and Life. He helped me see that everyBODY is an athlete (at some level), as we all live (with our minds) in a body; and that our bodies are in our minds. This breaks down the mind-body dualism.

This I have practiced, I see now, nearly my entire life. It works. I hope to not lose any power by saying that I have created and inhabit--now entering my seventh decade of life--a body (from the neck down) that is nearly the same as I had when I was an 18-year-old competitive athlete. (I have mentioned elsewhere that I was a non-scholarship walk-on on the University of Kentucky freshman basketball team.) It's startling to some when they see me at the gym. It's not all genetics as my three brothers do not look as I do.

Now my "competition" is with myself--with my body, with my mind. We have friendly competition and I'm always the winner.

My admonition to all y'all is to strive for some body-mind mastery as part of your own personal path of human potential. It works. The mind, working in tandem with the body, is a powerful force.

POSTMODERN PLACELESSNESS

Assuming someone is a particular way DUE to their culture, family background, or ANY other personal attribute is deterministic and should be avoided (this is probably also a Postmodernist stance!).

Having been imbued with a good dose of Postmodernism--as we all have, whether we understand this or not--I would say that, today, each one of us lives in a self-created, individualistic (Postmodernist) world, to one degree or another. True, yours might be further from the "mainstream" than most, but since Postmodern thought is highly skeptical of what's called "grand narrative," each individual is freer to create her own reality in an age of increasing individuation.

The term hybridity is used to explain this condition. For example, non-Native Americans can study Native American thought and lifeways. It would be easy to dismiss the former because they are NOT Native American people and they are not truly living a "Native American life," but that's my point: people are free to piece together--hybridize--their own created identities from whatever they choose.

This is a fairly new development. I would say that BECAUSE I am a middle-class, Caucasian, late-middle-age male raised in a milieu of Christian upbringing does NOT define much about me anymore. I am free to choose otherwise. I am free to create my own (new) persona, based on a smorgasbord of possibilities. (For example, I label myself "pagan-Buddhist-Christian," normally an oxymoron, but a label that has meaning for me.) This is one aspect of a Postmodernist society: self-created meaning and identity.

To understand Postmodernism one would have to understand the historical era described as "Modern" (some thinkers reject that we are really in a "post-" period after Modernism, and that we are in a "late-" or "hyper-" Modern period), which was based on ideals which came out of the Age of Reason (or the Enlightenment) of the 17th and 18th centuries. To take one of its ideals, there is the idea of Progress: that society could be perfected through the gradual perfection of humanity. Postmodernist thought is highly skeptical of this ideal, instead seeing within society increasing pessimism and irrationality.

There is so much more to Postmodernist ideas, but the area I am interested in academically is how we see and experience place and space (including cyberspace) and how this impacts identity and spatial cognition. To give one idea, we are increasingly "placeless" and tend toward a rootless nomadism, not bound to a single place. We are losing our sense of place to a single place in one degree or another and acquiring a sense of "glocal" space--a cognitive continuum from local to global, or so I theorize.

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC MAPS?

It is obvious that in fiction-writing cognitive mapping plays an essential role. From the 1884 novel by Edward A. Abbot, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which is literally about the dimensionality of space; to Mark Twain's placed-based works, set in California, Europe, or the American South; and Philip K. Dick's dystopian sci-fi novels and short stories (e.g., "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", which was made into the film Blade Runner)--all fiction, like history, must take place some place, even if the place is an entirely fictional landscape. Robert Louis Stevenson claimed that before writing his novel he drew a map of Treasure Island so that he could visualize the plot. Mississippian Eudora Welty said, in "The Writer's Craft," that, "One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. A sense of space [and place] gives equilibrium, a sense of direction" (my insertion). Spatiality is, as are the essentialities of matter and time, one of the attributes of the physical Universe.

INNER/OUTER LANDSCAPES

When I worked in Appalachian Kentucky, deep in the folded, forested mountains of bloody Harlan County, there were people who expressed to me their perceived need to have the closeness of the mountain slopes next to them. I, from the rolling hills of flatlands Midwest Kentucky, felt a bit claustrophobic and closed in, when I could not gaze out on any meaningful horizon.

In either case, it's our individual cognitive constructs interpreting the environments and landscapes around us. In some sense, we are formed by the environment/landscape in which we live, not in any deterministic way, but in dynamic interaction. There is interplay between our inner space and our sense of place--its environment and landscape. Each helps form the other.