Writing Place

The present is only a very short period of time, the seconds and minutes between the rising of an unknown future and the widespread past of our lives. Living in the present, that is to live a carpe diem-attitude, may mean to live an intense moment, but it does not anchor our selves in this world, for the present is not meant to last. It quickly becomes the past and part of our memory which defines us.

Thinking about our lives is like leafing through it like through a book. We think about the events in life that shaped us, like being kissed for the first time, graduating from school, moving out of our parent’s places, or even smaller things like the wonderful evenings we’ve spent with friends or a thoughtful walk through the streets at dusk.

All those events are past events, enclosed in our memory and, as we realise soon after when we try to tell others about these experiences, bound to places.

We find the places where we’ve spent parts of our life preserved in our memory, but we also find imprints of our past selves preserved in these places. Whenever I visit the farm of my grandparents for example, as much as it has changed over the years, I can still see myself at the age of seven or so, running between the trees. Likewise when I passed the hostel where I spent my first week here in Sydney a few days ago, I looked up to the window that used to be mine and could see myself, as I stood there on the first evening, thinking about what might lie ahead of me.

Why are memories like this so important for the human self? Rockwell Gray states in this week’s essential reading ‘Autobiographical Memory and Sense of Place’ that, while many of the features of our individual experiences ‘are generic, conditioned by the rhythms of a larger collective experience, each of us puts his own stamp on the ‘raw materials’ of existence, each has a distinct version of ‘where it all began’, and each crafts a unique story of ensuing development, success and failure. (…) All later experience remains bound, in some degree, to such beginnings.’ (Gray, p.45) In his work ‘Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing and the Sense of Place’ Kent Ryder quotes Relph: ‘There is for virtually everyone a deep association with and consciousness of the places where we were born and grew up, where we live now, or where we have had particularly moving experiences. This association seems to constitute a vital source of both individual and cultural identity and security, a point of departure from which we orient ourselves in the world.’ (Ryder, p.30) The memory-laden places are ways to ensure our identity; this is what Relph concludes when he writes about the need to orient ourselves in the world. Ryder writes that “if we feel that our present selves are inextricably bound to our pasts – that our lives have historical continuity, that we are the products of our past experiences – and if we tie memory to the landscape, then in contemplating place we contemplate ourselves.” (Ryder, p.29/30) For Gray, who is describing the same feeling, the need for historical continuity is a consequence of the modern way of living. The uprooted modern human, “hardly knowing where home is any longer” has to build “a composite sense of place”, because “(w)hen the lack of deep connection to a place and its traditions forces us to ask where we actually are, we are also asking who we are.” (Gray, p.57) Seen in this way, memory and places help us to define our identity; they are guidelines through the confused paths of life, able to give us a feeling of safety and familiarity against the growing anonymity of a rapidly changing modern world. For Wallace Stegner for example this familiarity is bound to ‘arid lands’, a ‘dry clarity and sharpness in the air’ and ‘horizons that either lifted into jagged ranges or rimmed the geometrical circle of the flat world’. In his book ‘Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living & Writing in the West’ he writes about the experience of being confronted with the absence of all these familiar features: “Now I began to understand who I was. I was a Westerner.” Memories of familiar places are always memories of familiar surroundings – be it the people connected to these places, the cultural background that is known to us or the physical knowledge that we gained about the places. Understood in this way, places in our memories are cornerstones of our identities, for they represent not only the place that we literally occupied on this planet, but they also represent everything that is familiar to us – for as Rockwell Gray says: ‘All experience is placed experience’ (Gray, p.53), and all we’ve left behind in time, all that helped to make us the people we are, that shaped our identities, is to be found in memory.