Photoessay #2568 - Place

This landscape archaeology class has really been a challenge (I was going to say 'is really kicking my butt') but maybe that's a bit to colloquial.  It's a 400 level class that I talked my way into.  The reading has been theoretical and hard but I've slogged my way through it.  The class is interesting, the instructor does a good job and the two hours just fly by.

One article we have read is "How to get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Pheonomenological Prolegomena" by Edward S. Casey.  Get a load of that subtitle.  Actually though, it's a casual title but a dense article.

I don't have time to break it down nor even abstract my favorite parts.  His punch line is that space and time do not make a place; place contains space and time.  We all know place by living through it, we experience it.  It contains memories and perceptions and scenes and experiences.  We move through it and it becomes a part of us.  Really I will quote from it; it's just late in the afternoon.

But I woke up the other day and realized that this was really central to the writing work that I do.  I'm always trying to get to the essence of a place or a time in a place.  I'm all about this 'place' business; it really speaks to me.

The first idea I had was my San Gabriel Valley piece.  Somehow I feel that there's something significant about this place because I was born there.  Why was I born there?  Because my parents were living there?  But what were they doing there?  They were there a very short time, they never felt 'of that place'.  And the landscape they lived in was changing at a huge rate.  So what is my part in that huge transition.  I participated.  And that place is in my own narrative. 

I've got to study this, it's too important to miss.

Picture is the San Gabriel Valley in 1942 ten years before my birth.  It was already transformed when my parents got there around 1950.