I think a lot about the concept of placeness, and what differentiates one location on the planet from another, beyond what you can see. Isn’t it interesting that in certain places you can sense stories humming in undertones? And that the spaces in which we move, physically, effect our activities and emotions and aspirations in radically different ways, via so many variables: geographical location, physical and natural features, human culture, history and migration, climate, pollution, design … and many more?
Some physical places look mundane, but have witnessed horrors and can make you shiver just to enter them. Some places make you feel elated and free.
moss-covered wall
Originally uploaded by .Leili.
Some crowded, whirring places simultaneously press on your soul, and awaken creativity. If there is no personal space for you in the crowd, in order to survive, you might have to make psychic space and distance around you.
Kampala Old Taxi Park (Matatu Park)
Originally uploaded by Kattaka.
In addition to these physical features, it seems that each place could also be said to have a spiritual history – a history of human relationships, advancement, interactions, choices, conflicts, innovations, struggles and love.
I went the other day to Boston Symphony Hall. We saw Fidelio with the amazing Christine Brewer in the Leonore/Fidelio role. Symphony Hall really has placeness. I grew up hearing stories about music heard in that place, towering musical figures encountered in that place. The building even had a role in my parents’ marriage.
So what constitutes “placeness” for you? What locations stay with you, and why? Do these places look unassuming, or might the uninitiated be able to tell that there is something special about that place from just a glance? Are your thoughts about placeness connected to ideas about home?
Mark and I are excellent at boring each other when we drive around our hometowns and point out every place where anything of any significance – and a whole lot of insignificance – happened during our childhood. And yet, it is absolutely irresistible, this desire to share that part of us that the other wasn’t around for as if that will somehow help them to understand who we are today. It can be anything from the Dairy Queen that I frequented whenever I won a softball game to the park my best friend and I would go to when we wanted to be alone.
I think for a lot of places its our own preconceptions of placeness that effect our view, I say this only because of seeing the reactions of people who are not Baha’i to the Shrines in israel. They have no concept of what it means outside of its importance to “someone else” and so for the most part it is just a nice quiet place, whereas for Baha’is its a much deeper experience.
By the same token, if you put your average teenager in a “beautiful” building it is generally obvious that the impact is lost on us, this is not because the building is less than adults believe it to be, nor is it because teenagers have no concept of beauty, it is because our preconceptions of beauty differ and our habitual response will be different, and maybe its the lack of understanding of that fact that leads to so much misunderstanding between our groups.
Our sense of space, of placeness, of being in, and affected by a space, while not entirely habitual or a reaction to peer group conditioning, is based, I believe, to some extent on factors outside of the place itself, its history, its design and more on our own sometime predetermined experience up to the momment of placeness takes place.
( Wow, check out all the commas in that last paragraph, I loves those trixy commas.)
wow what a wonderful blog…
I read all the front page, I add your English blogs to English Doxdo a site that tracks blogs in English about Iran or by Iranians, if you don’t like being in our list I will remove it, just send us an e-mail.
http://www.doxdo.com/en
Dear Mara, see – I don’t think it’s boring! I love how you both do that. It’s how I learned about Mentor, the golf course, and other fun bits of your Ohioan lives. It’s part of your culture, and will come into play even more when the baby comes and you start to impart to him who your family is. Speaking of the baby coming … if I understand it correctly, that is RIGHT NOW! We’ll be eagerly, eagerly waiting for news.
Kev, my friend – thanks so much for your comment. It was fascinating to live where we did, no? Such close proximity to beautiful gardens, where we encountered visitors from everywhere, every day, in that remarkable Spot – Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze, Baha’i pilgrims, tourists from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Australasia, Africa, plus all the school kids, musicians, doctors, architects, diplomats, educators, gardeners, soldiers, journalists … I often found that visitors, even if some were unfamiliar with the history of the place, sensed that there is a powerful spiritual energy there. I heard many refer to the gardens as “an oasis of peace”. Which surely has to do with the extraordinary physical beauty and design, but I think goes beyond that.
And Saleh – thanks for including me on Doxdo, and for your courteous note!
One of my favorite places is my grandparents’ house in the French Alps. My family moved from place to place while I was growing up, but we would always return to meme and pepe’s every other summer, so it one of the few places that we still go to now where I have stong childhood memories. Strangely enough, one of the most striking things I notice whenever we return are the familiar smells. Here’s a picture of it http://flickr.com/photos/vicali/181191406/in/set-72157594186459957/
Dear “Rit” – loved reading that memory, and being able to picture exactly what you describe. What are some of the smells that you associate with Meme and Pepe’s house? When I was in college, one day in the springtime I walked by the music building and suddenly burst into tears. The building was surrounded with boxwood hedge, which has a very distinctive, spicy/lemony fragrance. I had not smelled this since I was a little girl, visiting my grandparents in their garden in Tehran. It was so strong a trigger that it made me cry without knowing why.
Sometimes places just have this synchronicity for me. I may associate them with a person or something that was said to me, or with a song that I loved that I was listening to. I get choked up when I drive out of Indiana and ascend the Chicago Skyway Bridge and see the “Mayor Richard M. Daley welcomes you to Chicago” sign. It brings back a multitude of memories of listening to Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody” in the car when I was little and my entire family was driving across that bridge on the way to the House of Worship in Wilmette.
Speaking of Chicago, there’s an enclosed and elevated pedestrian bridge that crosses Lake Shore Drive at McCormick Place and I remember being fourteen and it being winter and pressing my face against the glass for about an hour so that I could see the snowflakes and the rushing traffic more clearly. I was listening to Depeche Mode and those swirls snow against the stark architecture were just mesmerizing against .
I’ve always loved St. John the Divine because I first visited there during World Congress and I’d never seen a real live gothic cathedral before. That feeling of mystery and history was magical and I suppose I always associate it with the energy I felt during World Congress.
Oops, just realized I didn’t finish my sentence there! See, I got lost in thought just thinking about it! I meant to say that it was mesmerizing against the sounds of the song, “A Question of Time”.
Hi! nice site!
You have a point about the “atmosphere” of a place. I comment on two English Abbeys.
I was born in England and left for Canada in 1940. Returning in 1970 to get to know the country and visit while working there, we visited various historic sites.
One was Clonfert Abbey, a beautiful, picturesque ruin which was as peaceful as the Shrine of the Bab.
Another was Westminster Abbey. I could not get more than 10 steps into it before the “atmosphere” drove me out. It certainly did not feel like a place of the Spirit.
Cool post Leili.
Hi Los Angelista, I keep running into you everywhere.