To be completely forthright, the topic of the Newberry Seminar was not the reason I decided to apply. I would have applied regardless of its material simply to have the experience that it offered. However, as I got ready to come to the program, I began to realize more and more that its topic actually did interest me. In fact, it interested me a lot. And its topic followed me around. In fact, it flew with me across the Atlantic to Greece.
During the last half of May I took a class that went to Greece, appropriately titled History as Archaeology. As expected, we spent the entirety of two weeks in a fast-paced exploration of Greece, its museums and archaeological sites. While my professor, an archaeologist herself, had drilled in our heads that the Ancient Greeks heavily tied their identities to their environment by framing her Ancient Greek History class in a phenomenological view, there is no lesson like climbing to the top of the acropolis in the Greek heat and watching the Parthenon cast its shadow over you. Or to watch the landscape pass by through a bus window as you came closer and closer to mountain top, where perched even further up on a layer of bricks, lies a temple overlooking its valleys. There is no feeling like seeing a sanctuary laid into mountain face, its steps winding you through half-broken treasuries to its oddly shaped temple where once a Pythia spoke obscurely to her visitors.
The seminar's topic lingered on my shoulder, it asked me to turn my head out from the glass panels of Athen's Acropolis museum and out into the city that looked back at it. How does geography become tied with identity? How does the placement of a temple amplify its significance? The placement of Hephaestus's temple, a god of crafting and pottery, above the craftsman's quarter was not a mistake. He was their god and as he looked over them, they gazed up to him.
While one may be able to achieve these sensations simply by reading an account of Pausanias, for me that experience could not be born from a text. The quote from Heart of Darkness above, goes on to capture something that goes hand-in-hand with this discussion of physical place and the individual: "It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams..." (pg. 24)
The immediacy cannot be captured in words, in grammatical play, in the periods of paragraphs. The intricacy eludes us. Yet, it impacts us. It molds us, just as it is molded by us. So, we attempt to construct for others a way to experience this world. Conrad does not end his story in these ellipses. He continues to write. We follow Marlow through the jungle, we grow claustrophobic with him in the narrow passage of the river, we feel the motion and breath of the heart of the darkness where Kurtz has sunken to illness. Perhaps some detail is lost. We do not know the pattern of the veins in the leaves that frame the woman's face as she emerges from the brush. We do not know the way the leaves sunk or resisted to Marlow's steps as he followed Kurtz's crawling through the jungle. We cannot share in the immediacy of the event, even the imaginary (or not so imagined? See tomorrow's discussion of King Leopold's Ghost) event, but that does not stop Conrad and every other author from laying out these moments for us.
Writers, thinkers, painters, poets, cartographers, scientists, scholars--these people present to us an interpretation of their immediacy of experience. Their identity may seem solid in their expressions, but it is quietly (or not so quietly) formed as they explore these aspects of life, as they encounter their environment and the people who occupy it.
Similarly, I am looking forward to watching myself and my peers begin to change shape throughout this experience. While the conversation unfolded today, everyone revealed a different perspective on the text and could articulate their points so as to allow others to build off of them. As a fan of class time, the whole discussion got me excited to come back for the next seminar.
Through this blog, I will try to unfold an experience. I am not sure what it will be yet, but here is to trying!
I am so moved by the range of your thoughts and perceptions about the complexity of the interplay between physical place and the shaping of identity. Your openness to having intellectual experiences filter into your lived experiences should deeply enrich the semester's undertaking as a scholar and a resident of this great and fascinating city. I look forward to seeing what you continue to reveal about yourself and your thought processes in class discussions and in your research.
ReplyDeleteAmen to Marcy's comment! Great work.
ReplyDeleteI really like what you say about the Greek world, too. It's one of the first things my students always notice when we begin looking at the mythology. Instead of thinking about "Apollo" as a single thing, we suddenly need to ask "do we mean Delian Apollo or Pythian Apollo?" The Greeks also persistently connected narrative with place. I think it explains Odysseus' constant longing for his "native land," or the exquisite irony of that moment where he wakes up on the beach in Ithaca and for a moment does not recognize that he is finally home. Is there a place that has shaped your identity?
Definitely! The geographic attachment to the gods speaks to the persistence of the notion of a local deity, despite the re-categorizing of those deities into a pantheon. While there is a sense of the gods' omnipresence in mythological accounts--such as plays, Homer, Hesiod, etc.--that may not completely reflect the way that those deities were worshiped by people. I had to read part of an very informative text last semester for my Ancient Greek class by Jon Mikalson called Honor Thy Gods on particularly the issue of religion as presented in these texts and how it was practiced socially. He has a more focused text on the practice of "popular religion" called Athenian Popular Religion which works as an attempt to map how religion actually played out on the ground of Athens. While I have not read it, I probably will sometime in the future!
DeleteAs cliche as this sounds, my childhood home probably had the most impact on my identity. I lived a bit off from town, surrounded by green and a pond. I had few neighbors, I think the street has 12 houses on it. So, I was often left to my own devices. The house itself has windows all along the wall facing the backyard and it was rare a light was turned on in the house before it was too dark outside to read. This has shaped me to feel very close to the outside world and to value my physical space, as well as be fairly agitated when I don't get enough sunlight/outside light! It also made me hyper-aware of animals, so if I am easily distracted by birds/squirrels/dogs, the reason is that I spent a lot of my time looking at them when I was younger.
How about you, what places have shaped your sense of self?