Sounding the Depths to Establish A Sense of Place
One of the biggest challenges in nature photography is truly capturing the awesomeness of a subject. There have been many occasions where I find a particularly moving image, but when I try to take a picture of it, the reproduced image on my screen just doesn’t do the actual scene justice. Such glimpses of the sublime in nature cannot be captured in photography because they are products of the whole atmosphere and feeling of the moment, of every piece of the landscape and sky coming together to create something really breathtaking; pieces of this are inherently lost when the subject is placed within a frame and removed from the moment. Struggling with this challenge has helped me to realize the innate difficulties in trying to capture a sense of place within a narrow frame of reference.
On my trips into nature for these writing exercises I have been trying to document the place in both pictures and writing. In both actions I have been limiting my understanding of the place to a narrow scope by venturing to isolate and preserve features of the landscape to create a lasting sense of place. In trying to establish this, I have become more and more aware of how flawed and limited the sense of place can be. There are ways in which I believe these writing exercises have both helped and detracted from the reliability of my sense of the place, and so I am still conflicted on how writing in this way affects such reliability, but on my fourth trip to the woods I gleaned a much greater understanding at least of the nature of my sense of the place through my interactions with the pond.
Regarding the unreliability of my sense of place, putting my experiences to words and even establishing memories of the place is inherently limiting. Research into memory distortion by the cognitive psychologist Frederick Bartlett in the early 1900’s showed how people could alter and fabricate memories as he identified memory as a reconstructive, rather than reproductive, product. This means that our memories, out internal images associated with a place or event, are comprised of only the things that fit into our schematic knowledge, and the rest is holes filled in by the brain. This is what leads to false and distorted memories that are largely constructed from inflated personal biases, and therefore an unreliable sense of the actual subject. Furthermore, the basis of my sense of place is anthropocentric in that it comes from an exclusively human perspective – my own, which further limits its comprehensiveness. Beyond the limits of establishing any sort of interpretation of the place, putting those thoughts down into writing even further jeopardizes the reliability of my sense of place. Writing creates a false depiction or reflection of the landscape upon which my sense of the place becomes based. It takes a narrow focus and falls short of the sublimity of the original.
Conversely, there are many benefits to the writing process as well in terms of establishing a sense of the place. Engaging in writing about the place causes me to think more critically and develop my thoughts in a way that I couldn’t by just thinking about them. I am also forced to pay more attention to the landscape to try to read and transcribe it onto the page, as I try to glean as much as I can from the space. Writing also makes my sense of the place more concrete and enduring; I can return to my place in nature through a reading of the text, if I really have been able to capture its essence in writing in the first place. And I am able to do this to an even greater degree with my own writing than by reading someone else’s, since I have the appropriate atmospheric and emotional schemata tied to every word on the page. But again, returning to the place through my writing can lead to a distorted sense of the place, since the writing is really only a false reflection or imitation of the real thing.
In debating over whether writing about the place in nature makes my sense of it more or less reliable, I am reminded of Plato’s use of the term pharmakon in Phaedrus. The polysemy of the word pharmakon as a symbol for writing brilliantly reflects the dual nature of writing’s effect on one’s sense of a subject. One interpretation of pharmakon translates as ‘remedy’; in Phaedrus, Theuth, the father of writing, describes the written text as “a potion for memory and intelligence”. Writing aids in the preservation and development of one’s understanding of a subject. However, pharmakon can also be interpreted as meaning poison. In the same fable, Thamous, king of the gods and father of speech, asserts that writing would actually have the opposite effect, causing one to be reliant on external sources for memory and to have a false appearance of being knowledgeable. Writing is a double-edged sword in this sense, and therefore Plato at least regards it as something that should be handled carefully. It is of utmost importance, therefore, to have as true and complete a foundation for one’s writing as is possible, which would be derived from one’s sense of the place prior to writing. The degree to which my own sense of place was complete and true was elucidated on my fourth trip into the woods by the pond.
On this trip I was determined to more thoroughly/Thoreauly investigate the pond. I paced out its dimensions; the pond is roughly 70 feet long at its longest point and 30 feet wide at its widest point. It slightly resembles the African continent in shape, with a large bulge at one end and a tapered point at the other. The pond has been different upon each of my visits to my place in Arroyo Park. On my first visit there was a chaotic show of glimmers dancing across the pond’s surface, as it was covered with hundreds of water bugs and this was the image that I had in my mind to associate with the pond. Each subsequent visit has given me a new, different image to associate with it. On this fourth visit, the pond seemed even more reflective somehow than it had been yet. Completely still and glass-like, the heavens were perfectly reproduced in its surface. When I try to look down into the depths of the pond, I am instead faced with the infinite depths of the sky, with great trees reaching towards the same point my eyes are searching for. It’s like I can see into the depths of the pond, but this is an illusory depth. There is the actual depth of the water and then this false reflection of depth superimposed over it. The harder I try to look into the actual depths, the more concrete and real the reflected illusion appears. No matter where I stand along the shore I cannot see past the reflective surface, almost to the point that the reflection is all there really is from my perspective, at least until I actually plunge into the pond and explore its depths physically…
But there are also the occasional bubbles that come up from below the surface, letting me know that there are in fact things going on below that surface of the pond. These bubbles send ripples out radially along the glassy surface, disrupting the reflection and my inability to conceive of what lies beyond the surface. They allude to creatures lurking in the dark waters, and my mind races even more with possibilities of what could be held in the pond’s depths. Even still, though, I recognize the futility of trying to sound the pond with my eyes while standing on shore, and it is at this point that I realize that, unlike my interactions thus far with the pond, my going into nature to try and write about it is akin to actually jumping into the pond to probe its depths. This realization showed me how important these writing exercises have been for my development of a more reliable sense of the place. If I were to try to gain a sense of nature only through reading about it in books, it would be like only looking at the reflective surface of the pond and thinking that I was seeing its actual depths; an author’s account of nature would only be a false reflection that has the illusion of showing the depth of his subject. By actually immersing myself in the space, though, I am plunging past the surface and actually probing the depths of the space myself.
Unsatisfied with my limited appraisal of the pond’s depths, I sought out a way to explore them further. I searched around and it didn’t take long to find the instrument with which I could do this. I found a big, curved stick, about 12 feet long, that I could use to reach out into the middle of the pond and dip down into the water to test how far down the bottom was. In doing these tests, I tried to aim for the points Thoreau identified in the Walden chapter “The Pond in Winter” as those where the deepest part of the pond should lie, at the crossing of the widest and deepest dimensions. Even though his actual survey shows the deepest part to be slightly off from this, I still thought it would be a helpful guideline for where to do my own sounding of the pond. I tested the depth at 4 different points in that general area, as well as some others that I could reach from different spots along the shore, and the water level never came up past 4 feet according to my stick. A mere four feet of water, that would hardly come up past my navel, and yet so much mystery lay far, far down in its shallow depths.
As I was dipping my instrument of surveyance into the pond, I rose to yet another level of understanding of the nature of my development of a sense of place there in the woods. I began thinking about how I was still only making blind, quasi-random stabs into the water, catching just glimpses of what lay below the water’s surface. Even more so, I was gaining my information indirectly through a medium – the stick. From this experience I suddenly realized that my previous notion – that I was immersing myself in the metaphorical pond and freely exploring its depths – was false. I was much more like the stick, arbitrarily being thrust into the waters at the hands of a schedule set down in the syllabus and evaluating only a small sliver of a much greater whole.
My trips to the pond had only lasted for two or three hours each time, and these visits were few in number. In order to truly explore that space and sound its depths, I would need to spend a much greater amount of time there. To establish a truly complete and more reliable sense of the place I would need to experience it at all hours of the day and all seasons of the year. To get as great an understanding as humanly possible, I would need to spend a great majority of my life there, to experience it in many stages of my own life. Even this would be a limited understanding though; it would take a truly omniscient presence to know something, from its beginning to its end and everything in between and to actually grok it. As they say, “God only knows”. But to really zealously explore and understand nature as a human being, one would have to go live there, not just visit. I believe this is what Thoreau was doing at Walden. While I think this was a commendable endeavor, and that he gained a remarkable sense of the place shows in his writing, but he was still only there for about two years. One truly committed to coming into as full of an appreciation and understanding of nature as possible would have to go far beyond what Thoreau did in his cabin at Walden Pond, becoming a more permanent inhabitant of the space.
On this trip to the woods I realized that, so far, my sense of the place has been comprised of blind grasps at brief glimpses of all that there truly is to see there, and so it would be naïve to claim that my sense of the place is remotely complete or reliable. However, each exposure to the space brings me closer to a more realized sense of place, and so I do believe that these exercises have given me at least a more reliable sense than I would have had without them. It is also still true, though, that writing about my experiences has an inherent effect of narrowing my focus and putting a frame around the subjects I wish to investigate, therefore isolating them from their environment and obfuscating their true qualities. The challenge in true outdoor writing then is trying to overcome this phenomenon so as to perceive and write as comprehensively as possible.
On my trips into nature for these writing exercises I have been trying to document the place in both pictures and writing. In both actions I have been limiting my understanding of the place to a narrow scope by venturing to isolate and preserve features of the landscape to create a lasting sense of place. In trying to establish this, I have become more and more aware of how flawed and limited the sense of place can be. There are ways in which I believe these writing exercises have both helped and detracted from the reliability of my sense of the place, and so I am still conflicted on how writing in this way affects such reliability, but on my fourth trip to the woods I gleaned a much greater understanding at least of the nature of my sense of the place through my interactions with the pond.
Regarding the unreliability of my sense of place, putting my experiences to words and even establishing memories of the place is inherently limiting. Research into memory distortion by the cognitive psychologist Frederick Bartlett in the early 1900’s showed how people could alter and fabricate memories as he identified memory as a reconstructive, rather than reproductive, product. This means that our memories, out internal images associated with a place or event, are comprised of only the things that fit into our schematic knowledge, and the rest is holes filled in by the brain. This is what leads to false and distorted memories that are largely constructed from inflated personal biases, and therefore an unreliable sense of the actual subject. Furthermore, the basis of my sense of place is anthropocentric in that it comes from an exclusively human perspective – my own, which further limits its comprehensiveness. Beyond the limits of establishing any sort of interpretation of the place, putting those thoughts down into writing even further jeopardizes the reliability of my sense of place. Writing creates a false depiction or reflection of the landscape upon which my sense of the place becomes based. It takes a narrow focus and falls short of the sublimity of the original.
Conversely, there are many benefits to the writing process as well in terms of establishing a sense of the place. Engaging in writing about the place causes me to think more critically and develop my thoughts in a way that I couldn’t by just thinking about them. I am also forced to pay more attention to the landscape to try to read and transcribe it onto the page, as I try to glean as much as I can from the space. Writing also makes my sense of the place more concrete and enduring; I can return to my place in nature through a reading of the text, if I really have been able to capture its essence in writing in the first place. And I am able to do this to an even greater degree with my own writing than by reading someone else’s, since I have the appropriate atmospheric and emotional schemata tied to every word on the page. But again, returning to the place through my writing can lead to a distorted sense of the place, since the writing is really only a false reflection or imitation of the real thing.
In debating over whether writing about the place in nature makes my sense of it more or less reliable, I am reminded of Plato’s use of the term pharmakon in Phaedrus. The polysemy of the word pharmakon as a symbol for writing brilliantly reflects the dual nature of writing’s effect on one’s sense of a subject. One interpretation of pharmakon translates as ‘remedy’; in Phaedrus, Theuth, the father of writing, describes the written text as “a potion for memory and intelligence”. Writing aids in the preservation and development of one’s understanding of a subject. However, pharmakon can also be interpreted as meaning poison. In the same fable, Thamous, king of the gods and father of speech, asserts that writing would actually have the opposite effect, causing one to be reliant on external sources for memory and to have a false appearance of being knowledgeable. Writing is a double-edged sword in this sense, and therefore Plato at least regards it as something that should be handled carefully. It is of utmost importance, therefore, to have as true and complete a foundation for one’s writing as is possible, which would be derived from one’s sense of the place prior to writing. The degree to which my own sense of place was complete and true was elucidated on my fourth trip into the woods by the pond.
On this trip I was determined to more thoroughly/Thoreauly investigate the pond. I paced out its dimensions; the pond is roughly 70 feet long at its longest point and 30 feet wide at its widest point. It slightly resembles the African continent in shape, with a large bulge at one end and a tapered point at the other. The pond has been different upon each of my visits to my place in Arroyo Park. On my first visit there was a chaotic show of glimmers dancing across the pond’s surface, as it was covered with hundreds of water bugs and this was the image that I had in my mind to associate with the pond. Each subsequent visit has given me a new, different image to associate with it. On this fourth visit, the pond seemed even more reflective somehow than it had been yet. Completely still and glass-like, the heavens were perfectly reproduced in its surface. When I try to look down into the depths of the pond, I am instead faced with the infinite depths of the sky, with great trees reaching towards the same point my eyes are searching for. It’s like I can see into the depths of the pond, but this is an illusory depth. There is the actual depth of the water and then this false reflection of depth superimposed over it. The harder I try to look into the actual depths, the more concrete and real the reflected illusion appears. No matter where I stand along the shore I cannot see past the reflective surface, almost to the point that the reflection is all there really is from my perspective, at least until I actually plunge into the pond and explore its depths physically…
But there are also the occasional bubbles that come up from below the surface, letting me know that there are in fact things going on below that surface of the pond. These bubbles send ripples out radially along the glassy surface, disrupting the reflection and my inability to conceive of what lies beyond the surface. They allude to creatures lurking in the dark waters, and my mind races even more with possibilities of what could be held in the pond’s depths. Even still, though, I recognize the futility of trying to sound the pond with my eyes while standing on shore, and it is at this point that I realize that, unlike my interactions thus far with the pond, my going into nature to try and write about it is akin to actually jumping into the pond to probe its depths. This realization showed me how important these writing exercises have been for my development of a more reliable sense of the place. If I were to try to gain a sense of nature only through reading about it in books, it would be like only looking at the reflective surface of the pond and thinking that I was seeing its actual depths; an author’s account of nature would only be a false reflection that has the illusion of showing the depth of his subject. By actually immersing myself in the space, though, I am plunging past the surface and actually probing the depths of the space myself.
Unsatisfied with my limited appraisal of the pond’s depths, I sought out a way to explore them further. I searched around and it didn’t take long to find the instrument with which I could do this. I found a big, curved stick, about 12 feet long, that I could use to reach out into the middle of the pond and dip down into the water to test how far down the bottom was. In doing these tests, I tried to aim for the points Thoreau identified in the Walden chapter “The Pond in Winter” as those where the deepest part of the pond should lie, at the crossing of the widest and deepest dimensions. Even though his actual survey shows the deepest part to be slightly off from this, I still thought it would be a helpful guideline for where to do my own sounding of the pond. I tested the depth at 4 different points in that general area, as well as some others that I could reach from different spots along the shore, and the water level never came up past 4 feet according to my stick. A mere four feet of water, that would hardly come up past my navel, and yet so much mystery lay far, far down in its shallow depths.
As I was dipping my instrument of surveyance into the pond, I rose to yet another level of understanding of the nature of my development of a sense of place there in the woods. I began thinking about how I was still only making blind, quasi-random stabs into the water, catching just glimpses of what lay below the water’s surface. Even more so, I was gaining my information indirectly through a medium – the stick. From this experience I suddenly realized that my previous notion – that I was immersing myself in the metaphorical pond and freely exploring its depths – was false. I was much more like the stick, arbitrarily being thrust into the waters at the hands of a schedule set down in the syllabus and evaluating only a small sliver of a much greater whole.
My trips to the pond had only lasted for two or three hours each time, and these visits were few in number. In order to truly explore that space and sound its depths, I would need to spend a much greater amount of time there. To establish a truly complete and more reliable sense of the place I would need to experience it at all hours of the day and all seasons of the year. To get as great an understanding as humanly possible, I would need to spend a great majority of my life there, to experience it in many stages of my own life. Even this would be a limited understanding though; it would take a truly omniscient presence to know something, from its beginning to its end and everything in between and to actually grok it. As they say, “God only knows”. But to really zealously explore and understand nature as a human being, one would have to go live there, not just visit. I believe this is what Thoreau was doing at Walden. While I think this was a commendable endeavor, and that he gained a remarkable sense of the place shows in his writing, but he was still only there for about two years. One truly committed to coming into as full of an appreciation and understanding of nature as possible would have to go far beyond what Thoreau did in his cabin at Walden Pond, becoming a more permanent inhabitant of the space.
On this trip to the woods I realized that, so far, my sense of the place has been comprised of blind grasps at brief glimpses of all that there truly is to see there, and so it would be naïve to claim that my sense of the place is remotely complete or reliable. However, each exposure to the space brings me closer to a more realized sense of place, and so I do believe that these exercises have given me at least a more reliable sense than I would have had without them. It is also still true, though, that writing about my experiences has an inherent effect of narrowing my focus and putting a frame around the subjects I wish to investigate, therefore isolating them from their environment and obfuscating their true qualities. The challenge in true outdoor writing then is trying to overcome this phenomenon so as to perceive and write as comprehensively as possible.