Quickly fleeing Glasgow, but first running north and west through touristy, crowded Loch Lomond. Tourism rules here: the past, the 'picturesque' land (here the Loch) and the nearby officially 'preserved' villages (like Luss) as commodities. One of the main attractions at the Loch, judging by the full parking lot and lines of people returning with full shopping bags, seems to be a shopping mall/aquarium/park visitors centre complex. Someone seems to have decided that if you can turn places into people magnet spectacles, like Luss and Loch Lomond, then why not proide a tartan shop, highland perfumery or knick-knack shop or two.
In the evening I open a tourist booklet to a full page ad in which the Duke and Duchess of Argyll invite us to “Be enchanted” at their Inveraray Castle. But then every castle in the region makes its best pitch, as with Duart Castle shining ghostly under a rare sun or Photoshop beam, hints of rocky outcroppings and golden heath, all sitting under deep grey clouds that don't seem to speak of rain.
Another page: a stylish ad for Iona Abbey and Nunnery sits face to face with an ad for Tralee Rally Karting (“Turn up, put on a helmet, and you’re in for the biggest buzz of the summer.”).
The two page spread for Inverarary Jail and County Court promises you'll “Witness History,” Get locked up! Face torture, Death & Damnation,” “Discover how wrongdoers were trated before the days of prisons [i.e. our progressive times]. For petty theft, the punishment was thumbscrews, being branded with a hot iron or having your ear nailed to a post!” (No torture in our time!). The past as cartoon of some fantasy of unique cruelty, hardship that we've all grown beyond.
What happens to the past in this touristic world? To memory? The total packaging of both. How to have something of one's own experience in such a world?
End of day - and next. We are finally moving a little beyond the crowds and the call to be enchanted. A morning walk along quiet, remote Crinan Canal (where boaters lock themselves through and there's not a bikini to be seen - both unthinkable on the Rideau Canal we've been paddling), then to Kilmartin Glen to walk among the sheep rubbing themselves against the Neolithic standing stones that dot their pasture. Even the recurrent showers of the first two days let up for much of today.
Tom
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Glasgow hallucinations
The hallucinatory effects of an overnight flight, combined with arriving in a strange city. Chatty seatmates, including Stuart Little. Noisy movies into the night, drink trolley then food trolley then merchandise trolley. Lights dimmed ... but it seems only moments later that the lights are bright again and “breakfast” lands in front of us: something called eggs, beans, several processed potato balls soaked in fat. This after I had been told by grinning Stuart Little about the delights of Scottish cuisine: real meat pies, deep fried Mars bars, various forms of ‘delicious, lovely’ sausage ….
Sleep starved, I likely couldn’t be fair to Glasgow at first walk down Duke Street: dreary, dreary, even with the overcast sky which opened up into a sunny if cool afternoon. Concrete and stone buildings, bulky, square, stained and ever so plain. The jumbled mix of these 19thC buildings and newer Soviet feeling grey steel, concrete and glass blocks along the hills.
Many many closed shops along Duke and from what we could see up and down side streets. B’s seatmate estimates 10 % unemployment in Scotland. Along Duke the long low brick remains of some industrial ruin, repeated spaces once held empty arched windows, the grassy areas underneath strewn with plastic bags, cans, bottles.
The best part of the day is meeting grand nephew Dennis for lunch at Bar 91. He likes the solid old buildings he says
The atmosphere seems to have a silvery hue to it. The clouds and ocean light? The light off the rain slicked slate roof tiles. Wherever it comes from, it too brightens the place, brings it alive.
Tom
Sleep starved, I likely couldn’t be fair to Glasgow at first walk down Duke Street: dreary, dreary, even with the overcast sky which opened up into a sunny if cool afternoon. Concrete and stone buildings, bulky, square, stained and ever so plain. The jumbled mix of these 19thC buildings and newer Soviet feeling grey steel, concrete and glass blocks along the hills.
Many many closed shops along Duke and from what we could see up and down side streets. B’s seatmate estimates 10 % unemployment in Scotland. Along Duke the long low brick remains of some industrial ruin, repeated spaces once held empty arched windows, the grassy areas underneath strewn with plastic bags, cans, bottles.
The best part of the day is meeting grand nephew Dennis for lunch at Bar 91. He likes the solid old buildings he says
The atmosphere seems to have a silvery hue to it. The clouds and ocean light? The light off the rain slicked slate roof tiles. Wherever it comes from, it too brightens the place, brings it alive.
Tom
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Wayfinding along a crooked road
This blog is influenced by my interest in what I refer to, for now, as “wayfinding.” In its usual uses, wayfinding refers to the many ways people orient themselves to their world and find their way from place to place. The subject is wide: Aboriginal Australian finding their place and way among stars and landmarks. Various forms of cartography. Locational technologies: compasses, GP devices. More recently, wayfinding in the bureaucratic guise refers to approaches to signage, architecture and urban planning aimed at 'aiding' and ‘managing’ the movement of people.
Most meanings and uses of wayfinding, apart from the Aboriginal instance, refer to activities and technologies that have been closely aligned with commercial, religious and state power, the history of mapping being but one example. In these common contexts wayfinding usually suggests considerable confidence in the ability to name how things are and how to get from A to B.
I begin elsewhere. Here the critical element of wayfinding is lack of confidence in how the powers that be shape and describe where we are. Here wayfinding begins with the existential uncertainties and questions, applied to history, memory, the present, and possible futures. The best ‘travel’ books, like W.G. Sebald’s, are wayfinding books. Where am I? Where have I come from? What am I doing here? What is home? Where am I going? '
The usual ‘maps’ give kind of answer - answers aligned with power - to such questions. I’m with the great journeyer Melville when he suggests what is worth finding “is not drawn on any map; true places never are. "
The journeys of Sebald the archaeologist (a wayfinder who digs down/through a modern violence that seems to instantly bury, forget and deny, itself), take us to scenes of the buried, repressed, denied (as well as the lives of whose on the edges who suffer in memory: the refugees, dreamers, migrants, artists of the Wadi Halfa cafe), which in turn cast light on where we are now (the innocent-appearing what simply “is” of the official maps/pronouncements) and where we moderns keep returning: Guantánamo, S-21, Terezin ….
David Woodward: I first heard of David Woodward – now dead, but the instigator of an amazing critical project on the history of cartography - during a radio interview as we drove across the Nullabor plain, one of the longest, straightest roads on earth. It was Woodward who was connecting the many usual meanings of wayfinding with the state, but also seeing something else important in the concept: those more essential questions, asked critically, referred to above.
The west coast Salish once told stories suggesting their shock (and laughter) at how the new westerners (clear cutters, road builders, industrial fishermen) worked compulsively, til death, “making all the crooked ways straight.” ‘Wayfinding’ here is a crooked ways journey through both this straightening and its results and, I hope, some encounters with some places not found on any map.
Tom
Most meanings and uses of wayfinding, apart from the Aboriginal instance, refer to activities and technologies that have been closely aligned with commercial, religious and state power, the history of mapping being but one example. In these common contexts wayfinding usually suggests considerable confidence in the ability to name how things are and how to get from A to B.
I begin elsewhere. Here the critical element of wayfinding is lack of confidence in how the powers that be shape and describe where we are. Here wayfinding begins with the existential uncertainties and questions, applied to history, memory, the present, and possible futures. The best ‘travel’ books, like W.G. Sebald’s, are wayfinding books. Where am I? Where have I come from? What am I doing here? What is home? Where am I going? '
The usual ‘maps’ give kind of answer - answers aligned with power - to such questions. I’m with the great journeyer Melville when he suggests what is worth finding “is not drawn on any map; true places never are. "
The journeys of Sebald the archaeologist (a wayfinder who digs down/through a modern violence that seems to instantly bury, forget and deny, itself), take us to scenes of the buried, repressed, denied (as well as the lives of whose on the edges who suffer in memory: the refugees, dreamers, migrants, artists of the Wadi Halfa cafe), which in turn cast light on where we are now (the innocent-appearing what simply “is” of the official maps/pronouncements) and where we moderns keep returning: Guantánamo, S-21, Terezin ….
David Woodward: I first heard of David Woodward – now dead, but the instigator of an amazing critical project on the history of cartography - during a radio interview as we drove across the Nullabor plain, one of the longest, straightest roads on earth. It was Woodward who was connecting the many usual meanings of wayfinding with the state, but also seeing something else important in the concept: those more essential questions, asked critically, referred to above.
The west coast Salish once told stories suggesting their shock (and laughter) at how the new westerners (clear cutters, road builders, industrial fishermen) worked compulsively, til death, “making all the crooked ways straight.” ‘Wayfinding’ here is a crooked ways journey through both this straightening and its results and, I hope, some encounters with some places not found on any map.
Tom
Monday, August 24, 2009
Being a stranger
Writer Orhan Pamuk, long time resident of Istanbul, says that to savour the city's back streets "you must, first and foremost, be a stranger to them." We'll be strangers all right, the very essence of the traveler. Living with unfamiliar, unknown, often incomprehensible - at the very least, uncertain - things, places, words, gestures, meanings.
(It especially interests me how this kind of strangeness is or isn't so different from the strangeness - especially the sense of the incomprehensible - I often feel in my 'home land'.)
. . . . .
People ask: Why Scotland and Turkey? One answer is circumstance: a recently planned wedding in Scotland, a previously planned journey in Turkey. But similarities (if that's what is being asked for) also quickly come to mind. Both are feudal societies, and maybe not just in the 'ancient' sense. Both are littered with rocky ruins and histories of gangsterism (okay, that's not the touristic or official-ideal term). Both lands have echoed with bagpipes, Turks long before the Scots. Both speak languages we won't understand.
Tom
(It especially interests me how this kind of strangeness is or isn't so different from the strangeness - especially the sense of the incomprehensible - I often feel in my 'home land'.)
. . . . .
People ask: Why Scotland and Turkey? One answer is circumstance: a recently planned wedding in Scotland, a previously planned journey in Turkey. But similarities (if that's what is being asked for) also quickly come to mind. Both are feudal societies, and maybe not just in the 'ancient' sense. Both are littered with rocky ruins and histories of gangsterism (okay, that's not the touristic or official-ideal term). Both lands have echoed with bagpipes, Turks long before the Scots. Both speak languages we won't understand.
Tom
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