Where are we?: Being a stranger

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

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Where is here?

The title banner includes a detail from “Targets” (2000) by the U.S. artist Joyce Kozloff. “Targets” is a walk-in globe within which are painted panels of every country bombed by the U.S. since 1945. One panel on wheels acts as a door to the globe.

In the detail here, the door is ajar and we look out into the dark uncertain. I want maps (and any official representation of place), notorious for concealing their own human making and values, to have something like this doorway into their made life, an entering place where we can stand and ask questions of all those place names, images and other marks made familiar-seeming and coherent by being caught within the administrative-scientific grid-space of straight lines and co-ordinates. I recommend Kazloff’s creative wonderings about maps, places and empire, including her “Imperial Cities,” “Silk Routes” and “Voyages” projects.

Canadian painter Landon Mackenzie combines her expertise in cartography, her interest in neuroscience, and her curiosity about the experiential dimensions of place, its human ‘mapping’, and the contending personal and cultural memories and their stories (“the ghostly bits”) that inhabit places and maps. Mackenzie’s work is discussed widely but most interestingly from the perspective of this blog by Alan Morantz, Where is Here? Canada’s Maps and the Stories They Tell.

The traveller's way

The traveller’s way, as experienced here, offers up blind corners and wonders. It branches and digresses. It leads to places that excavate memories, to others that invite dialogue and questions. The traveller’s way humbles with what is not known or understood. Beyond the coordinates of empire, the traveller’s way invites the toes to stretch and curl down into those singular places where the peculiar energies of the ghosts of others’ creaturely lives seem to whisper words like ‘longing’, ‘delight’, ‘care’. The traveller’s way cheers on a more open life.