Where are we?: Walking Edinburgh's streets

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Walking Edinburgh's streets

You'll find a new gallery of photos "Walking Edinburgh's streets" more less to the right of this posting. Some of the more obscure photos include:

a deep-fried cheeseburger (only in Scotland?)
Betty and a walking companion from Bolivia eating a deep-fried Mars bar (recommended by numerouvs Scots we've met)
circular stone work where the last public execution took place (near "The Last Drop" pub
a delightful wood carved bagpipe-playing angel hovering in St Giles Cathedral
various quotes in the pavement from obscure (to me) Scottish poets
views from Arthur's Seat, 250 metres on a bluff overlooking the city, a relief from the noise, crowds, close spaces and busyness belowv
various creatures and figures carved into the building stonework, including a coffin and burial tools in the wall next to a prison camp where Covenanters (dissenters from Church of England domination) were held in appalling conditions designed (successfully) to kill most of them
the wonderful naming of 'closes', or small inner courtyards and squares at the end of narrow covered alleys ... a book on the genesis of these names will have been written by someone

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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.