Comment on postings

Keep up the wonderful work - there is such a delightful mixture of comments - from pithy explanations of individual lines from our readings; meditations of the meanings of wilderness and nature; explorations of the significance of places of particular importance, and cogitations on the meaning of emigration and the return.

Things to think about:
Ø We explored the multiplicity of meanings associated with key terms (wilderness, nature), and noted that there is a vast and powerful literature on these concepts. Both terms have importance in matters of policy - for instance, what do we protect when we protect nature/wilderness? Only vast open spaces? If there is ambiguity about the terms does this restrict our ability to act – if we acknowledge that many features in wilderness areas were the product of Native American use, does this mean that we should continue to use them for moderate resource extraction? Additionally, if you accept that there are concerns about the status of the wilderness idea (prisons for grizzly bears!), and yet you know the value of wildness from personal experience (e.g. Antoinette's wonderful account of the transformative value of a tiny wilderness refuge in suburbia), how do you strike a balance? Is it okay to be in two minds about concepts even as you apply them?

Ø Recall that quote from Aldo Leopold where he recognizes that not all people need a direct experience of the wild. There may be several in the class who feel this way. My favorite example of such urbanophiles are Talking Heads: "I fell in love/With a beautiful highway/This used to be real estate/Now it's only fields and trees". Here they express disappointment that "...as things fell apart/Nobody paid much attention". For them the encroaching of wilderness is troubling. The point of this class is not to convince you that rambling in wild place is a privileged aesthetic. Nor am I trying to convince you that walking is a noble pursuit! What I am trying to do is (re)introduce to powerful ideas which are the substrate upon which all thinking about place is based. So if you are happier on the city streets than on the forest floor - let's here about it. (I pause to note that Ramina has posted interesting comments to this effect before).

Keep blogging!

Liam

Walking

" sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exsist distinctly in our idea." This line really struck me because, although Thoreau is applying it to his "walks", in a greater sense I believe he is speaking of our lives. Many times it is simply too hard for people to decide what they want to do with their lives. The fear of the unknown constantly seems to get in the way, and unfortunatly this barrier often guides people in making the wrong decisions.
Although some of this packet was very challenging , I enjoyed how hard it made me think. I feel that Thoreau had a very unique mind and while his thoughts sometimes wandered off, his main focus, the sort of "unknown" simplicity of mankind, was very straight foward.

The difficulties of returning home - Oisin and Urashima

Since I read this in class I want to share the text here:

A thousand of miles away from Dublin, in a research station in Costa Rica, a Japanese anthropologist and I – an Irish ecologist – sat in the station's dining hall. It was shortly after the birth of my second son who had been encumbered with the name Oisín Odysseus, reflecting the migratory Irish and Greek proclivities of his parents. The caterwauling of howler monkey’s announced the onset of the afternoon rains, and we exchanged these folk stories.

I offered this one:
After being vanquished at the battle of Gabhra, several of the legendary warriors of the Fianna were hunting together along the shore of Lough Lena. The company saw a beautiful woman galloping upon the waves towards them. Niamh of the Golden Hair chooses Oisín, the bardic son of Finn, as a husband. Oisín, enchanted, mounts the horse and she carries him back across the waves to Tir na nÓg, the Land of Perpetual Youth. Oisín meets there with many adventures. Alas, there is no paradise conceivable that maintains our attention eternally, so after the passage of time he expresses a desire to visit home. Seeing his sorrow and pointing out that many centuries had passed since he came, Niamh relents and lends him her horse to return to Ireland. She instructs him that he must not dismount the horse and that he should return when he understands that what she tells him is true. He rides off across the foamy waves. He sees for himself the truth that everything is changed – his family and his friends are long dead. He turns the horse to return to his bride. As he does so he notices an elderly woman struggling with a cord of wood. Bending down from his saddle to assist her with this task he falls off the horse to the ground. Back on native soil he ages all of those years that he has magically evaded.

My colleague shares the following:
Urashima rescues a turtle from the taunting of children. The rescued turtle turns out to be Oto, the beautiful daughter of the God of the Sea. He marries her and they return to the palace beneath the waves. Time passes by and though Urashima loves his wife he dreams of his parents, and frets that they will die alone. The princess learns of his sadness and bids him return home. On parting she gives him a gift, wrapped in a beautiful lacquered box, though she instructs him that it is a gift better left uninspected. If he should open it he will never be able to return to her. Urashima returns home, and discovers that the three years spent beneath the waves were in fact three centuries, and that he has become a legend, and his people long dead. He has no instructions on how to return to his bride, and thinking that the gift may contain these vital instructions he unwraps the gift. A mist arises from the box and he hears the voice of his beloved receding. Urashima aged three centuries in an instant.

Do these folk stories speak of something universally true, that it is difficult to return to the place of our youth; are their interesting similarities a coincidence?; is there other possible meanings?

This might be of interest on de Certeau

"Certeau, Michel de (1925–86)
Michel de Certeau, a French philosopher trained in history and ethnography, was a peripatetic teacher in Europe, South America and North America. His thought has inflected four areas of philosophy.....

Invention, from its Latin sense (invenire, to happen upon, to choose) describes a vital area of de Certeau’s philosophy of everyday life. Since capitalism has mapped out the world and, through mass media, colonized the subjective imagination, every individual becomes responsible for creating practices that do not serve the economy, but that give definition to autonomous and unofficial ways of living. Invention entails conceiving of other spaces in which the individual subject cannot be plotted, located or, as have been most third world natives, bartered, bled or tortured. Based in part on Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, which is the indigenous ‘science of concrete activity’ that fashions new meanings from fragments of myth and quotidian objects, the art of invention includes practices of walking (a performative ‘space act’ analogous to J.L. Austin’s ‘ speech act’; see Speech acts), of making different things from a gamut of inherited forms (cooking, playing), and of opening different mental spaces (via thinking or reading) in areas that otherwise lie under strict ideological control. In this way the anonymous subject, no matter what their origins, can philosophize and act so as to live within but also to change the tenor of inherited, often limiting, social conditions."


CONLEY, TOM (1998). Certeau, Michel de. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved September 09, 2005, from http://www.rep.routledge.com.ezproxy2.lib.depaul.edu/article/DE008
Please note, this site uses web standards that your browser does not support.See help for further information.


The resource I quoted from above is available to you throught the library webpage:
http://www.lib.depaul.edu/eresource/database.asp

Go to Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy - browse and enjoy.

I have enjoyed the previous four postings - yes, of course, this is a notoriously difficult piece of writing - the question one must always ask - should this be read simply for meaning, is the form a contribution to the meaning, is the writing plain 'bad', is it deliberately opaque?

Remember tomorrow will simply pause to genuflect before these classics (Thoreau, and de Certeau), and will have a deeper conversation about them next Friday (by which time we will have one more reading added to the list).

Liam

Chi-Town Winter

By M. Raheel Khalid and Colin Kohl

Frigid, freezing, cold
Waiting for the el just sucks
Don't lose your mitens.

Chicago Haiku 2005

Chicago suburb
Coyote on the rail track
Milelong train shrieking.

Walking

Your first set of readings for this class are on 'walking' - one is called "Walking in the City" by Michel deCerteau (published 1984), the other, 'Walking' by Henry David Thoreau (published 1862). Though unified by the theme of walking, the contrasts are strong. DeCerteau's is a meditation about the power of the pedestrian in the metropolis to subvert to intentions of the elite - planners, develops, architects. It begins with an inspection of Manhattan from the top of the World Trade Centre. Thoreau's essay starts with the incandescent line "I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness...". Clearly, Thoreau's concerns are those beyond the town's perimeter.

The two together present a curious study in opposition - nature and culture, wilderness and city, ecosystem and anthrosystem. But there is more than just pure opposition here. Both essayists are concerned about human freedom, both are concerned with how the individual navigates herself through the world.

Your reading, and your discussion, should begin with a straightforward attempt to unravel the meaning of these texts. After this, we will try to travel further into the significance of essays and their connections with the themes of the course.

Liam