The Power of Place: A Year in Review

The iconic Baptist Church steeple pierces straight through the full moon, which rests briefly on its pinnacle before floating free into the winter night sky. Arrested by this ephemeral spectacle of sublime beauty, I grab my camera and shot out the window. This is probably a pretty funny spectacle itself, inching along in car with a camera balanced on a half-open window, a portrait of the modern place voyeur and bad driver wrapped up in one. This kind of place narrative seeks to capture fleeting phenomena. Whether unexpected or iconic, a good images captures a sense of feeling, a great images captures a sense of place. The curve of moon rests on a church spire, and then floats free. Places are treated like steeples. Fixed and permanent. Rooted in the geography of a town and its history. But places are more like the moon. Waxing and waning. Pulling at us like the the tides, without us knowing. Never really fixed, never wholly rooted, just on a wobbly orbit, albeit regular and largely known. This is where a great many theories on place are moving to, the idea that place is a process and not merely a fixed geographical location. This does not mean that places are not real in the physical sense, or geographically knowable. It  does mean that place is no longer a mere backdrop where history is staged, but something to be studied as powerful in its own right. But they still make lovely backdrops.  

A picture used to be worth a thousand words. Most are only worth a few words now, as many as there are.We are overrun by images. Romanticized, deftly poignant, pop-culture clever, photographic images are isolated from their surroundings in place and time. A rusted car sits amid the lovely ruins of tumbled gates and fences, an old pickup in faded blue sets off the dusty green of a faded playground, boys sitting by a pond seem timeless in black and white. The quintessential truth of photographs is that they lie. Photographer Miguel Gandert, who sits on my dissertation committee to my great delight, told me this when I sought photographic advice. "Just remember, the picture is not the thing itself." But a good picture fools us into believing it is the truth of a thing. 

Miguel Gandert. Nuevo México Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland (2000)

The thing itself is a complex animal with teeth and claws, blood and bone.The thing itself is a tortured girl tied in the back of a truck by Ralph Edwards park. The thing itself is land abandoned as economic opportunity flees to countries where little is often worse than nothing. The thing itself is the world moved on from one war to the next, minus the boys who lived here and never came home. The thing itself is the the methamphetamine-carved flanks of boys young enough to have good teeth still, in a new kind of war. The thing itself is the full moon on a homeless man shambling down Austin on a cold night in December on the Friday after Christmas. The thing itself is not the brilliant moonstruck placescape I am trying to capture from a warm moving car that passes him quietly in the night. The thing itself and the place that holds it have a curious relationship. 

"Corner of 5th and Central"
by Levi Romero
in A Poetry of Remembrance: New and Rejected Works (p. 105)

My name is Keven
rhymes with heaven
I'm the most photographed
homeless man in town

contrary to what the
bible thumpin' Jesus servants told me

I am not lost

I am on the corner of 5th and Central
albuquerque, new mexico
united states of america
northern hemishpere

the planet is divided up into four quadrants...

The star at the north corner of the Palomas Hot Springs Bathhouse photographs nicely. I love that star. The  pink neon shutters down into smaller and smaller blue stars. The swift cascade goes black for a moment and repeats  The continuous cycle of bright pink and blue and black. I am buoyant at regaining my momentum, lost during my month-long illness. My day was great. I talked to a couple I had been wanting to meet after an accidental conversation at the Passion Pie Cafe. I had dinner with Sherry and Baxter. I had some incredible new ideas about the town, what Sherry calls her 'Ah Ha' moments, when certain things become clear and patterns emerge. Part of this was the decision to re-work my history into something that does not replicate a too-simple linear timeline. Part of this was the people I talked to on this beautiful Friday in December  I realized that a similar place narrative was present in almost every one of my new-to-town, in varying degrees, resident interviews. It is a narrative that speaks to a deeply-rooted place belonging that comes from something other than the a history of being in a place. I am buoyant, and there was the moon shining like a beacon in the night sky. Then the homeless guy went and ruined my landscape, and I was once again pulled under by the weight of the thing itself. The thing in question is, broadly, the colonial violence necessary to settle any land that is peopled and claimed, no matter how often it is called untamed wilderness or wild frontier. That violence is everywhere, but carefully edited from our histories until it resembles a photograph of a civil war battlefield on a marker by the side of the road. But these histories echo in modern acts of violence and resonate in contemporary struggles with poverty, abuse and addition. But they also echo in the history of triumphant, or stories of  struggle without triumph but struggles nontheless. How can these place narrative get written? Scholar Delores Hayden, in The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, (1995) explores how several contemporary public history projects have sought to embody a more honest history of place, and in doing so have been vital sites for community engagement and transformation. 

“It is in providing outward display for things and pathways as they exist within the horizons of landscape that places enable memories to become inwardly inscribed and possessed: made one with the memorial self. The visibility without becomes part of the invisibility within.”
― Edward Casey. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (1987. p. 213)

The truth of a thing, or a place in this case, can only ever be partially known. Back stories are endless. History is obscured, buried, re-fashioned and re-told. Sometimes, as is the case with the Apache warrior Lozen, which will be my New Year's narrative, the contemporary story is nothing but careless fiction. But that is a fairly common characteristic of many of our stories, especially our place stories. The story I will write about Truth or Consequences has begun to emerge, and I hope to inscribe in this written landscape a complexity and fullness that is its due. I am thankful for the countless people who have opened their homes,  hearts and histories to me these past months. I stop one last time on my way north, to take a photo of the three lights that sit on-top of the rise where the interstate traverses Alamosa Canyon. As a child I always marked the the top of this canyon the arrival point to Monticello, and, by extension  T or C. There is something reassuring about these lights, and I am glad they will mark my return here in a few days when the year is new again.