memory and nature

Once again, I really enjoyed your post (and also the comments it's attracted on your blog and on facebook). I'm keen to write about it this morning but, because it's a complex subject and it's only just opening up, I don't have a worked-out argument to express. I'm just going to jot down a few thoughts...

(1) There is certainly a tension between the haecitas of nature and the fact that natural organisms can also represent traces of historical events. It's true that the wisteria is simultaneously 'a flowering vine blooming out of the ground in the spring' and the trace of a certain kind of history.

(2) In a way the distinction is between recognising the wisteria as a symbol of a particular history and rigorously refusing to make it into a symbol, thus insisting upon its haecitas in the here and now. This idea of nature-as-symbol and nature-without-symbolism is interesting to me. There might be good reasons to want to see the wisteria in both ways.

(3) I have a feeling that this is one of those things where one can move between two perceptions of the same thing, both being possible but each always excluding the other. In this, it's like a Necker Cube:



Each of the box shapes in this image can be seen as either protruding from or intruding into the page. But, although you can see them in both ways, you can't see both at the same time.

(4) The impulse simply to be in the here-and-now is an important one - part of the reason that Buddhism has achieved some purchase in the west - but the impulse to look for the traces of history also seems important to me. Isn't it rather chilling to think that the here-and-now will simply cover up the past? Weren't we quite pleased when we found that the Minnesota Historical Society had put up signs to commemorate what was done to the Ojibwe at Great Sandy Lake and so trouble the sense that the lake is just a gloriously beautiful natural vista? (Although, actually, it occurs to me that, if one is standing there enjoying the 'beauty' of the lake, one might not be able to claim that one is simply being - 'enjoying the view' is a culturally constructed activity, I think.) This is why I like the image of the Necker Cube - wisteria is both presence-in-the-world and historical trace but maybe it can't be both to us at the same time.

(5) I love the fact that you've posted about Eudora Welty in this connection and I agree that she is absolutely fascinating. But, having tried to work out what I feel about this, I'm not sure that I fully understand her sense that places somehow retain their history quite apart from the functioning of human memory. I don't think my intitial response to a place - or at least to a place that seems 'natural' - involves a kind of intuitive discovery of its history but more the kind of aesetheticised here-and-now response that I've talked about in relation to Great Sandy Lake. Moving to the other view of the Necker cube - the view of the place as somewhere where history happened - involves some kind of mental work, some kind of learning - and then, once that's achieved, it can be difficult to go back to the other way of seeing it. Actually, I'm not quite sure about that last point - it's all too easy to slip back into an aestheticised way of seeing it but very difficult to experience it in that rather more unattached way as simply 'there'. (Also, I may not have understood Welty's ideas very well...)

(6) All this leads me to think about my focus on language and voices. The names of plants are quite clearly historical clues and so my interest in language perhaps conditions me to understand nature historically. But, again, it occurs to me that there is something very powerful to be done in thinking about the distinction between the named and the un-named. Would it be possible to detach the wisteria from its name once its name is known to you? I'm really struck by your allusion to Romeo and Juliet here. I'm also thinking about the way I felt as I kayaked through the woods immediately below Vekin's Dam and realised that I couldn't attach names to any of the plants around me.

(7) This is just coincidence really, but - as it happens - the Necker Cube appears in the designs of the mosaics at Pompeii:



Both images in this post come from http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NeckerCube.html

Seven 'thoughts' on memory and nature :o) I don't if any of it makes much sense but that's what's in my mind right now...