But we are and always have been name-callers, christeners.
Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks
After a roughly two-decade lifelong stint in the Western US, I’ve moved to Cambridge, England, and I want a record of the place. I want to name its multitudes of places. Presumptuous of me, maybe; people have been recording and naming this place for dizzying centuries, and I’ve been here for six months. But I want my turn anyway. You’re welcome to flip through this placebook, if you can’t come see and be here yourself.
For some thoughts and lots of mixed metaphors in which I try to untangle my motivations for creating this blog, read on.
Living somewhere is a special privilege. You have time and claim to fill a map in your head with backs and forths and forays. I’ve lived in a good selection of places and found fascination in all of them, but I doubt that any of them were as thickly layered and jointed with nooks and crannies as this city. People have been settled here for millennia and were building buildings, laying roads, planting gardens here for centuries before my ancestors had even heard of North America, let alone set foot there. And somehow other species and their landscapes have stayed interleaved with the human landscape. I can look up at five-hundred-year-old bell towers from a narrow street and within five minutes of walking or cycling be standing in the middle of a marshy fen. It’s grace, really, to be in this ancient place–as much as anywhere on the ancient earth, maybe, but I can’t shake a sense of specialness and serendipity here.
I’m a word enthusiast, a detail connoisseur, and a place hunter. I’m not sure when this started, when I first began trying to pin down places with words. I’ve kept a journal of some kind since I was six. When I was maybe nine or ten, I would sit on the cool concrete of my front porch in California and scribble lists of sensory impressions in a flip-top notebook, collecting breezes, sprinklers, basketball bounces, sunsets, gnat clouds. Around the same time, on a rainy fifth-grade field trip to the Central Valley wetlands, I sat under an umbrella with a notebook until my foot was dead asleep because I didn’t want to break the reverie of turning the lushness around me into words. Ever since, whether in poems or journal entries or lyric fragments in my phone notes app, I’ve kept up the recording impulse that accompanies my habitual sensory feasting on my surroundings.
I’m also not sure I’ve always thought of these notes and noticings as tied to place, per se. I often say my primary subject is nature—in fact, I decided to study ecology largely because I wanted to add scientific understanding to my intimacy with the aesthetic details of nature. But really, I love people and their hermit crab shells of houses and buildings and physical histories just as much (though one could argue that this is all part of nature anyway). I love world-details of all kinds, you could say, and sifting them like gold flakes. But I love them even more when they’re webbed together, embedded in prismatic layers of context, three- and four-dimensional. Ecology; place. I’m amazed by living in this, so I want to capture it.
That’s impossible, of course. I can’t see most of that webbing and context that a place (reality?) is built out of, let alone press it all into words. I have only gleanings and iceberg tips, all bent to my own lenses and slipping through my sieve of consciousness. There’s probably no such thing as one comprehensive version of a place, anyway; no final boundaries, no final decider. So I’m left only with details after all—word crumbs. But that’s something, and hopefully beautiful enough, sometimes. I enjoy the effort. (It certainly takes effort.)
Another question: what was/am I drawn to first or stronger, the raw experience of a place—whether flashes in the pan or the whole gestalt—or the words I fish up and spin out into a proxy for that experience? When I first started taking notes, did I get more tingling pleasure from the attention the words brought to colors and breezes, or from the crafting of words themselves? Of course there’s no need for a dichotomy here; I don’t know how to disentangle these impulses, to watch and to write. I can enjoy one without the other, but together, for me, words and place can undergo a kind of alchemy that elevates them both. Even before I make the effort of writing a new place, often details resonate, leap out, or gel together with the eager potential for words. And if and when I succeed in finding enough of the right ones, I like to think the words become more than a proxy— an extension of my perception, leaves on the same tree, opening as I coax them out, melding into the place as I know it.
Other than a few poems published in university and regional journals, my scribblings have been private, because I’m a fairly private person. I’ve never until recently felt compelled to write a blog or wanted to be regularly beholden to a public audience.
But I do want to write. For years I’ve enjoyed being part of a community of writers mostly as a reader, relishing the alchemies of other voices—Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, Wallace Stegner, Aldo Leopold, Barbara Kingsolver, and more recently British writers like Helen Macdonald, Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey. If reading them alone in my room touches wires and puts lights behind my eyes, I know that stepping all the way into that community as a writer myself and linking up my words to others would be even more electric.
The thing is, when it’s up to you, it takes a lot of cranking to build up the charge, and meanwhile I’m also trying to become an ecologist. I’ve long wanted and will always want to be a writer too, but my efforts have been stop and go. I need a reason to write and to bring my work into new open spaces where the currents of audience and feedback can push it along.
Enter Cambridge and its layers. More than anywhere else, Cambridge has activated my place-hunter and a detail-connoisseur modes. I’ve been busily mapping it, both with and without words, for the last six months. Then I discovered the British Isles place-writing of Robert Macfarlane and the other writers he gathers together in his book Landmarks, a whole new crowd to add to my American bookshelf. Not only did the reading tune me into this landscape and its layers even more, but it also lit that spark of eagerness to get serious about my own place-word-gathering here. Maybe, someday, I’ll add it to the shelf. Meanwhile I need to write.
So, here we are. This is very much an experiment, and may be mostly for myself. But I hope it will help me to be more deliberate about netting the details of Cambridge, holding them up next to each other, building up my own layers of written experience in this place, and sharing it. Maybe even a little alchemy will happen here.