Senses and Place

"A tangible sense of place develops in their [Pueblo dwellers] architecture because it is premised on such a powerful sense of belonging to a larger natural whole."  Tony Anella, "Learning from the Pueblos," p. 31

"... all the senses were utilized....Everything was touchable, knowable, and accessible."  Rina Swentzell, "Conflicting Landscape Values: The Santa Clara Pueblo and Day School, p. 57

These two quotations highlight the close relationship between our physical senses and our psychological or spiritual senses.  The aroma of almond cookies in Macao brought me from Asia back to Christmas in Minnesota in a second; immediately I was intensely aware of being away from home, even as I was comforted by the taste of almond in a cookie stamped with a Chinese character rather than in the shape of a Christmas tree.


The shape of the land around us, the type of vegetation, the quality of light: these effect us in ways beyond what we see.  This weekend I was on a bus tour of historic churches in southeast Minnesota with a group of historians of Lutheranism.  One remarked on the acres and acres of half-harvested crops: "There is a lot of empty out there."  Her's was the very opposite response to my initial reaction to a deep, mountain valley.  There I sensed, not security, but constraint.


Seeing, smelling, touching, hearing, even tasting are the means by which we perceive our surroundings.  From those perceptions we gain a sense of where we are and who we are.  Anella quotes Harries: "true freedom is not freedom from constraint, but rather to be constrained only by what one really is, by one's essence."  Indeed, who one is, who we are, these identities involve boundaries that do constrain our freedom even as they provide a sense of belonging.

Reading Poetry

A Teacher Considers Why She Includes Poetry

I am a lover of poetry:
for the sounds,
for the shape on the page;
words turned to images
or a shaft of light.

A poem read aloud first thing:
a bell to invoke the spirit,
a bouquet of roses for beauty;
water in a pump
or a new pair of glasses.

The work of poetry:
to open the heart,
to stimulate imagination;
waves against walls
or an angle of insight.

LDL


From the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project  Billy Collins on how to read a poem, not instructions, but analogies that evoke other experiences.

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

This is NOT how American Conversation students responded to the poems they read for today!

Beauty is not optional

In the open space of democracy, beauty is not optional.  Terry Tempest Williams "Grounding Truthing", in Open Space of Democracy (Orion, 2004), p. #

Through out this essay and its two companion pieces Williams makes frequent use of allusions to the senses.  She writes of "...sensory impulses of eyes and ears alert toward justice."  Again, "... knowledge is another form of democracy, the freedom of expression that leads to empathy."  Over and over, she invokes hearing and seeing and also other senses not associated with organs: imagination and empathy recur.  Because I'm convinced that our intellects are strong, necessary, and yet limited tools for understanding and living in the world and with each other, I'm drawn to Williams' approach that makes room, in the open space of democracy, for these other ways of apprehending.  These give us access to what is outside us, beyond us, and inside us; they also foster appreciation, perhaps even love.

So, what about beauty?  Why lift that statement out of the three essays?  Perhaps because beauty, as illustrated by the poppies Williams describes in this essay, is vulnerable and precarious and in that way like the "perilous liberty" Jefferson preferred to "quiet servitude."  But, vulnerability and perilousness are not quite equivalent.  Are they?  Isn't there sometime potentially subversive, as well as fragile, about beauty?  Perhaps I'm drawn to this statement and this valuing of beauty because beauty has the power to unsettle our rigid, fiercely held absolutes and, as Williams says, open our hearts.  And this suggests a link between recognizing beauty and responding with mercy.  And, this is why Barbara Boxer held up Subhankar Banerjee's photos of the Arctic.  [His Land in Home project.] She hoped that the beauty would move her colleagues' to see more clearly and respond with mercy and empathy.

Here I should have a link to a recording of "For the Beauty of the Earth," or at least to its lyric.