"The more we come to dwell in an explained world, a world of uniformity and regularity, a world without possibility of miracles, the less we are able to encounter anything but ourselves"
-Neil Everden The Social Creation of Nature
We rarely delight in the idea of not knowing. On a recent trip to a prestigious observatory, a group of us listened as a lead astronomer reluctantly admitted that there was something not so amazing about these high-powered instruments of observation. Standing dwarfed by a giant telescope and its accessories, this man candidly confessed that as his knowledge of the skies increased, his sense of wonder and enjoyment waned.
Although this inverse relationship is hardly law, I think it is not entirely uncommon. This shift in thinking during the Enlightenment has been described as a shift from the extraordinary (sensory impact) to the ordinary (rationalizing nomenclature). What again is the value in stargazing? Is it always most fruitful to seek fact from experience? The suspension in the moment between discovery and explanation is for me the richest territory. When we venture out in search of nothing in particular we are led to inquire about the things we perceive.
My method of inquiry today is not to go to a book or the Internet for the answer. The answers to my questions would not be there anyway: What would the wind look like if its movement were traced? What does it sound like underground? How far would I have to dig in this very spot to hit the original sand dunes of the park? I make a list and am off to the studio to make these questions visible.
Taped to the wall above my desk is a promotional postcard from Poetry Magazine. A quote from the editor, Christian Wiman, reads: “Let us remember that in the end we go to poetry [or art] for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both. “
It feels increasingly challenging to fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them. Robert Pogue Harrison argues that Western civilization promotes ‘institutions of dislocation [I would add disconnection] in every dimension of both social and cultural existence’, and this has led to an ‘aggravated confusion about what it means to dwell on the earth’(198-9). In attempts to negotiate this confusion, I am exploring ways of knowing, documenting, sensitizing, and measuring to enrich my understanding of the space between myself and what we have come to accept as ‘the natural.’
To “more fully inhabit” seems to necessitate firsthand experience and a heightened sensory awareness of surroundings. This idea of full inhabitation is something I am exploring in my work. I would like to consider, speculate, and reflect on larger issues using my particular relationship to the natural world as a point at which to begin. I am grounding my investigations in two sites, which comprise one place for me. One site is my backyard from ages three to eighteen, and resides in my memory. The other site is a few blocks away from my current San Francisco apartment and is also functioning as a surrogate for that initial stomping ground, and the site for my project field research.
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