Harvard Alley

-Space and Place, The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Tuan, Geographer

“I invoke you, poets and devas, ecstatic spirits and desolate, help me to find the memory place.  Give me the coordinates on the map.  Help me trace this story”:  At the top of the piece this girl is seeking what Yi-FU Tuan describes as place, defined in large part as “an organized world of meaning.”  Bombarded by competing memories, she seeks a structure for them, a frame.  She summons her poetic and spiritual ancestors to transform the campsite into a sacred space so that she may locate “the memory place.”  The idea of externalizing our memories, locating them someplace outside of us in the physical world may appear fanciful.  But I believe it’s safe to say images – a beautiful sunset, for example, or even a mundane object, like a coffee mug or set of curtains we shared with our ex, are physical symbols—memory objects representing and giving voice to our inner life—that we may choose to keep or dispose of.

“The built environment, like language, has the power to define and refine sensibility.  It can sharpen and enlarge consciousness.”

-Space and Place, The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Tuan, Geographer

She builds a tent that is open to the sky.  She exposes herself to the elements, and she provides herself with a vista to gaze at above.

“In open space one can become intensely aware of place; and in the solitude of sheltered place the vastness of space beyond acquires a haunting presence.”

-Space and Place, The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Tuan, Geographer

In the center of the vast woods she assembles camp: chair, firewood, blanket, pillows, backpack.  This serves as her “home base.”  From here she can gaze out at the space around her, allowing nature and emptiness to act upon her,  and possibly transcend her fears.

“A healthy being welcomes constraint and freedom, the bounded-ness of place and the exposure of space.”

-Space and Place, The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Tuan, Geographer

She engages in an inner dialogue between feelings of safety and vulnerability, courage and fearfulness, seeking calm in an organized narrative yet finding agitation in conflicting memories.

“When space feels thoroughly familiar to us it has become place.”

-Space and Place, The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Tuan, Geographer