places and movement

The demand that a place first makes of us is to be able to move in it as our bodily selves. The tourist at the Grand Canyon has a far better chance of “seeing” the canyon if he goes for a hike in it than if he stands gazing at the rim, mightily attempting to behold it (even though he can, in a literal sense, see more of it from the rim). This motion need not be directly a matter of the body; any machine that a person enters and controls as a vehicle of his own powers will do: whether he drives an airplane, a car, or a wheelchair, some relationship between agent and place is formed. As the aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry discovered, each machine functions as a different sort of body that permits an encounter with different aspects and scales of a place.

Central to the demand to move in a place is the demand to find one’s way through it. It is the most basic requirement for gaining access to a place — physical access to its features, but also access to those features as experientially meaningful. It is one of the results of learning to “internalize” a map or a set of directions through a place: the qualities of the place itself become “internalized,” taking on new meaning for the traveler. In internalizing bird’s-eye directions, one gets the lay of the land, the depth and configuration of space, that helps tie together the disparate components of a place into a whole; in internalizing landmark-based directions, the sites and features of a place gain significance. It is a crucial part of our first real entry into the revelation of place — a revelation that must be worked for, achieved in stages and through struggles; that can never be simply told or taught.

Through this struggle, place gains an experiential shape. The features of a particular place begin not just to look different from the features of another place, but to feel different and mean something different. Go to a city and find your way to somewhere new; take a walk or a drive through the streets of Washington, D.C., and you will begin to feel how it is a different place from Austin or San Francisco or Paris or New Orleans — how your possibilities for action are different and so too your possibilities for being. Finding your way around is how you begin to escape the realm of mere location and sight, wresting from it place and that elusive sense of the place.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/gps-and-the-end-of-the-road