People and places: a phenomenological approach

23rd BSA Auto/Biography Summer Conference 2014 Topic: People and Places Venue: Wolfson College Oxford Date: 11-13 July 2014 Keynote speaker: Dr. Aidan Seery from Trinity College, Dublin  ABSTRACT People and places; a phenomenological perspective. This discussion explores the way different writers talk about people and places from distinct but sometimes overlapping perspectives. The process of knowing a place is explored from a phenomenological perspective in this paper (Trigg, 2012). Coverley (2012:ebook:64) provides evidence for some aspects of current psychogeography, which resist clear theoretical definition through a shifting series of interwoven themes that are in constant flux. The main emphasis in this paper is on the way natural places feature in peoples concept of self. Place-identity has been described as the individual's incorporation of place into the larger concept of self, defined as a "potpourri of memories, conceptions, interpretations, ideas, and related feelings about specific physical settings, as well as types of settings".(Proshansky, Fabian & Kaminoff, 1983:60). The theory of place-identity was established because mainstream psychology at that time had ignored the physical built environment as a factor of importance in identity development. (HighBeam Research http://www.highbeam.com:6-15). This article mainly considers identity and place with particular reference to natural places rather than the built environment. Places contain symbols of different social categories and personal meanings, and represent and maintain identity on different levels and dimensions. The natural environment has been seen as a significant element by writers on nature and the self (e.g. Jung, 2008, McFarlane, 2007, Abrams, 1997). They claim that natural places have a special function for the self, although each has a differing perspective and emphasis. Some writers (Butala, 1994, 2000, 2001) claim instinctual knowing in the landscape is widespread as part of self knowledge but it is rarely acknowledged. Nature is also conceived differently by different groups: it can be seen as a kind of 'wilderness fantasy' (Cronan,1996) where people turn to nature because it is seen as untainted by social ills, and experience wildness as restorative. On the other hand wildness can be characterised as dangerous and in need of control. This brief discussion, informed by a phenomenological approach, is intended to stimulate a debate about place, identity and self in auto/biographical studies. (352) Dr. Irene Selway Independent Researcher Formerly Principal Lecturer, University of Portsmouth  People and places: a phenomenological perspective In discussing people and places it is useful to begin with a brief outline of the concept of place and people within it with regard to identity. Aspects of identity linked to place can be described as "place-identity." The term has been in use since the late 1970s (Proshansky, 1978 ), and is here, as originally, typed with a hyphen. Place-identity has been described as the individual's incorporation of place into the larger concept of self (Proshansky, Fabian & Kaminoff, 1983), defined as a "potpourri of memories, conceptions, interpretations, ideas, and related feelings about specific physical settings, as well as types of settings" (1983, p. 60). Place attachment is considered a part of place-identity, but place-identity is more than attachment. Place-identity is a substructure of self-identity, much like gender and social class, and is comprised of perceptions and comprehensions regarding the environment. These perceptions and conceptions can be organized into two types of clusters; one type consists of memories, thoughts, values and settings, and the second type consists of the relationship among different settings of home, school, and neighbourhood. (Proshansky & Fabian, 1987). The theory of place-identity was established because mainstream psychology had ignored the physical built environment as a factor of importance in identity development. Whilst this article seeks to raise the discussion of place-identity as an element of auto-biography, before doing so, it useful to recognise when researching this topic that different writers who talk about people and places approach it from differing theoretical perspectives. The contemporary focus on psychogeography is a very broad endeavour and is outlined clearly by Merlin Coverley (2012:64: ebook) who says of psychogeography increasingly this term is used to illustrate a bewildering array of ideas from ley lines and the occult to urban walking and political radicalism.. (however for him psychogeography is) ... the 'point where psychology and geography meet in the emotional and behavioural impact of urban space'. His book ranges over a whole plethora of approaches to psychogeography. Walking is a key feature or method e.g. Ian Sinclair (2002), Peter Ackroyd (2000). Psychogeography provides us with illustrations of ways of experiencing our surroundings or places by noticing something new or different, or uncanny. However, given the wide range of perspectives within psychogeography in relation to people and places this article will focus specifically on the meaning natural places have for individuals in particular in relation to their self or identity. A phenomenological approach Trigg (2012) discusses the history of people’s experience of place and identity. He says 'Place is all around us...place is not only at the heart of who we are but also the culture in which we find ourselves.' (Trigg, 2012:1) He approaches the discussion of people and places from a phenomenological perspective. The meaning, or phenomenology of place, are shaped by human beings but "place exists independently of human life, in turn shaping us...the result is place can take on a life of its own...apart from the way it is remembered or experienced." (Trigg, 2012.1) He also claims that in pairing the terms phenomenology and place there is also tacit admission that phenomenology as method and place as a concept have potential to encounter each other in a meaningful manner. (Trigg,2012.3) Although place is all around us it is not always conceptualised. We all live at various moments in places and can take them for granted. As Trigg (2012.2) tells us "In naturalistic terms place is taken to be so familiar as to evade all conceptual analysis. We are already in place". I am not simply sitting at a desk in the room I normally write in but in the condition of 'there being a place at all'. We also 'carry places with us' Trigg (2012:11) in the sense they are a constituent part of our embodiment of self and the continuity of self. I am from somewhere, an urban place, which is the Portobello Road in West London. Two or three generations of my family were born and grew up there. I may have left that place but my identity is caught up in it as an auto/biographical trace. Many of the houses my family lived in are now demolished to make way for the Westway. However, as Solnit (2006:118) tells us 'the places inside matter as much as the ones outside' even if they do not exist now. Place can be seen as an empirical idea, independent of human life, and defined by scientific perspectives about the environment, a realist view. In this case the environment or place is reduced to its constitutive parts. It exists whether human beings are there or not. On the other hand place can be seen as a construct of human experience; we define a place and without us place would have no definition it would just be. This leaves place subject to the vagaries of socio-political circumstances. Neither of these perspectives alone offers a complete picture. Trigg (2012:14) argues a third view is needed; that of the existential significance of place and it is this perspective that phenomenology facilitates. Phenomenology enables us to recognise that 'lived spatiality' is not a container that can be measured in objective terms but an expression of our being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world in Heidigger’s terms does not mean the world awaits our arrival it means being placed within through our interaction with it and how we construe it. (Trigg, 2012.15) There is no fixed definition of place, according to Merleau Ponty (2006:330) who says place: is not a particular class or state of consciousness or acts. Its modalities are always an expression of the total life of a subject, the energy with which he (sic) tends toward a future through his (sic) body and his (sic) world. Places can therefore be defined in their relationship with the person who experiences them. Sometimes I foreground places in relation to how important they are to me in my current milieu and at other times I am indifferent. So, for example, home and getting home become very important to me when I have been away on holiday, and initially upon my return I am bathed in a sense of being in my own place. Whereas at other times I am indifferent to being at home and just take it for granted when engaged in writing tasks. However, on other occasions, when there are crises or problems in the home, I cannot wait to get away from it. My relationship to the current place of home is dynamic which illustrates that our interaction with places is not static. Thus place is usefully understood as experiential. We experience place in an affective meaningful way. Place is also singular or particular; we are situated in the world in a particular place. Thus we can say experience, affectivity and particularity are at the heart of place: splicing the three themes together gives us a sense of place which belongs neither to the subjects’ constructs nor the world's reality. (Trigg, 2012.17) Rebecca Solnit (2005.118) talks of the way in which places in which any significant event in our lives occurred become embedded with some emotion and so to recover the memory of place is to recover the emotion. She says 'every love has its landscape…and that places possess you in your absence'.(ibid.119) People and natural places; a phenomenological commentary I have a particular interest in the relationship between people and places in contemporary society in the sense of how this relates to their perception of self. There seem to be many writers on natural places that claim they have a special function for people, although each has a differing perspective and emphasis. Employing a phenomenological perspective on place I will begin the discussion by considering Robert MacFarlane (2007) and the late Roger Deakin's (2007) perspectives, whose focus is human experience within natural landscape. MacFarlane has written several books that focus on specific aspects of landscape; mountains, holloways (ancient paths), and wild places and the links between human needs and wildness. He is clear that his personal identity, his life, is tied closely to wild places. He explains it like this (MacFarlane, 2007:9) I could not now say when I first grew to love the wild, only that I did, and that a need for it will always remain strong in me. As a child whenever I read the word, it conjured up images of wide spaces remote and figureless. Isolated islands of Atlantic coasts. Unbounded forests and blue snow-light falling on to drifts marked with the paw prints of wolves. Frost-shattered summits and corries holding lochs of great depth. And this was the vision of a wild place that had stayed with me: somewhere boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental, and demanding of the traveller in its asperities. To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history. This account of the meaning and love of wild places for him contains many insights into the nature of his longing. It is an essential element of his identity. He argues that it is compromised by the lack of any nearby wild places in contemporary British lives, suggesting that this lack is a negative development in human history. For MacFarlane ( 2007:9/10) for example 'wild places are no longer marked. The fells, the caves, the tors, the woods, the moors, the river valleys and the marshes have all but disappeared... (or) mostly they have faded out altogether like old ink, become the suppressed memories of a more ancient archipelago'. (ibid.p10) His words illustrate how strong the sense of wild places is to his sense of self. He mourns the loss of wild places which for him are essential to his being-in-the-world. Whether being able to find and access wild places is essential for human well-being is debateable but it is a diminishing element of human life in Britain. In the USA, which has many wild places, there is also a growing longing for wildness by urbanites as illustrated by Angelo and Jerolmack, (2012) They show that the excitement engendered by the courtship and nest building of two red-tailed hawks in the middle of New York can be seen as a kind of 'wilderness fantasy' (Cronan,1996). People turn to nature because it is seen as untainted by social ills, and can experience wildness; the hawks nesting on a window ledge, from the safety of their homes. However, when the hawks used urban flotsam and jetsam to line their nests (bubblewrap scraps) some observers claimed this was not 'natural' and spoiled the wildness of the birds (they did not highlight the birds resourcefulness in an unfamiliar environment). They wanted nature to be pure, asocial. 'They were seeking an asocial nature experience and protested when the signs of a social world interrupted their image' (Angelo and Jerolmack, 2012.25). The idea of nature as a realm free of social interests may be a fantasy as a cultural ideal but it does sometimes shape the way people experience and give meaning to the environment. MacFarlane (2007) clearly resents the social interference and role in reducing wild places. These comments and examples illustrate that either observing a wild hawk nesting in an urban place, or exploring wild places first hand, acts as a microcosm of our social struggle on how to live with nature. In fact knowledge of natural life in general seems to be dwindling in the UK. Road maps are drawn by computers from satellite images and MacFarlane says such maps speak of 'transit and displacement' by drawing readers away from the natural world into one which is primarily a context for motorised travel. In fact MacFarlane (2007) explains that as he travelled through England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland he decided to draw up a map to set against the road atlas that would seek, in prose, to make some of the wild places of the archipelago visible again before they vanished for good. This is the context for his book The wild places (2007). To read it is to be drawn into his inner world and how he encounters, memorises and notices places. As discussed above, through coming into contact with the world, place becomes much more than an inert materiality, it is a plays a key role in our understanding of self. Noticing the world has a long history. In religious terms, attention was a form of devotion and there are many poems and writings that record this. Observing and interacting with natural environs and reporting on the differing states of mind and body that arise from such activity, for McFarlane, is evidence of the importance of nature for the human psyche. Wildness: a danger or marvellous? Wildness seems to be a concept that has different meanings depending on how you perceive nature. There is considerable debate here; wild nature can mean country parks, large stretches of currently uncultivated land and woods, mountains like those in the Scottish Highland or ancient places that have remained untouched by human interference. None of these definitions is clarified by the writers; for example the Highland of Scotland have developed in large part by human interference e.g. forest clearance and sheep farming. Therefore it is important to clarify what meaning is given to nature and wildness when discussing this topic. MacFarlane (2007:29) argues about two distinct perspectives on wildness in culture by saying Ideas, like waves, have fetches. They arrive with us having travelled vast distances and their pasts are often invisible or barely imaginable. Wildness is such an idea. It has moved immensely through time. And in that time, two great and conflicting stories have been told about it. According to the first of these wildness is a quality to be vanquished; according to the second, it is a quality to be cherished. Wildness in nature has historically been seen as dangerous and in opposition to the need for order in human culture and agriculture. Wildness has to be tamed to make use of nature for human need. Letting nature go wild is wasteful of the resource it may contain; it must be controlled and harnessed for use. The Old English epic poem Beowulf is riddled through with wildeor or 'savage creatures' who inhabit a landscape of wolf haunted forests, illustrating its danger. (Seamus Heany, 2002), In contrast there are historical accounts that talk of wild places as miraculous. These writings are not only from so called nature mystics but from Monks and poets (eg. Michael Kirby (1988).  There are other accounts of the way wild nature has been give meaning. The Chinese artistic tradition known as shan-sui, or rivers and mountains, originated in the 5th century BC and its exponents were wanderers and self exiles who lived in the mountainous lands of China. Their art tried to articulate the wondrous processes of the world. They did not just want to illustrate the world; shan- sui painting is not an open window for the viewer's eye, it is an object for the viewer's mind. Shan-sui painting is more like a vehicle of philosophy. The shan-sui artists coined the word zi-ran meaning self-thusness or wildness. (Maeda et al, 1970).  Wilderness has thus been seen as both dangerous and miraculous and is still categorised in these contrasting ways by individuals and societies. The environment and human cognition and imagination David Abram (1996) whose writing has been described as where ecology meets philosophy, psychology and history writes about perception, e.g. what sense we make of what we see and experience in nature, and what language is developed and used to explain it. Abram (1996:ix) and says …today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age old reciprocity with the many voices of the landscape. We still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations...we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. Abram shows, particularly through the way the language of the environment stimulates and shapes imagination, that we are symbiotic with the landscape and ignore the importance of it on our intellect. He also explains (1996:262/266) his notion of the sensuous world where we may have unmediated interactions with nature. In contrast to the apparently unlimited global character of the technologically mediated world, the sensuous world - the world of our direct, unmediated interactions - is always local. The sensuous world is the particular ground on which we walk, the air we breathe....the human mind is not some other worldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather, it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth. For Abrams there are clearly links between the inner psychological world and intellect and the perceptual terrain or place that surround us. Much of what is being argued about global pollution, global warming and the ultimate consequences of not 'noticing' our landscape sufficiently suggests that as human beings we have removed ourselves too far away from noticing it, except when weather or earthquake or flood interfere and spoil our lives. Many people tend to take their places for granted until they seem to change in unpredictable ways. Places like landscapes, rivers, woods, have been seen variously as in need of control to keep them at bay, or protection and love like needy children. Ecological arguments about wild places sometimes seem to suffer from the asocial perspective in the sense that we want to preserve wildness, however conceived, but only on our own terms. The importance of wild places as a means of psychological and cognitive well-being has also been commented upon by many writers. Writers like Stegner (1988:178), in The American West as Living Space, argues that if all the wild places were lost: we would never again have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it...We would be committed, wholly without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment...we need wild country available to us....for it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, part of a geography of hope.. This leads us to a consideration of place in human cognition and imagination. For example, natural places can act as a creative stimulus in individual. Writers like Kathleen Jamie (2005) draw attention to the listening and observing processes in wild places (and cities) as a means of generating imaginative ideas. She speaks of her travels around the natural landscapes of Scotland as well as going to the Orkney Islands in the winter solstice and of her domestic place in a town in Scotland. To illustrate how noticing can take her imagination to another place consider the following: I like the precise gestures of the sun, at this time of the year. When it eventually rises above the hill it shines directly into our small kitchen window. A beam crosses the table and illuminates the hall beyond. In barely an hour, though, the sun sinks again below the hill, south- south-east, leaving a couple of hours of dwindling half light. Everything we imagine doing, this time of year, we imagine doing in the dark. I imagine travelling into the dark. Northward - so it got darker as I went - I'd a notion to sail by night, to enter into the dark for the love of its textures and wild intimacy. She goes on to consider why dark as a natural phenomenon, rather than some dangerous thing, is not cherished more by people. For her dark is good. Her writing illustrates a very close symbiosis between her intellect, imagination and the places she encounters. The natural world and the psyche: C.G. Jung From a different but related perspective, the psychologist Carl Jung (in Sabini (ed),2008) also speaks of nature, technology and modern life and his own and other human needs. He claims that human beings need nature and life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away - an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilisations we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. Jung's rhizome is the natural world. For Jung the earth has a soul. Jung (in Sabini (ed),2008:79/80) believes that the loss of emotional participation in nature has resulted in a sense of cosmic and social isolation. Whilst Jung is a psychoanalyst and concerns himself with the human psyche he, like Freud, asserts that the psyche develops in a natural and social environment. He claims that scientific understanding has rendered us unable to make sense of our natural world in ways in which we used to, due to the complexity of scientific theories and explanations, but also that this inability to make sense of the natural world for ourselves, has turned us away from it, or caring for it, and cast it as unknowable by the layman and not necessary to interact with; leave it to the scientists and the technologists. Jung says (in Sabini (ed) 2008:79/80) through scientific understanding our world has become dehumanised. Man feels himself (sic) isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in nature event, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer a voice of god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man's life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom...Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants and animals. He no longer has a bush soul identifying him with wild animals. His immediate communication with nature is gone forever and the emotional energy it generated has sunk into the unconscious...but nature is not matter only, she (sic) is also spirit. Were that not so, the only source of spirit would be human reason. For Jung the disposition of human beings is instinctive and innate, as instinct is with all animals. However, science draws us away from relying on instinct and presses us to rely on reason, evidence and certainty in order to explain our relationship to nature. He argues (Sabini (ed) 2008:91-99) that it remained for modern science to de-spiritualise nature through its so called objective knowledge of matter. All anthropomorphic projections were withdrawn from the object one after another, with a twofold result; first mans (sic) mystical identity with nature was curtailed as never before, and secondly the projections falling back into the human soul caused such a terrific activation of the unconscious that in modern times man (sic) was compelled to postulate the existence of an unconscious psyche. The idea of a natural or primal mind is of central interest to Jung and he offers evidence to show that our modern mind attributes certain events to chance, a statistical concept, whereas our natural or primeval mind seeks a more meaningful or causal explanation. The archaic mind, which he calls the natural mind, is not objective or subjective but cleaves the two together so for example dreams may consist of real testified events, or chance events, but may also be woven through with subjective interpretations or warnings or predictions and so on about those events. However, these subjective thoughts are not given credibility or weight in everyday life. They are consigned to the unconscious...in the last analysis, for Jung, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us. Sharon Butala (2000) in an article called 'Seeing' writes of her initially worrying experiences of noticing and ‘seeing’ historical figures and events when walking in the plains in USA. In it she recalls how as a child she suspected her mother of being in possession of some secret insight into other worldly matters but would never talk to her about it and Sharon herself had no inkling either. She wasn't frightened by it and wanted to have her 'powers' but did not. However, as she became middle aged she found herself in a different context. When her mother was young if anyone spoke of the 'psychic' powers of women in middle age they would have been derided. Witches were what we dressed up as at Halloween; not to be taken seriously. No-one ever spoke seriously about witchcraft or more seriously conceptualised any increase in women's intuitive abilities in middle age. Yet our folklore, as Butala (1994) says, is full of stories about witches, about mysterious, dark powers, and about women's connection with them. Literature is also full of such stories. Women themselves have 'forgotten' about this insightful side of our nature and when insight does arise they are quickly suppressed in fear and shame that we may be considered strange. Things are now changing and there are growing numbers of people, men and women, who are exploring nature and humanity, trying to connect with elements of the world that are not immediately explainable in rationalist terms. This can include natural healing, awareness of presences in landscapes, and the ability to predict, see into the future and past worlds. Butala (2000.213) says; The powers I am talking about are an increasingly strong and accurate intuition, a more meaningful and richer dream life, and the occasional mystical experience of one kind or another, from hearing a voice (usually soundless in the normal sense) to seeing a vision, however briefly. Incidents of clairvoyance - 'seeing' something true that is beyond the range of normal vision, and having predictive dreams - are also part of this package of possibilities..... Butal Butala (2000) says few women make their insights of this nature public for fear of ridicule. They may be labelled 'nature mystic' views and as such the label defines why the experiences are rarely made public or valued; in our rationally defined world any explanations that do not lend themselves to scientific rational investigation are demeaned. Why these experiences seem to surface in a certain age group is not known although there have been suggestions made of female hysteria, or not enough hormones circulating in female bodies at this time of their life. Butala (2001) dismisses such explanations and says her own unexplained experiences of seeing and hearing voices in the landscape of the plains in the USA involve making contact with some power, or with the 'collective unconsciousness' that Jung speaks of; making contact with instinctual knowing. She says it is a manifestation of spirit that flows through the universe behind daily life and is available to all of us. She personally does not do anything specific to get in touch with it, it just occurs spontaneously. She claims to be available to such wisdom you must learn to wait, and watch, be open to truth and accept it no matter how personally painful it might be. Trigg (2012) theories clarify the kind of experience Butala has. Her experiences echo some of Jung's theories. Older women are close to what Jung calls 'individuation', closer to having a firm, true idea of the Self. Having a stronger understanding of the Self makes it possible for one to open wider, without fear, to the universe. Women who have this heightened consciousness are enabled to have more knowledge of the world itself and what exists in the universe according to Jung. Butala (2000) says we don't realise that we waste certain normal human abilities; those few remaining societies that are still largely without modern technologies remember how to use them as David Abraham (1996) suggests. The abilities help us to understand our own souls: what they are, where they came from, and where they are going. They confirm the self is both conscious and 'unconscious' in Jung's terms. Othe Concluding comments. I have included in this discussion different writers who talk about people and places from distinct but sometimes overlapping perspectives. Places contain symbols of different social categories and personal meanings, and represent and maintain identity on different levels and dimensions. Writers on nature and the self all claim that natural places have a special function for the self, although each has a differing perspective and emphasis. Cronon (1995) suggests that in idealising the wild, the empty, we are given licence to ignore the urban. He shows that concepts of wilderness, developing from seeing it as a danger, to the current wildness where we might find solace for the soul, is a counterpoint in its purity and virtue to the degradation of civilisation. Many of the writers discussed in this article appear to hold this view. As Woolf (2013:151) says we decry the effects of society and humanity upon what we believe to have been unspoiled, wanting it to remain or return in order that we should be able to go there to restore ourselves...we seem to want wilderness for ourselves alone, for the possibilities of finding ourselves or being at one with ourselves, or a degree of spiritual benefit that is to be gained from the freedom to escape the world as we find it, an escape from time itself. Wild place in this perspective is one where people become themselves in ways they are unable to in other contexts. (see Appendix 1. below for an account of how this is experienced). However, as Cronan (1995) and others point out so called wild places are by no means untouched by man and his account of Yellowstone Park illustrates well the myth of wild place as ‘natural’. However, it seems there is some evidence to suggest that escaping from the world as we find it to a place where we can be ‘ourselves’ is often a process of leaving a developed urban place to go to a seemingly untouched wilder environment for some people. These brief comments, informed by a phenomenological approach, have been offered to stimulate a debate about place-identity in auto/biographical studies. © Dr.Irene Selway, IIn Independent Researcher January, 2014.  ( BIBL BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrams, D (1997) The spell of the sensuous; perception and language in a more than human world. New York. Vintage Books. Ackroyd, P (2000) London: the biography. London. Chatto and Windus. Angelo, H and Jerolmack, M 'Natures Looking Glass' in Contexts (2012, 11:24. American Sociological Association. Sage. Butala,, S (1984) Perfection of the morning; a woman’s awakening to nature. St. Paul, Minnesota. Hungry Mind Press. Butala, S (2000) ‘Seeing’in Shields, C and Anderson, M (ed) (2001) Dropped threads; what we are'nt told.. Canada. Random House Butala, S (2001.) Wild Stone Heart; an apprentice in the fields. London. Virago Press. Coverl Coverley, M (2012) Psychogeography. Harpenden Pocket Essential Books [e-book] Cronan, W 'The trouble with wilderness; getting back to the wrong nature' in Uncommon Ground; rethinking the human place in nature. (1995) New York. Harcourt Brace. Cronan, W (1995) Uncommon Ground; rethinking the human place in nature. New York. Harcourt Brace. Ldcas Deakin, R (2008) Wildwood; a journey through trees. London. Hamish Hamilton. Penguin. Heaney, S (2002) Beowulf.New Edition. London, Faber & Faber. HighBeam Research http://www.highbeam.com/10/20/2008 accessed 7 August 2013 Jamie, K (2005) Findings. London. Penguin. Sort of Books. Jung, C.G ‘The primitive knows how to converse with the soul’ in Sabini, M (ed) (2008:91) The earth has a soul; C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology and modern life Berkely, California, North Atlantic Books Jung, Jung, C.G (1969) The structure and dynamics of the psyche. 2nd Ed. From The collected works of C.G. Jung. 20 volumes. Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press. Kirby, M (2002) Skelligs Calling: A Memoir of Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Donegal. Maeda R, et al (1970). Two Twelfth Century Texts on Chinese Painting. University of Michigan, Centre for Chinese Studies.p.16. Sabini, Meredith (ed) (2008) The earth has a soul. North Atlantic Books. Berkely, California. Merleau Ponty (2006) Phenomenology of perception. London. Routledge. Proshansky, H. (1978). The self and the city. Environment and Behavior, 10(2), 147-169. Proshansky, H.M., Fabian, A.K., & Kaminoff, R. (1983). Place-identity: Physical world socialization of the self. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3, 57-83. Sabini, M (ed) (2008) The earth has a soul; C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology and modern life. Berkeley, California, North Atlantic Books Shields, C and Anderson, M (ed) (2001) Dropped threads; what we aren’t told. Canada. Random House. Sinclair, I (2002) London orbital. London. Granta. Stedman, R.C. (2002). 'Toward a psychology of place. Predicting behaviour from place-based cognitions, attitude, and identity'. Environment and Behaviour, 34(5), 561-581 Stegner, W (1988) The American West as living space. USA. University of Michigan Press Solnit, R (2006) A field guide to getting lost. Edinburgh, Cannongate Books. Trigg, D (2012) The memory of place: a phenomenology of the uncanny. Ohio. Ohio University Press [e-book] APPENDIX 1. Examples of an account of a place of importance for one person 'The Glen of the fourth Dimension'. Artist: Kapka Kassabova Title: The Glen of the Fourth Dimension (Radio 4 broadcast, 2012) Length: 6:34 minutes (6.02 MB) Format: Stereo 44kHz 128Kbps (CBR) There is a place in the Scottish Highlands where I like to disappear. I’m not telling you the name of this place. You might try to find it, and before I know it, I’ll be bumping into you, and things will get busy. You see, my notion of ‘busy’ has changed since I started living in the Highlands. ‘Busy’ used to mean, say, downtown Calcutta at peak hour. Now, busy is when I see another soul within an hour of walking.   Let’s just say that the place where I like to go is somewhere south of Ben Wyvis and north of Loch Affric. It’s a locked glen, and I call it the Glen of the Fourth Dimension. You have to know the secret place where the key is kept. Once you’re in, the gate locks behind you. From here, you can walk for twenty miles, all the way to the Sound of Sleat which sounds like a precipitation, and rightly so. Because in the Glen of the Fourth Dimension, weather is just as unstable as time. One moment, the gorse on the hills crackles with heat and you’re stripping off to swim in the river. The river too, is unreliable in depth – transparent one minute, and deep as a black hole the next. Then without warning, the sky grows ugly with storm. In the distance, the blue hills multiply, or is that clouds? You hear a deer breathe in the forest, it stands still, attentive like a painting, then it runs fast in the tree gaps, and is gone as if never there. The light becomes dense with electricity. You thought it was morning when you arrived, was it an hour ago? But now the light …   What is it about the light in the Glen? It’s infinite, like childhood summer. It’s strangely familiar. I’ve seen grubbier versions of this light elsewhere, in my twenty years of wandering the earth as a global soul, a polite euphemism for lost soul. I have seen it in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, where red-stone Kasbah forts rise in the scorched plains like bad dreams. I’ve seen it in India, behind ruined cenotaphs and vultures. In Marseille, over the Old Port where the spices and slaves of Empire came, and where ships still come from Algiers, Tunis and Djibouti. I have seen it over the rooftops of Buenos Aires, with their fantasy cupolas crumbling like cakes from a distant party. I’ve seen it in Macedonia, over the Ohrid Lake on the border with Greece and Albania, where monasteries perch on cliffs and where my grandmother was young and unhappy.   In other words, this is an ancient light. But how can light be ancient? Surely I mean to say that the landscape is ancient. Perhaps. Either way, the chemistry that binds you to a place is like the chemistry that connects you to a person. It is irrational, and it probably has something to do with the past – yours, theirs, and a more distant ancestral past that you carry in your system wherever you go. Whatever it is I carry in my system pushes me to places like this: where the light is ancient, where many have passed who are not here anymore. Places that are human but can’t be contained by us.   And so I continue on my way in the Glen of the Fourth Dimension, where chlorophyll-green grass carpets the forest, and the tree branches are like the downy horns of deer. I reach a hydroelectric station built in the time of art-deco. It’s vertical and forbidding like a film-set for a prison drama, and it looks disused but I know it isn’t, because it’s humming.   I move swiftly on, towards the snow blizzard approaching from the fjords, or is that a giant swarm of midges? I’m glad I took my fleece and my scarf, so I can wrap it around my face come what may.   I have all the time in the world to think about how I ended up here, after moving countries five times, and after moving house so many times I’m scared to count them, in case it looks like insanity rather than the journey of a rootless soul. Yes, I have all the time in the world to think about the illusions I’ve gladly lost, and the reasons why I feel so at home in the Glen of the Fourth Dimension when I didn’t feel at home in so many other places; busy places, exciting places, beautiful places, places where you felt you were going places.   I was going places – and they all led me here, to the Glen of the Fourth Dimension, where I’ve finally found the most difficult thing in life: freedom. Freedom to come and go, remember and forget. And most importantly, freedom from fear: this is the gift that the Highlands have given me with their light, moss, rumbling rivers, long summer nights, crystal chiming winters, and the distant devastation of history. Because like everybody, in my blood I carry the bitter-sweet remembrance of magic from childhood. When I ran free in the mountains – before the burdens of adulthood, of being a desirous woman with love disappointments, a restless traveller, a global soul with three nationalities and no peace – before all of that came to ruin the enchantment. Here, I can be enchanted again. I can be myself again. Here, in the Glen of the Fourth Dimension, I find the possibility of magic, the remembrance of seasons, the infinity of the day. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 17