Vantage

It has been a few months since this theme journal has been touched. That is not to say that we’ve given up. Writing perennially suffers from a love / hate flu--speaking for myself--and for Ali it is a dark question of confidence. Subjects are hard to come by when you’re in no occupational shape to devote north of fifteen minutes a day to old fashioned, playful reflection. We have yet to determine our expectations regarding readership and our relationship to writing in this format, which is still new to us. Do we write for our own personal fulfillment? Do we want to ignite discussion, to make public knowledge of our ideas? In this way, our spare time becomes an experiment to establish a texture, parameters (or lack thereof) to all that we are trying (?) to do. So as sporadic as it seems, this blog continues, in what I hope comes across as a type of unpredictable, asymmetrical chronology.

It would be futile to do anything but select a few protruding instances of relevance in backtracking over the hole left by procrastination. Moving forward, the time and opportunities missed will be set free in elliptical sprinkles, moments of vivid clarity. Clarity is what we strive for in mapping (in both geographical and autobiographical senses); mostly, it arrives in those “a-ha” moments, poring over maps as I did endlessly throughout my childhood, fascinated with scale representations of real places, oblivious to their referential fidelity or political symptoms.

Clarity may also arrive as a surprise, shaking us awake while suddenly presenting us with a new vantage. In September, I hiked up Jay Peak, a ski hill located just a few kilometers over the US border in Vermont. Often, it is the promise of a breathtaking view that attracts people to the top of a hill, whether they climb, drive, or take a ski lift. As I do whenever I am presented with such a chance (we also found ourselves at the top of Mount Mansfield a few weeks later) I searched for landmarks. Luckily, the top of Jay, were it not for a chalet and gondola station, affords nearly a 360-degree scene. What it also delivers, as with views from planes, is the ability to feel your unique location in the world, to transplant all your cartographic knowledge onto your far-reaching surroundings. In fact, I would say that referential knowledge is essential to this effect, or else the absolute vastness of the panorama becomes a spectacular, peaceful nothing. When you see things you recognize, you impose your mind’s map on the sight and find that everything makes sense. Its integrity is confirmed. Everything is in its rightful place. Lake Champlain, the Adirondack High Peaks region, Mount Mansfield, White Mountains of New Hampshire, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, all checked off the list; all exactly where they should be.

All of this is fine and good. It is what any natural navigator will tend toward. What was new in the case of that particular day was seeing Montreal from a flat distance. I have seen the city from the sky, shortly after takeoff and prior to landing, at the time captivated by what my mind’s map was matching to those familiar points. But our experience playing with Google Earth somewhat drains the excitement out of what a neighborhood looks like from 8,000 feet in the air. This was something altogether different. For the first time I was seeing my home from 120 km away (a two hour drive) and was taken by its enduring immensity. I must have been expecting a shorter span of the island at that distance. The picture provided here, snapped by hobby photographer James Fraser, one of my five companions on that hike, demonstrates this expansive sprawl (click on the image to see an enlarged version).

The viewer appears to be halfway between the forest and the clouds, as both act together as a cradle for a downtown flanked by Mount Royal toward the left of the picture, and a much separated Olympic Stadium on the right. This has altered my understanding of perspective, of how the viewing ratio we derive from looking at a map can totally deceive our actual perception of the real thing. This can be brought about by the difference in the size of the observer with respect to a sheet of paper versus when we are a million times smaller, thrown into that map, observing from within. Emotionally, it felt sublime.

I have used this otherwise insignificant moment to illustrate what I think many of us are constantly searching for but don’t know it – our next encounter with the sublime. In 1998, an American communication theorist, Robert Hariman, published an essay entitled “Terrible Beauty and Mundane Detail: Aesthetic Knowledge in the Practice of Everyday Life.” The essay deals with the interplay between the sublime and the mundane, opposing yet cooperating poles in artful symbolic action. The sublime is the emotional experience of both awe and wonder when we are confronted with “natural beauty, technological power, or artistic perfection”. It is a feeling of exhilaration that transcends the boundaries of our ordinary perception and consciousness and usually arrives as a result of an unexpected alignment of perspective and object. By contrast, the mundane is the usual quotidian routine and obligation that fills time between rare occurrences of the sublime.

In general, Hariman says that the sublime and the mundane are imitated in the practical arts through “oscillations” and transformations from one to the other, and although experiencing sublime moments can put one’s ethical (everyday) sensibilities at risk, it also has the power to change for the better. “Beauty can trap, but it also heals, and every structure is destabilized as it becomes subject to continuing oscillation between sublime and mundane embodiments”. While his theory is really about the effect of types of speech in achieving specific persuasive goals, it is easily applicable to many natural and unintentional occurrences in life as we live it. The sublime can adjust our rationality, causing us to, for instance, let down our guard, abandon strongly held assumptions or beliefs for the benefit of the greater community.

Okay, so I'm digressing into political territory here, so let's corral the herd, shall we. Urban geography, appreciated from the perspective of personal histories, is rife with spine-tingling revelations. The active search for diverse, unique texts that represent and reconfigure the concept of place, progresses in moments where discover a new way of seeing, or a connection between one thing and another we previously did not know existed.

[Not really giving in to academic form, but I thought I'd include the one reference:]

Hariman, Robert. 1998. Terrible Beauty and Mundane Detail: Aesthetic Knowledge in the Practice of Everyday Life. Argumentation & Advocacy 35(1): HTML Document. Internet. Available from http://search.ebscohost.com