Saudade or Welschmertz?

[mallorys_camera]

Every gritty little city struggling to reconcile its booming manufacturing legacy with the new realities of the service economy has a place in my heart, but none more so than Oakland. I didn’t grow up there but Marybeth and the Raffantis did, and I tapped into their memories. I did spend a major part of my young adulthood on the Oakland/Berkeley borderline, and sometimes when I have insomnia I try to remember the exact layout of the churches and the businesses that line Telegraph Avenue from 51st Street to Alcatraz Avenue. Goodnight Moon.

Do different landscapes summon different emotions or is the emotional resonance a human constant whatever the landscape it attaches to? There used to be a steel mill close to this freeway and back in the day when you could actually put yourself through college if you worked hard enough, Mark had a job at that steel mill as a night janitor. I used to visit him there a couple of nights of nights a week, riding my bicycle, without a light, over rusty railroad tracks, through the crazy streets west of San Pablo. I remember the shadows his flashlight made as I trailed him on his rounds, monsters without bodies, the huge casements and scaffolding and vats.

I’m the solo guardian of those memories now.

Maybe the sense of place is determined by just how many such memories, from hundreds or thousands of people, are embedded in any particular landscape.

Would make a nice central core to a Borgesian, dark urban fantasy story but I can tell -- I'm blithering.

Comments

[old-cutter-john.livejournal.com]

Blithering? Maybe. But great to read! Thanks!

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. :-)

[sulphuroxide.livejournal.com]

it might be inaccurate to analogize strictly, speaking, but the mind's map seems to be indexed, by sense and location. one recalls the other, and in that way, we link what would otherwise be nearly impossible to retrieve memories. it might also be interesting to note how our internal somatic feeling is the vanishing mediator in these exchanges.

[anais-pf.livejournal.com]

I typed this out last week for another LJ friend who was really missing her childhood home and having similar thoughts to those expressed in this post. If one more LJ friend posts about feeling attached to a place or wanting to go home, it will be time for me to write my post about why I want to keep this house I can't afford. But I digress. Here is the excerpt, from Stephen A. Mitchell’s Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time. (Quote begins on page 36.)

[I]f I were forced to select an essential, wired-in aspect of human psychology, the sense of “home” would be high on my list. It is difficult for me to imagine a person -- or a human culture, for that matter -- who doesn’t orient himself around some sense of home: my place, where I am from, where I belong, where I long to return. Home, wrote Robert Frost in “The Death of the Hired Man,” “is where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

It is no accident that the words “family” and “familiar” have the same roots. We seek continuity, sameness, as a way of grounding, anchoring ourselves, and each of us has our own particular way of going about establishing “home.” The sense of place referred to in contemporary poetry reflects the way a geographical location, especially a place where one has spent childhood years, comes to penetrate one’s mind with a deep sense of comfort for which there can be no substitute. There are people who feel at home only in the crowded bustle and electric intensity of New York City, or near the ocean-like expanses yet fresh-water feel of the Great Lakes, or dwarfed by the huge mountains of Colorado, or gazing at a flat, endless Nebraska cornfield. There is a neurophysiology as well as a psychology to this experience: the sounds, smells and images of our childhood and important passages of adulthood become wired into our brains in a way that is intrinsic to our sense of self-recognition, central to our psychological well-being.

Researchers who study infants have been observing this process in the subtle reciprocal influence and mutual adaptations that dominate the early months of life. The brain of the newborn, we now know, is incompletely formed; crucial neurological pathways governing basic biological rhythms . . . are established . . . between the particular infant and the particular caregivers. The infant and the mother mutually shape each other to create a world into which the growing child will fit. The mother provides not just a supportive environment, not just a featureless container, but a particular supportive environment, with its own, distinct affective tones, its own sensory textures. We become our early significant others from the deep past. The profound feeling of connection and belonging that is evoked in the experience of “home,” and in the presence of someone who comes from our home or with whom we have made a home, reflects a kind of matching, a pervasive resonance between what is inside us with what is outside us, between the past and the present, between what we were, what we are, and what we long to be.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

who doesn’t orient himself around some sense of home

What about nomadic tribes? I mean, I think they have a sense of home -- tribal membership, their family's tent -- but it wouldn't be one that's tied in to a sense of place.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

our internal somatic feeling

Specifically coded to our sense of smell, the most primitive and purely chemical of all our senses...

[robby.livejournal.com]

Speaking of chemicals, I was watching a piece on narcolepsy research, and they have isolated a brain chemical that supresses the unconcious dream state when we're awake. Sometimes this process fails, and people then have dreams while awake.