Edges: Where Things Occur
Part 5: Reciprocity
Reciprocity
Barry Lopez’ offers practical advice as to how to forge reciprocal relationships with the places we visit. It is advice that I follow while engaging with the places where I photograph. Lopez’ advice should inform any excursion into any “geography” whether local or far flung, near field or far field.
How does one actually enter a local geography? . . . To respond explicitly and practicably, my first suggestion would be to be silent. Put aside the bird book, the analytic state of mind, any compulsion to identify, and sit still. Concentrate instead on feeling a place, on deliberately using the sense of proprioception. Where in this volume of space are you situated? The space behind you is as important as what you see before you. What lies beneath you is as relevant as what stands on the far horizon. Actively use your ears to imagine the acoustical hemisphere you occupy. How does birdsong ramify here? Through what kind of air is it moving? Concentrate on smells in the belief you can smell water and stone. Use your hands to get the heft and texture of a place—the tensile strength in a willow branch, the moisture in a pinch of soil, the different nap of leaves. Open a vertical line to the place by joining the color and form of the sky to what you see out across the ground. Look away from what you want to scrutinize in order to gain a sense of its scale and proportion. Be wary of any obvious explanation for the existence of color, a movement. Cultivate a sense of complexity, the sense that another landscape exists beyond the one you can subject to analysis.
Lopez concludes that “[t]he purpose of such attentiveness is to gain intimacy, to rid yourself of assumption.” His summation that “[i]t should be like a conversation with someone you're attracted to, a person you don't want to send away by having made too much of yourself,” resonates whenever I am in Poland Brook and other such places. My time in the local geography proves to me that “[s]uch conversations [do] take place simultaneously on several levels.” I too have found that such conversations “may easily be driven by more than simple curiosity,” that the forces that drive me to such engagement are much deeper, sustaining and compelling than mere inquisitiveness. I share the “compelling desire, as in human conversation . . . to institute a sustaining or informing relationship” with any given place. I seek to feed my imagination so as to make something from the intimacy gained. For, like Lopez, the relationships I have forged with the places I visit have established in me an unshakable faith that “the power of the human imagination to extrapolate from an odd handful of things—faint movement in a copse of trees, a wingbeat, the damp cold of field stones at night—the human ability to make from all this a pattern, to compose a story out of it fixes in me a sense of hope.”
Here is where I could tell you about the ethereal echo of the rumble of those stampeding hoof beats that remains with me to this day. An echo that surges up from the soles of my feet, through my legs, across my midriff, lodging a lump in my throat when I am nowadays standing waist high in goldenrod, the sun, only a hint above the ridge, as I await the intimate subtle stampede of murmurs and whispers of the sustaining and sustained conversation with Poland Brook Wildlife Management Area to manifest through the fog I carry within. But alas, the magic of such conversations with good friends, the power that resonates within from having had them, diminishes or disappears altogether in the strict retelling. And worse, like gossip, can leave the relationship unsteady, threatening to send Poland Brook away from me by having made too much of myself in the retelling. Some conversations are just private. But the outcomes, the benefits of having had those conversations, the benevolence taking root—that I am made better by having such conversations and the stories that I have made from them in my images, must be shared. “We keep each other alive with our stories,” Lopez tells us. “We need to share them, as much as we need to share food.”