Christmas day is almost upon us and the more sceptical part of me is brooding upon the vast mountains of plastic and electronics that will be awaiting many children throughout the land on Friday morning. I confess, I was one of those children who awoke to a rather large sack stuffed full of toys, most of which spent the remainder of their lives in the drawer under the bed, emerging into the light perhaps once a year. Now, it is not the purpose or aim of this blog to rant about and bemoan the age of rampant consumerism but rather to contribute, in some small way, to the wider debate that is taking place about ways we can re-envision and re-articulate our relationship to the Earth, and in particular to the places upon that Earth.
While I am on this subject, I would like to point those who are not yet aware of it to The Dark Mountain Project - a new literary and artistic ‘movement’ conceived of and curated by Paul Kingsnorth (a leading green voice of his generation) and a friend of mine called Dougald Hine. The journal will showcase literature and poetry that is firmly grounded in a sense of place and time (in the tradition of Thoreau, John Berger and Alan Garner). Despite the odd hint of pretentiousness here and there, I nevertheless have a little feeling that, come 2020, this movement and the journal that is accompanying it will be looked upon as one of the defining, though resolutely alternative, voices of the next decade. We need some geographers writing for it!
Coming back now to the real reason why I was writing about these aforementioned 'mountains of plastic and electronics', I have been thinking in the past week about how we might get pupils to reflect on some of the more hidden facets of Santa’s seemingly endless generosity. No doubt there will be many an environmentally aware teacher who will start the new term with an activity based around mapping the hidden connections that link our gifts with other places and people around the world, and this is all good. However, there may be yet another, more phenomenological, approach to take which could also result in some inspired creative writing efforts. This approach involves thinking carefully about how our new belongings have an impact on the very way we experience and engage with the world.
It’s Heidegger who’s got me thinking about this; specifically his fairly well known description in 'The Origin of the Work of Art' of van Gogh’s painting of the peasant's shoes. In this example, the painting of these rather innocuous looking items conveys to us not merely the shoes themselves but the entire world of the peasant and their relation to the earth. As Heidegger puts it, in his characteristically poetical way:
“From out of the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth… In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.”It is of course his frequent use of these conspicuously rural examples that have led to the charges of anachronism, romanticism and anti-modernism that have been levelled at Heidegger over the years. However, there seems to be no reason why we cannot undertake a similar analysis with markedly modern objects, which Heidegger himself did in his account of the autobahn. This is what led me to consider how we could take a piece of equipment such as an I-Pod, mobile phone or a pair of trainers and write about how it shapes the way we engage with the world – the way we observe it and interact with it on a daily basis. Indeed, might it not be of great interest to write an account of an urban walk from the imagined perspective of a pair of trainers?
An even more imaginative and empathic leap may entail one then comparing how the everyday items of distant countries and other eras reveal quite different worlds to our own, and quite different ways of experiencing it. let us say... ‘sandals treading gently on the bare earth’ as opposed to ‘thick air-cushioned soles pounding against the firm concrete’ to take two admittedly rather stereotyped examples!
I suppose what I am really trying to argue for here is an approach to geography that really focuses on our everyday engagements with the world and puts them to question, through literary methods. Not so as to displace other approaches, I hope you’ll understand, but as a valuable perspective that has for too long been seen as the domain only of the English classroom. Putting it in a more Heideggarian way, such an approach may help teach us how to ‘dwell’ with greater care on the Earth, and to open ourselves up to those aspects of this world that refuse to be conceptualised by an analytic, scientific method.
And leaving you with these thoughts I will now wish you all a very merry Christmas and happy new year. I will return to posting in January...
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