John Griogair Bell’s Unbook

The outcome of my work has been a pair of studies, each comprised of three snapshots. Each snapshot is a map, a representation, of my experience of pathways in either my imaginal landscape, the political landscape, or a blended image where imaginal and political are mapped together.

These two studies seem to suggest a sequential order from consensus to imaginal through blended, or from imaginal to consensus. In actually I started with imaginal first, then developed the consensus snapshot, and finally represented as closely as possible the majority of my own travels mapped on the consensus.

It seems clear to me that my experience of the pathways in my place is bounded by the political landscape and there appears to be no representation of an engagement with the vernacular landscape. In this sense, I rarely change the physical paths of my place; I don’t inhabit my landscape because I don’t create the inhabited landscape or change it. I may alter my own footsteps, but the physical path is not discernibly altered by my passing. And, if the changes I make on the physical path are not discernible then I certainly have no discernable impact on the consensus, shared political map.

While the vast majority of my travel this month is represented, but of course there are side trips and small variations that are not discernable, do not rise above the threshold of these maps. Any representation of my vernacular engagement is almost entirely through my imaginal landscape and my pathing through that is unshared and private, and irrelevant to the community.

On the other hand, it seems clear that the pathways on which I travel through my imaginal landscape are only nominally and marginally related to the consensus. My imaginal is broad and graceful; my actual is angular and stunted – like the difference between the an animal in it’s natural, changing environment and the pacing of a zoo animal … back and forth tracing the boundaries of a cage, the political landscape in which it is trapped.

I appear in the imaginal snapshot, but as the consensus map solidifies into view and as my imaginal path is mapped onto the consensus map, I begin to fade from relevance. And, in the consensus map I am not discernible; I don’t appear to really exist.

This inescapably mundane reality that seems to falsify my imaginal landscape and path fills me with the desire to burn my possessions and start a walkabout, to radically abjure this assimilation.

I have been fascinated by the connection between my own experience of place and John Brinkerhoff Jackson’s notion of odology, the study of roads or pathways. I have long developed my sense of place in relation to pathways. As a child I would understand my location in relation to pathways that were my markers of space, my way of navigation and the cross-hatching that revealed to me a picture of the territory as I experienced it and a hint of what had yet to be experienced. Finding the pathways of a place has been my way of coming to know a place.

In the essay “A pair of ideal landscapes,” Jackson, in addition to talking about odology, articulates a distinction between political and vernacular, or inhabited, landscapes. According to Jackson, the distinction must be made that the term landscape implies a place that has been changed by humans, a collection of “improved” lands. Once this distinction has been made, then the landscape can be further understood to be comprised of both those shared spaces that are political and those that are vernacular, or inhabited.

“… the political landscape is deliberately created in order to make it possible for men [sic] to live in a just society, the inhabited [vernacular] landscape merely evolves in the course opf our trying to live on harmonious terms with the natural world surrounding us.” (Jackson, 1984, p42)

I suggest further that there is also an imaginal landscape. Indeed Jackson appears to recognize not only the existence of the imaginal landscape but also the possible need for this landscape to inform and enrich a sustainable human relationship with the more than human. Jackson explains the way in which the imaginal informs the human relationship with the landscape:

“Any firmly held belief in the invisible, it seems to me, must somehow affect our attitude toward the visible world, and that might have been little more than a random plundering and destruction of the nearby wilderness became an exchange of benefits: those things which men took from the forest for their daily needs were repaid by our helping and protecting and loving the small, invisible creatures who lived there. They served as intermediaries, they reassured us that we were taking part in the natural order and were not entirely alien to it.” (Jackson, 1984, p53)

So, it is with through the lens of odology, through a study of pathways, that I chose to examine the various landscapes of my experience.

Sigils of Imagination

a personal territory narrative analysis

by John Griogair Bell

Experience of Place

Spring ’06 – Geist