Page 18 RAIN November 1976 I PLACE All of us have certain buttons which, if pressed, send up red flags, blood pressures, and bring forth violent ideological outcries. When you talk to a lot of people and keep finding the same panic · buttons, you b'egin to become ~ware of what could be called societal soft spotswhere we feel somehow too insecure about our posi.tion and actions torespond normally. One I always used to stumble into was Sewage, thou'gh people are changing a lot on that topic. Now, questioning someone's right to mobility runs up the flags faster than questioning their virility, but if you want to get the most defensive, clamshell response, ask most people how much money they make! Or try a couple of others, just for fun: tell someone that Xeroxing is a har~ful technology o: that we have too many medical serVices. If we sniff around a bit when we hit one of those buttons, we can often learn a lot. Mobility, for example, is now an unquestionable, God-given right, to be defended and expanded at every opportunity. We have so long ago lost any awareness of what it means and feels like to have roots, that we cannot imagine or sense any positive potentials of abandoning, either voluntarily or from need, our wandering, mobile lifestyle. We can immediately sense, though, when·someone with the strength of deep roots and strong ties to a place questions our mobility, that they are speaking from an experience we lack . and one that gives them a strength we cannot fu,lly understand. Mobility, like all things, has good and bad sides, and when carried to the extre.mes of its potentials also creates the extremes of its harmfulness, which brings rise to the 'desirability of.other patterns. Roots and wheels aren't extremes on a continuum; they're different dimensions·of experience. Th~ emergence now of desires for rootedness comes more because it can now offer more positive experience than more mobility once you've taken mobility as far as you can go (either as individuals or as a society). A sense of place that arises from living in and loving a place and drawing our sustenance from it gives rise to different and deeper roots than can be gained by any other means. The strength that grows from deep roots in powerful places can be sensed in the speeches and writings of Native Americans as well as many other cultures where people lived close to their land : Seven Arrows, Hyemeyohsts Storm, 1972, $6.95 from: Ballantine Books 201 E. 50th Street New York, NY 10022 A beautiful expression-in words, pictures and allegory-of the forces of people and nature that flow together through a place, forming and evolving together. Landscapes-Selected Writings ofJ. B. . Jackson, ed. by Ervin H. Zube, 1970, $6.00 from: University of Massachusetts Pr~ss Amherst, MA 01002 J. B. Jackson was editor/publisher of Landscape Magazine for 16 years, and his collected essays from that journal and other writings are among the few clear visions of modern America. The night-jeweled cities from the air, the stranger's path through a city, the susuburbia of old Rome and New York- ] ackson's essays reveal the places of modern America with unequaled clarity. Era of Exploration, Weston Naef, 1975, $9.75 from: New York Graphic Society 140 Greenwich Avenue Greenwich, CT 06830 Our images and perceptions of ourselves and our world usually change more dramatically and rapidly than the physical places themselves. This fascinating chronicle of the rise of landscape photography in the American West, profusely illustrated with the photographs that make up that revolution, provides an absorbing insight into those changes in perception: Photographs made by three fine photographers, within a twoyear period, of the same view of Yosemite and other places, from precisely the same spot create .an entirely different feeling of the idyllic'beauty, power, awesomeness, quietude or harmony of nature. A record of people affecting landscapes, landscapes affecting people, and the images of both evolving into a new sense of our place in our world. Two of Wendell Berry's books give a powerful sense of these ancient and nurturing roots: · The Long-Legged House, 1965, $1.25 from: Ballantine Books 201 E. 50th St. New York, NY 10022 A collection of essays on his reestablishing a homestead in the neglected farmlands of Kentucky, this book is filled with beautiful images of the land he' knows: "The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in.its passivity and beneficence and in the penetrating energy that issues o.ut of its peaceableness.' It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched .by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always bl.!ilding up out of death into promise. Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enters its future." Memory of Old Jack, 1940, $2.65 from: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 757 Third Ave. New York, NY 10017 A novel of an old farmer's last day, flashing back through his life and relationships with the people and land of his home. His frustrations with so many of the new generations who have succumbed to the lure of the city life is based in his own experience of strength and love received back from his own hard work and simple life.
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