We are held by more than the force of gravity to the earth

Artic Dreams (earlier) by Gary Lopez (earlier) opens with quotes from Edmund Carpenter and N. Scott Momaday. I never heard of Momaday before but the quote turns out to be half a poem. You will see that it is admirably saying something about the core principles of psychogeography/deep topography or whatever obscure disciplineof landscape divination  you adhere to. The bit behind the break was omitted by Lopez and you see why.

The Earth

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.

For we are held by more than the force of gravity to the earth. It is the entity from which we are sprung, and that into which we are dissolved in time. The blood of the whole human race is invested in it. We are moored there, rooted as surely, as deeply as are the ancient redwoods and bristlecones.

First hand knowledge is a way of life

Barrly Lopez photograph by Robert Miller.

On the website of Orion Magazine, a splendid resource for high quality nature writing, I found a short 2001 essay by Barry Lopez (earlier) called The Naturalist. Speaking about field biology and native people he makes a number of assertions on the art and power of observation that are not just epistemological but ethical and well worth quoting in the context of forage psychogeography:

my experience with field biologists, those fresh to a task—say, caracara research—are the ones most likely to give themselves a deadline—ten years, say—against which they will challenge themselves to know all there is to know about that falcon. It never works. More seasoned field biologists, not as driven by a need to prove themselves, are content to concentrate on smaller arenas of knowledge. Instead of speaking definitively of coyote, armadillo, or wigeon, they tend to say, “This one animal, that one time, did this in that place.” It’s the approach to nature many hunting and gathering peoples take, to this day. The view suggests a horizon rather than a boundary for knowing, toward which we are always walking.

A modern naturalist, then, is no longer someone who goes no further than a stamp collector, mastering nomenclature and field marks. She or he knows a local flora and fauna as pieces of an inscrutable mystery, increasingly deep, a unity of organisms Western culture has been trying to elevate itself above since at least Mesopotamian times. The modern naturalist, in fact, has now become a kind of emissary in this, working to reestablish good relations with all the biological components humanity has excluded from its moral universe.  

One of the reasons native people still living in some sort of close, daily association with their ancestral lands are so fascinating to those who arrive from the rural, urban, and suburban districts of civilization is because they are so possessed of authority. They radiate the authority of firsthand encounters. They are storehouses of it. They have not read about it, they have not compiled notebooks and assembled documentary photographs. It is so important that they remember it. When you ask them for specifics, the depth of what they can offer is scary. It’s scary because it’s not tidy, it doesn’t lend itself to summation. By the very way that they say that they know, they suggest they are still learning something that cannot, in the end, be known.

Firsthand knowledge is enormously time consuming to acquire; with its dallying and lack of end points, it is also out of phase with the short-term demands of modern life. It teaches humility and fallibility, and so represents an antithesis to progress. It makes a stance of awe in the witness of natural process seem appropriate, and attempts at summary knowledge naïve. Historically, tyrants have sought selectively to eliminate firsthand knowledge when its sources lay outside their control. By silencing those with problematic firsthand experiences, they reduced the number of potential contradictions in their political or social designs, and so they felt safer. 

As an example of the power of firsthand knowledge the following qoute from Jared Diamond comes to mind. I found it through a recommended essay by US forager Samuel Thayer on the irrarional Western fear for using/eating wild plants (also see).

One day, when my companions of the Foré tribe and I were starving in the jungle because another tribe was blocking our return to the supply base, a Foré man returned to camp with a large rucksack full of mushrooms he had found, and started to roast them. Dinner at last! But then I had an unsettling thought: what if the mushrooms were poisonous?

I patiently explained to me Foré companions that I had read about some mushrooms’ being poisonous, that I had heard of even expert American mushroom collectors’ dying because of our difficulty in distinguishing safe from dangerous mushrooms, and that although we were all hungry, it just wasn’t worth the risk. At that point one of my companions got angry and told me to shut up and listen while they explained some things to me. After I had been quizzing them for years about names of hundreds of trees and birds, how could I insult them by assuming they didn’t have names for different mushrooms? Only Americans could be so stupid as to confuse poisonous mushrooms with safe ones. They went on to lecture me about 29 types of mushroom species, each species in the Foré language, and where in the forest one should look for it. This one, the tánti, grew on trees, and it was delicious and perfectly edible.

Eskimo Psychogeography

The first is a a map of the Cumberland Sound-Frobisher Bay region drawn from memory by an Eskimo named Sunapignanq, The second map is a modern cartographic map.

The above image and the quote below are excerpted from Barry Lopez fabulous 'Arctic Dreams, imagination and desire in a Northern landscape'. I opened it at random the other day and the following fragment about the definition of 'space', 'place' and how the transition from one to the other is brought about through narrative and long term contact seems to be in perfect alignment with forage psychogeography. It is a wonderfully compact quote, a large segment of the book is concerned with Eskimo (ethno)psychogeography but Lopez here manages to find universal facets. Italics are mine.

 The American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan distinguishes in his writing between concepts of space and a sense of place. Human beings, he says, set out from places, where they feel a sense of attachment,of shelter, of comprehension, and journey into amorphous spaces, characterized by a feeling of freedom or adventure, and the unknown. "In open space," writes Tuan, "one can become intensely aware of [a remembered] place; and in the solitude of a sheltered place, the vastness of space acquires a haunting presence." We turn these exhilarating and sometimes terrifying new places into geography by extending the boundaries of our old places in an effort to include them. We pursue a desire for equilibrium and harmony between our familiar places and unknown spaces. We do this to make the foreign comprehensible, or simply more acceptable.

Tuan's thoughts are valid whether one is thinking about entering an unknown room in a large house or of a sojourn in the Arctic.  What stands out in the latter instance, and seems always part of travel in a wild landscape, is the long struggle of the mind for concordance with the mystery entity, the earth.

One more thought from Tuan: a culture's most cherished places are not necessarily visible to the eye - spots on the land one can point to. They are made visible in drama - in narrative, song, and performance. It is precisely what is invisible in the land, however, that makes what is merely empty space to one person a place to another. The feeling that a particular place is suffused with memories, the specific focus of sacred and profane stories, and that the whole landscape is a congeries of such places, is what is meant by a local sense of the land. The observation that it is merely space which requires definition before it has meaning - political demarcation, an assignment of its ownership, or industrial development - betrays a colonial sensibility.   

Fabulous eye candy: Greenland Inuit shoreline maps.