The Country State of Mind
By Megan Mueller (05/22/14 11:33:00)
The Country State of Mind is an excerpt from Barry Lopez's book Arctic Dreams. Its a combination of travelogue, historical information, and critique of research/Western thought. Lopez speaks from the first person and is informed by actually walking the spaces in which he writes about. I underlined quite a bit of the chapter, feeling quite moved by his observations and analysis.

A few gems:
One is better with a precise and local knowledge, and a wariness of borders.

It is impossible to seperate their culture from these landscapes. The lands is like a kind of knowledge traveling in time through them. Land does for them what architecture sometimes does for us. It provides a sense of place, of scale, of history, and a conviction that what they most dread-annihilation, eclipse-will not occur.

English divides time into linear segments by making use of many tenses....A Hopi would be confounded by the idea that time flowed from the past into the present.

A couple students from UCSB did an outdoor art project in the Mojave desert in the beginning of this quarter. We were the first to arrive on site for installation, beating the curator, meaning that we were responsible for finding out plots of land on the 40 acre site. The curator had emailed us a hand drawn map of a cul-da-sac plotting the center point with an existing landmark. Standing in the sand, off the road, we found the road to curve more than the drawing allotted for. Shifting the orientation of the lines from 90 degree angles to a softer rounder curve. The desert seemed desolate. It was hot, barren, every step felt important as you tried to place your foot on areas of sand that appeared sturdy. If they were not, you foot collapsed the roof of shallow tunnels dug beneath the surface.

It took a great deal of time to find the one landmark we were given, it took even more time to drag our materials by hand to our spaces. We had driven a Uhual from Santa Barbara to Wonder Valley, so it was not possible to use the vehicle to deliver our materials any further than the road. The more time that we spent that weekend on the site, the more we saw. We saw two snakes, one coiled under a bush - I assume taking refuge from the sun and the other a small thin white snakes slithering on the ground and then away into a hole in the sand. I saw an iridescently blue beetle play dead when I moved the sand in front of it. There were more plants than I realized were there, in the middle of the day, they looked brown and hot and dead. Once the sun began to set around 6, the color palette shifted to soft greens and yellows.

Point being, the longer I spent time on the site, the more I learned about it. Being present allowed me to realize that there is indeed a flourishing and resilient ecosystem and the nuances of space, time, and place. These animals, insects, etc could be read about but informed me so much more when allowed to be witness to their lives. Mr. Lopez already understands what I have recently just learned. He articulates his observations, experiences, and research in a poetic manner. His way of writing is an inspiration.

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