In this unique world, everything sensuous that I now originally perceive, everything that I have perceived and which I can now remember or about which others can report to me as what they have perceived or remembered, has its place.
—Husserl, Experience and Judgment
Isn’t memory a matter of the past? Is it not primarily a temporal phenomenon? How can we think of it otherwise after Kant and Husserl—not to mention Aristotle, who said straightforwardly that “memory is of the past”?1 Philosophers’ propensities apart, it is certainly true that whenever we think of memory, indeed whenever we actually engage in acts of remembering, we have to do with past time: with time that in some sense has elapsed and is now being revived in some guise (whether by image or word, or by bodily movement). This is undeniable—even if it is equally undeniable that such time past is ineluctably elusive and always reappears in memory “as seen through a veil.”2 Since memory does not require exact repetition in any case, the elusiveness does not matter in the larger picture. In the larger picture, remembering seems fully preoccupied with the past. Who could possibly question such an apparently well-founded bedrock assumption as this? Would not questioning it amount to questioning the existence of memory itself?
And yet question it we must and on several grounds. Consider, to start with, the way in which the primary action of time can be said to be dispersive—time in Aristotle’s words “disperses subsistence”3—whereas memory is itself mainly collective in its basic work (which is not to say, however, that it is mainly recollective in its basic operation). Time’s dispersiveness means that, as a direct consequence, temporal phenomena tend to be conceived as grouping themselves in a monolinear pattern of sheer succession: an assumption common to Aristotle, Kant, and Husserl alike. Whitehead’s trenchant critique of this conception as an effect of abstraction in the realm of presentational immediacy in no way eliminates the tenacity of the conception itself, which is only reinforced in the post-Cartesian world of “clock-time” and “public-time.”4 On a monolinear view of time, there is dispersal and disintegration as each instant arises and dies away—instantaneously. No time is left over in such a view: no time that might be gathered up in memory and kept therein. Thus, to say that memory is “of the past” resolves nothing; indeed, it may dissolve the effective basis for the reconnective capacity of memory itself. At the least, memory is of a non-punctiform past. But we may say more radically that memory involves something more than the purely temporal in its own makeup.
Consider the following line of thought. If remembering were a sheerly temporal phenomenon—and even allowing for a more capacious, less linear notion of time—it would remain largely disembodied. For time, even cohesive, nonpunctiform time, is something we contemplate or represent rather than something we feel “in our bones.” In our bones—in our bodies—we do not experience time or its depredations directly. We experience states of corporeal existence, e.g., health or illness, ecstasy or sluggishness; but it is only when we notice discrepancies between such states that we begin to infer the passage of time—most notably in observing oneself “getting older.” Time may be felt by the body (Whitehead would say “with” it) but it is not felt as such in it. And yet we have just learned in the last chapter that there is no memory without a bodily basis—that bodily efficacy is pervasive of all remembering, including the most purified acts of recollection. If the thesis that memory is of the past implies that memory is disembodied in its enactment, we must question the thesis itself.
But if memory is not simply or exclusively “of the past,” what does it involve in addition? The very embodiment of remembering hints at an answer. To be embodied is ipso facto to assume a particular perspective and position; it is to have not just a point of view but a place in which we are situated. It is to occupy a portion of space from out of which we both undergo given experiences and remember them. To be disembodied is not only to be deprived of place, unplaced; it is to be denied the basic stance on which every experience and its memory depend. As embodied existence opens onto place, indeed takes place in place and nowhere else, so our memory of what we experience in place is likewise place-specific: it is bound to place as to its own basis. Yet it is just this importance of place for memory that has been lost sight of in philosophical and common sense concerns with the temporal dimensions of memory.
This was not always so. The ancient Greeks devised an elaborate and effective “art of memory” to which I made brief reference in the Introduction to this book. In this art, which was in fact more than a merely instrumental mnemotechnique, the role of place was altogether central: hence its classical description as a “method of loci.” A locus is definable as “a place easily grasped by the memory, such as a house, an intercolumnar space, a corner, an arch, or the like.”5 A given place or set of places acts as a grid onto which images of items to be remembered are placed in a certain order. The subsequent remembering of these items occurs by revisiting the place-grid and traversing it silently step by step in one’s mind. In Cicero’s words:
Persons desiring to train this faculty of memory must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things . . . and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.6
Here the model of memory as a wax-tablet returns, but this time not to be summarily dismissed as it was by Plato.7 On the contrary: as signifying an underlying grid of places, the wax-tablet points to the reliance of the art of memory upon a stable place system. For the operative premise of this system is that “the order of the places will preserve the order of the things [to be remembered].” It is all the more impressive that such preservative power is imputed to place even when the places in question are imagined and not perceived. For the loci themselves can be quite fictitious in origin, and yet manage very effectively to hold in memory the images deposited on them. An extraordinary situation: the fragility of images and the silence of the memorizer8 combine with the stability of place to bring about a mnemotechnique so efficacious that to this day it is still being recommended in popular memory manuals.
I cite the ars memorativa tradition as one salient piece of evidence that the relationship between memory and place is at once intimate and profound. Outside this tradition, whose subterranean vicissitudes have been traced so brilliantly by Yates and Spence, the relationship remains largely unsuspected: either taken for granted or not noticed at all. This, too, is extraordinary and calls for remedial measures of the sort which this chapter aims to provide. For it is a fact that memory of place, of having been in a place, is one of the most conspicuously neglected areas of philosophical or psychological inquiry into remembering. My own treatment of memory up to this point in the book has been no exception to this unspoken rule; apart from a few observations on “remembered space” and the “scene” of remembering, I have not begun to do justice to place—whereas, and very much in keeping with predominant Western proclivities, the temporal aspects of remembering have received the lion’s share of attention. It is time to call this preoccupation with remembered time into question and to accord to remembered place its rightful due.
And what a due this is! Only consider how often a memory is either of a place itself (e.g., of one’s childhood home) or of an event or person in a place; and, conversely, how unusual it is to remember a placeless person or an event not stationed in some specific locale. To be placeless in one’s remembering is not only to be disoriented; it is to be decidedly disadvantaged with regard to what a more complete mnemonic experience might deliver. Place serves to situate one’s memorial life, to give it “a name and a local habitation.” The link between place and situation is close indeed. As Heidegger has observed:
To situate means . . . first of all to point out the proper place or site of something. Secondly it means to heed that place or site. These two methods, placing and heeding, are both preliminaries to a topology.9
Where Heidegger is ultimately interested in a “topology of Being,”10 my concern here is exclusively with a topology of the remembered. We must come to heed the proper place of the remembered—its manner not just of occupying place but of incorporating it into its own content. Situating by its very nature, place adequately heeded will help us to situate memory more fully than has been possible thus far. It is a matter of acknowledging the placement of place itself in memory; and since we become oriented in place mainly by bodily movements, we shall have to trace out the corporeal basis of remembering in ways that were barely glimpsed in the last chapter.
If place is indeed so important for memory, why has it been so pervasively overlooked? One answer has already been suggested: the primacy accorded to time and to temporal phenomena generally. But there is a second reason as well.11 This is that the significance of place, formerly unquestioned, has been forcibly undercut by a fixation on what I shall call “site,” that is, place as leveled down to metrically determinate dimensions. Much has changed since the early Pythagorean Archytas declared that place is “the first of all beings, since everything that exists is in a place and cannot exist without a place.”12 Aristotle, acknowledging with Archytas that “everything is some-where and in place,”13 adds that “if such a thing is true, the power of place will be a remarkable one, and prior to all things.”14 In his Physics Aristotle attempts to spell out this power by attributing to each place in the natural world a “certain influence” and a “distinct potency.”15 Thus each place has its own distinctive dimensions such as up/down, before/behind, and right/left. These dimensions constitute “regions” which cannot be defined in terms of their occupants alone. Having thus established that place is active, independent in its being,16 and necessary for the existence of other existents, Aristotle proceeds to define place as “the innermost motionless boundary of what contains.”17 It ensues that there is a tight fit between a given thing and its place; the outer surface of the thing coincides with the inner surface of the place. “Place is thought to be a kind of surface,” says Aristotle, “and as it were a vessel, i.e., a container of the thing. Place is coincident with the thing, for boundaries are coincident with the bounded.”18
Nonetheless, what is “first of all” for Archytas and Aristotle ends by being last, and it becomes so by the close of the seventeenth century—when space, and place along with it, became geometrized. For the Greeks, this development was not possible. For one thing, they did not think in terms of spatial coordinate systems, the basis for any thorough geometrization. For another, their very conception of space was resistant to being formally geometrized: space was either “something inhomogeneous because of its local geometric variance (as with Plato) [or] something anisotropic owing to directional differentiation in the substratum (Aristotle).”19 Not even Euclidean geometry could apply without resistance to Aristotle’s regionalized, direction-bound universe. It was evident that the very idea of space had to undergo a metamorphosis not just for Euclidean geometry to apply to it but more particularly for rational geometry to be able to specify it.
This metamorphosis, and with it the demotion of place (which depends on inhomogeneous and anisotropic qualities for its very vitality), was effected by the audacious speculations of Newton, Descartes, Bernoulli, and others, for all of whom space was conceived as continuous extension in length, breadth, and width and, thus, as mappable by the three-dimensional coordinate system of rational geometry. Descartes was doubtless the most unspoken on this point, and he drew the direst consequences: “We conceive a place to contain nothing but extension in length, breadth, and depth.”20 Here place is conceived as sheer spatial site. It follows that place qua site is merely a matter of relative position: “When we say an object is ‘in’ a place we are merely thinking of its occupying a position relatively to other objects.”21 This contention marks a turning-point in Western thinking about place. While for the Greeks the relativity of place is far less important than its inherent character (“Places do not differ merely in relative position,” said Aristotle, “but also as possessing distinct potencies”),22 for Descartes and his immediate successors place is strictly a relative matter, that is, a question of fixed positions in relation to each other within a systematic whole.
What we witness in Descartes is therefore the supersession of place by site. A site is not a container but an open area that is specified primarily by means of cartographic representations such as maps or architects’ plans. It embodies a spatiality that is at once homogeneous (i.e., having no internal differentiations with respect to material constitution) and isotropic (possessing no inherent directionality such as up/down, East/West, etc.). A site is thus leveled down to the point of being definable solely in terms of distances between “positions” which are established on its surface and which exist strictly in relation to one another. As a result, a site is indifferent to what might occupy it—and to what we might remember about it.
The triumph of site over place has continued from the Cartesian epoch until the present day. This triumph has crucial consequences for the memory of place. As essentially empty (its vacuity is expressed in a phrase like “building site”), a site lacks the variegations or “obtrusions”23 that aid in remembering unsited places. A site possesses no points of attachment onto which to hang our memories, much less to retrieve them. By denuding itself of particularity, site deprives itself of what James called “contiguous associates,” i.e., the most efficacious cues for remembering.24 Place, in contrast, characteristically presents us with a plethora of such cues. Thanks to its “distinct potencies,” a place is at once internally diversified—full of protuberant features and forceful vectors—and distinct externally from other places. Both kinds of differentiation, internal and external, augment memorability. We observe this when an indifferent building lot, easily confused with other empty lots, is transformed into a memorable place by the erection of a distinctive house upon it.
It is the nature of place, in contradistinction from site, to encourage and support such distinctiveness, thereby enhancing memorability. Requisite to any full understanding of memory of place is thus a recognition of the way in which place itself aids remembering. It does so precisely as being well suited to contain memories—to hold and preserve them.
It was precisely Aristotle’s contention that the primary action of place is that of containing. “Container” in Greek is periechon, literally a having or holding around. To be in a place is to be sheltered and sustained by its containing boundary; it is to be held within this boundary rather than to be dispersed by an expanding horizon of time or to be exposed indifferently in space. In fact, the most characteristic effect of place is that of maintaining or retaining rather than dividing or dispersing. This is what lies behind such idioms as “marching in place,” “having a place of your own,” “that’s a nice place to be,” “getting in place,” etc. In each case the expression draws on place’s peculiar power to hold in or keep in. No wonder, then, that access to place is not deeply problematic: in its abiding character, place is there to be re-entered, by memory if not by direct bodily movement. As continually available, place does not naturally lead us to become preoccupied with indirect, symbolic representations of it, or to feel that we are somehow forced to choose between these representations. The very persistence of place helps to make it accessible in a way that is rarely true of a comparable unit of time or a given site. For place tends to hold its contents steadily within its own embrace, while site and time characteristically replace their respective contents. Think of the kaleidoscopic array of items that can fill up just one hour’s time as they succeed one another in a sometimes confusing alacrity, and compare this with the stability of any given place such as a house, a plaza, an office, etc. Sites are also all too easily filled up with a clutter of things or events that may appear and disappear in disconcerting rapidity.
It is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability. An alert and alive memory connects spontaneously with place, finding in it features that favor and parallel its own activities. We might even say that memory is naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported. Moreover, it is itself a place wherein the past can revive and survive; it is a place for places, meeting them midway in its own preservative powers, its “reservative”25 role. Unlike site and time, memory does not thrive on the indifferently dispersed. It thrives, rather, on the persistent particularities of what is properly in place: held fast there and made one’s own.
But let us leave history and theory aside for the moment and turn to actual cases of place memory. It is a revealing fact that five of the six examples of memory set forth in chapter 1 involved place to a significant degree. Yet in only one instance—that of my memory concerning the philosophy library—did I expressly remark on place as a relevant factor, and then just in passing. Otherwise, my analysis was oblivious to the presence of place: as oblivious as almost every treatment of memory after Aristotle. True to this forgetful tradition, I stressed either purely temporal factors (e.g., the dating of the Yosemite memory, the moment-after aspects of the tea-tasting episode) or parameters of sheer site (“we had come over to Yosemite from San Francisco”: a cartographic claim). Just as contemporary cognitive psychologists are largely blind to the role of place in their experimental material despite their topographic language of “storage,” “levels of processing,” etc.26—so I was opaque to the dimension of place in my first round of examination.
But consider these early examples more closely. The Yosemite memory itself was place-saturated. It began with a look at the valley of the park as viewed on first approach: here one place was seen from another. This pristine moment was itself photographed and installed in another place I also vividly remember, my mother’s dressing table. Moreover, the main memory proceeds as a virtual tour of places within Yosemite valley: Half Dome, the cabin where my family stayed, the waterfall. It is striking that the only allusion to “place” that was allowed in my analysis of this memory had to do with the indefiniteness of the cabin’s exact location—that is, with an imperfectly remembered site. But the massive place-orientation of the memory as a whole was passed over in silence.
If less conspicuous in their neglect of place, the other examples examined in chapter 1 are nevertheless illuminating to ponder in retrospect. In the case of my Small Change memory, there was a marked succession of places as the setting changed from dinner at Clark’s to the Lincoln Theater, with a paperback bookstore serving as an intermediate point. My family and I then found “places” in the movie theater and interchanged seats—a matter of sites set within a place. The theater building itself, however, was no mere site for me; as the scene of many memorable movies I had seen there over a period of nearly two decades, it was redolent with the past: it held the past in place. Part of the power of this particular place was due to the fact that the memorable movies I had viewed there were themselves highly place-specific—as was the case with the decidedly French setting of Small Change.
Even the most compressed of my initial memories manifested basic place aspects. In recalling “902,” the number on my office door, I was after all remembering a feature of a place. Although the item was remembered in a quite isolated way, it was nevertheless recollected as detached from the office it emptily designated. This place remained as an essential backdrop to the remembering itself. In the similar case of recalling the single word “Culligan,” the backdrop (the basement of my childhood home) arose indistinctly but unmistakably into my remembrance. This penumbral quality of place—my analysis spoke of “a nebulous setting”—was also evident in the tea-tasting episode, whose scene was set by the top of my desk. At every level, then, and even in instances in which a setting was only dimly specified (and was sometimes altogether unspecified) the presence of place reveals itself on close inspection.
The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of every other leading example which has been employed in this book. Was it a matter of indifference that the paradigm of a habitual body memory was set in an isolated island off the coast of northern Sweden? Here the place lent poignancy and point to the circumstance of starting up a moribund automobile: remembering how to start it was especially prized in such a place, and I in turn remembered the episode as indissolubly place-bound. The same is true of my erotic and traumatic memories. In their case, however, my own body served as a pertinent place, as the immediate setting for what I came to remember. In still other cases, place continued to be deeply ingredient: whether as the postcard photograph of the Parthenon that reminded me of the glory that was Greece, the grim battlefield about which elderly veterans reminisce, or the South Bend airport in which a scene of recognition took place. The reservative role of place is evident in every instance. However unobtrusive this role may be, it serves to contain—to shelter and protect—the items or episodes on which the act of remembering comes to focus.
The paradox is that despite the undeniability of this role, it remained terra incognita in my own previous assessments. Not only in these, however: the place of place in human memory is enormously difficult to detect in almost any traditional model of remembering. This is as true of a Kantian account of memory as “reproductive imagination” (i.e., as imagistic recollection) as it is of a Husserlian act-intentional analysis. Indeed, it is true for Aristotle’s view of memory as “the having of an image regarded as a copy of that of which it is an image.”27 As presented in his treatise De Memoria et Reminiscentia, this view leaves little room for Aristotle’s description in the Physics of place as containerlike. And yet it is the latter notion that is so suggestive for a more thorough understanding of place memory, one which refuses to reduce place to site or to let the spatial aspects of memories be overwhelmed by their temporal features.
Such considerations lead us to the following two-fold observation. On the one hand, place is selective for memories: that is to say, a given place will invite certain memories while discouraging others. The fact is that we can’t attach just any memories to a particular place—as can occur in the case of a site, whose featurelessness is nonselective with respect to memories, much as a blank television screen can accommodate any and all images that might flit across it. Place is always definite, and regarding a given place only some memories, indeed only certain kinds of memory, will be pertinent. My memory, say, of seeing Small Change at a particular theater calls for remembering that is limited to certain visual, auditory, and (to a lesser degree) kinesthetic modalities. It would be literally “out of place” to associate systematically with this theater memories of isolated cogitation, of jogging, of painting, etc. A movie theater is a place with local peculiarities that would not welcome such memories as these: if not disallowing them altogether, it is a most unpropitious setting for them.
On the other hand, memories are selective for place: they seek out particular places as their natural habitats. Why this propensity? Partly because places furnish convenient points of attachment for memories; but also because places provide situations in which remembered actions can deploy themselves. Or more precisely, places are congealed scenes for remembered contents; and as such they serve to situate what we remember. Here we encounter once more place’s periechon being, its containing/surrounding function. Place is a mise en scène for remembered events precisely to the extent that it guards and keeps these events within its self-delimiting perimeters. Instead of filtering out (as place can do for inappropriate, ill-placed memories), place holds in by giving to memories an authentically local habitation: by being their place-holder.
But it is still not clear just how such an intimate relationship between memory and place is realized. Through what agency does this become possible? The answer can only be: through the lived body. The lived body’s basic “inter-leaving”28 activity makes it ideally suited as a means for mediating between two such seemingly different things as memory and place. As psycho-physical in status, the lived body puts us in touch with the psychical aspects of remembering and the physical features of place. As itself movable and moving, it can relate at once to the movable bodies that are the primary occupants of place and to the self-moving soul that recollects itself in place. Above all, through its active intentional arc, the lived body traces out the arena for the remembered scenes that inhere so steadfastly in particular places: the body’s maneuvers and movements, imagined as well as actual, make room for remembering placed scenes in all of their complex composition. In the end, we can move into place, indeed be in a place at all, only through our body’s own distinct potencies. And if it is the body that places us in place to start with, it will be instrumental in re-placing us in remembered places as well. As integral to the original experience of places which we come to remember, it is also central to the motion and time that depend on place.29
Accordingly, we must now take up the role of the body in memory of place. Doing so will carry forward the work of the last chapter. Body memory is by no means confined to matters of place. But such memory, in several of its basic aspects, can be regarded as importantly operative in memory of place. In any case, whether subject to memory or not, the lived body is indispensable to remembering places of every sort.
A full discussion of just how the body is constitutive for memory of place would have to include consideration of the ways in which it establishes directionality (e.g., right/left, North/South), spatio-temporal distance, and a sense of level in given places. As I have treated these matters elsewhere,30 we can move immediately to a reflection on what can be called “in-habitation.” By this I mean the manner in which, thanks precisely to the lived body, we find ourselves to be familiar with a particular place in which we are located. I underline “familiar” and “in” to indicate what is characteristic of places in contrast with sites. A site, for example a development lot, resists familiarization just as it resists movement into its interior. In its well-surveyed stolidity, the lot stands over against us. It seems to want to keep us out—unless we are prospective buyers, and even then it seems to oppose any attempt to become fully familiar with it. For familiarity to begin to set in, we must project a state of already having inhabited it, e.g., the dwelling we plan to build on it. Otherwise, it remains foreign, even inimical, to us. Such a site is not the stuff of which memories are made! Its indifference to us is answered by our commensurate indifference in remembering it. It is just one more lot to look at, and as such it is distinctly unmemorable.
Merleau-Ponty wrote that “we must . . . avoid saying that our body is in space or in time. It inhabits space and time.”31 When such inhabitation concerns place specifically, it is best construed under the two headings of ‘in’ and ‘familiarity’, which we must now consider at more length.
‘IN’
In discussing eight ways in which one thing can be said to be in another, Aristotle cites as “the strictest sense of all, [the way] a thing is ‘in’ a vessel, and generally ‘in’ a place.”32 The vessel is not casually invoked here. It had already been introduced in Book IV of the Physics with the remark that “place is supposed to be something like a vessel.”33 It is like a vessel insofar as both are forms of container: “Place is thought to be a kind of surface and, as it were, a vessel, i.e., a container of the thing.”34 This is not to say that a vessel is a perfect analogue of place. Place, it will be recalled, is defined by Aristotle as “the innermost motionless boundary of what contains.” Therefore, whereas “the vessel is a transportable place,” place itself is “a nonportable vessel.”35 But portability aside, what remains valid in the vessel analogy is the structure of close confinement, of snug fit. As water fills up a vessel into which it is poured and is protected by that vessel, so the lived body can fit snugly into a particular place and be protected by it.36
At play here is a two-fold movement. On the one hand, there is an active in-sertion into place by means of the body. In its propulsive power, its dynamic intentional arc, the body thrusts us into each successive place we inhabit, pulls us into place, puts us in the very midst of it as in a surrounding vessel. Bodily insertion into place is a matter of what Merleau-Ponty calls the “gearing” of my body into the world, becoming emmeshed in it:
My body is geared to the world when my perception presents me with a spectacle as varied and as clearly articulated as possible, and when my motor intentions, as they unfold, receive the responses they expect from the world.37
This statement makes it clear that a dialectic between subject and world is operative in bodily implacement and that actions of in-sertion into the world (via “motor intentions”) are matched by contributions (“responses”) from the world itself. On the other hand, there is an answering activity of in-taking on the part of place per se. Such activity is responsible for my feeling fully contained in place, with no empty space left over. Here is doubtless the origin of our sensitivity to intimate places, those into which we “just fit,” which seem “just right” because we sense that we are somehow perfectly coincident with what is containing us. These lieux intimes are especially memorable as well, suggesting a profound linkage between memorability and being bodily in a “cozy spot.” The linkage is made possible by the factor of in-taking, which allows us to feel well-contained in place. Thanks to in-taking, we become convinced indeed that “our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism.”38
FAMILIARITY
When taken together, the ‘in’ of in-sertion and the ‘in’ of in-taking yield the sense of familiarity that inheres in human in-habitation—in all dwelling and being-in-the-world.39 We only inhabit that which comes bearing the familiar; and the familiar in turn entails memory in various forms. Familiar places are places we are apt to remember—to hold and keep in mind.
Familiarity of place ranges all the way from the barely recognizable (“I think I’ve been here before, but I can’t say just when or in what circumstances”) to the thoroughly known (e.g., one’s office, one’s domicile). Present throughout, however, is the feeling of being chez soi, at home, domestic. This “down home” sentiment is not only a matter of feeling at ease in a given place but of feeling at ease in a place that has become one’s own in some especially significant way. “One’s own” does not imply possession in any literal sense; it is more deeply a question of appropriating, with all that this connotes of making something one’s own by making it one with one’s ongoing life.
The appropriation of familiar places is accomplished by the lived body, which has “a knowledge bred of familiarity that does not gives us a position in objective space.”40 The kind of space that figures here is an “attuned space,” a space with which one feels sympathetic at some very basic level—in contrast with the indifferent site-space of cartography or rational geometry.41 In the presence of the latter, it is quite difficult to feel chez soi unless one happens to be a cartographer or a geometer.42 In the ambiance of attuned space, it is correspondingly difficult not to feel at home; for this is the very space that inheres in the place one has made one’s own through establishing such dimensional features as level, distance, and directionality. These features effect an attunement of in-habited space, helping it to become familiar precisely because it is largely one’s own achievement.
But how are we to account for this attunement of the body in a place? How is it established and maintained? We have already encountered the source of the attunement. It lies in the customary body as conceived by Merleau-Ponty:
Our body comprises as it were two distinct layers, that of the customary body and that of the body at this moment . . . my body must be apprehended not only in an experience which is instantaneous, peculiar to itself and complete in itself, but also in some general aspect and in light of an impersonal being.43
A dramatic example of the customary body existing in dissociation from the momentary body is found in experiences of phantom limbs, in which the accustomed sense of still possessing a healthy arm or leg persists even though one is forced to deny it in perceiving one’s “body at this moment.” The persistence can occur only because the memory of the missing member has attained a degree of generality that is not undermined by the fact that the member is perceived as absent. This generality, this “impersonal being,” characterizes every aspect of the customary body, which is why it “gives to our life the form of generality, and develops our personal acts into stable dispositional tendencies.”44 Precisely as impersonal and general—as not being overwhelmed by a mass of personal recollections that take me resolutely out of the present into the past—the customary body anchors me all the more firmly in the present, even at the price of leading me to believe I possess a missing limb. Although the customary body is rooted in the past, it does not return me to the past: it engages me in present in-habitation.
It is in much the same way that familiarity of place is brought about. Proust knew this well. In a passage from the Overture to “Swann’s Way” he calls upon custom in the guise of “habit.” This occurs at the very point where the narrator’s confused insomniacal state has acted to suspend a sense of familiarity with the room in which he finds himself:
Habit had changed the color of the curtains, silenced the clock, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of the vetiver, and appreciably reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Habit! That skillful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.45
As surrounding passages make clear, habit is at work here as deeply sedimented into the troubled sleeper’s customary body, which has gained control over the confusion and malaise of his momentary body. It is this customary body that not only finds but makes the surrounding bedroom familiar and thus habitable; and it does so by allowing initially unfamiliar-seeming objects to find their own “right places,”46 that is, their proper places in a fully familiarized setting. The familiarization itself does not occur by means of recollecting the room in question, much less by comparing it explicitly with other rooms of a similar sort. It arises instead from a succession of postures assumed by the semi-dormant body as it projects various possible habitats (e.g., a “Louis XVI room,” “rooms in summer,” “rooms in winter,”47 etc.), inhabiting each via successive corporeal memories until it comes to attach itself securely to the actual habitat in which the narrator finds himself.
Such work of the customary body is domesticating in function; it forges a sense of attuned space that allows one to feel chez soi in an initially unfamiliar place. It does so in a manner quite analogous to the way in which the same body, through its own remembrances, feels already at home in the past places which its memories summon up. In this we observe the exceedingly close tie between body memory and memory of place—close to the point of their becoming virtually indistinguishable in many lived experiences of remembering. Body memory establishes the familiarity that is requisite to the full realization of place memory. The “things, places, years” which revolve around the Proustian narrator in the darkness and to which his mind is manifestly unequal are revolving around his body, a body “still too heavy with sleep to move.”48
In-habitation, we may conclude, is at once an effectuation and a culmination of bodily being-in-place. It achieves an extremely close bonding to place by realizing the dual ‘in’ of in-sertion and in-taking; and it accomplishes the deep familiarity of feeling chez soi, thanks in turn to the sense of attuned space which the customary body brings with it. Beyond the specific contributions of human dwellings to making places more inhabitable,49 there is, still more basically, the customary body’s contribution. This contribution not only leads to enhanced memorability (above all, by helping to create places with an intensely felt intimacy) but infuses place with memory throughout. The customary body contains its own sedimented memories of place, whether these be of the particular place in which one presently finds oneself, contiguous places, places of a like kind, etc. Moving in or through a given place, the body imports its own implaced past into its present experience: its “local history” is literally a history of locales. This very importation of past places occurs simultaneously with the body’s ongoing establishment of directionality, level, and distance—and indeed influences these latter in myriad ways. Orientation in place (which is what is established by these three factors) cannot be continually effected de novo but arises within the ever-lengthening shadow of our bodily past. As Bergson says of all “habit memory,” the body’s past acts in the present: “it is part of my present, exactly like my habit of walking or of writing; it is lived and acted, rather than represented.”50 In the actions of the customary body, then, we observe the continuance of time in place—a continuance that connotes not merely maintenance but active incorporation. In this way the past becomes “our true present”;51 it loses its identity as a separate past (a past of another time and place) through its precipitation into the present of bodily behavior, which enacts the past rather than picturing it. And this presentment of the past is nowhere more active or more evident than in bodily memory of place.
Concerning the role of body in memory of place we need to make two further general remarks:
(1) This role exhibits just how decisive the distinction between place and site is. Few if any of the activities of the body that have just been sketched would be relevant, or even possible, in the kind of space determined by sites. Achieving orientation in a homogeneous, isotropic space would be at best a merely mechanical matter. It would reduce to alignment with pre-established axes and positions. Directionality would amount to convergence with, or divergence from, one of the three axes of a three-dimensional coordinate system. Level, if it existed at all, would be a matter of situatedness in relation to two of these axes, the vertical and the horizontal. Distance would be measured along the third axis, that of depth as objectively determinable in exact metric equivalents. For such factors as in-sertion or in-taking—indeed, for the sense of being bodily ‘in’ anything—there would be no equivalents at all.
For sites do not contain or enclose but either open out endlessly into infinity (as in a Newtonian conception of “absolute space”) or are simply juxtaposed with one another (as in the case of building sites). Moreover, in the absence of a sense of place-as-container—which is, in the Aristotelian view of place that I have taken as paradigmatic, to lack a sense of lived place altogether—there can be no experience of place-as-shelter: hence, no sense of habitable place. Yet in-habitation, as we have seen, is central to a full sense of being in place, of being there in an attuned and customary way. Sites are to be built on but not lived in (it is the houses constructed on them that we dwell in), just as they are measured in space rather than savored in memory. Sites are prospective in character; they are sites for building, exploring, surveying, etc. Places, in contrast, are retrospectively tinged: we “build up” memories there, are moved by them in nostalgic spells, are exhilarated or get “stuck” in them. In short, it is thanks to places, not to sites, that we are inhabitants of the world. Can it be surprising to us that we find ourselves longing to get back into place, whether by memory or in some other way? Getting out of place, being displaced, is profoundly disorienting. As John Russell has observed:
‘Where am I?’ is, after all, one of the most poignant of human formulations. It speaks for an anxiety that is intense, recurrent, and all but unbearable. Not to know where we are is torment, and not to have a sense of place is a most sinister deprivation.52
No wonder, then, that we so much prize memory of place and often seek out “old haunts.” Precisely as a container (not just of movable bodies but of our entire memorial lives), place acts to alleviate anxieties of disorientation and separation. Places and their memory sustain us in our everyday lives, subject as these lives are to fragmentation and rupture of so many sorts. Even persons (i.e., the very beings who are the sources of separation anxiety) are experienced and remembered primarily as persons-in-particular-places: “Crawford at Asheville,” “Dan at the Handcraft Center,” “Tunie in Topeka.”
(2) But back to the body: unless it feels oriented in place, we as its bearers are not going to feel oriented there either. If our body does not feel at home in the world, we shall almost certainly experience Heimatlosigkeit. This is why I have placed such stress on the way the lived body familiarizes us with regard to place; for this familiarization, more than any other single factor, brings about the conviction of being at home in the world. We cannot even imagine what feeling chez soi would be like without the body’s abiding presence—nor could we remember what it was like. It is in and by the body’s polymorphic powers of situating us in place that we come to have a sense of what being-in-place can mean for human existence.
But there is a closely related matter that we must not neglect. Beyond orienting and situating us in place—in the very place in which it is located—the lived body itself serves as a place. It is a place not just for its internal organs but for all of its activities of presentment in place. In this respect it can be considered as a place of places—or more exactly, a placer of places. We could even call it, following Bergson, a “place of passage”:
[The body] is the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me and the things upon which I act—the seat, in a word, of sensori-motor phenomena.53
What kind of place is the body as a place of passage? It consists in being at once an intra-place and an inter-place.
(a) Body as intra-place: Within a given place there may be a simple unbroken expanse or else a set of subplaces (e.g., partitioned-off parts of a room). In either case the body plays a special role as an interior place: as a dynamic but stationary force that selectively organizes the spatiality of those things that surround it. Such things (material objects, other people, etc.) gain position in relation to the body-place as an organizational center. Here the body is more than an abstract point in indifferent space, more than a group of vital functions, more even than a set of habits. It is itself a place with a “distinct potency” that helps to structure the overall spatiality of the place in which it finds itself, making it into a place within which the body resides and toward which it acts in manifold ways. The body as intra-place is thus a place through which whatever is occurring in a given setting can take place: it is a place of passage for such occurrences, which array themselves around it (and do so even if it is only their silent witness). For this reason we almost always remember places from the point of view of our body’s own intra-place within a remembered place: there we were, there and no-where else. The body’s own intra-place within place is a place of anchoring, of staying put in relation to the scene remembered; it is a mainstay of memory of place.
(b) Body as inter-place: But the lived body is at the same time a moving body. Even if it is its own place, it also moves us from place to place. As Erwin Straus says, “In a landscape we always get to one place from another place; each location is determined only by its relation to the neighboring place within the circle of visibility.”54 No longer is it a matter of the body as a stationary center of a to-be-remembered scene; now it is a question of the body as the basis for changing places. In changing place the body transports its whole organic mass from one stationing-point to another. The trajectory traced out by this movement describes an inter-place, a place between places that is itself a special kind of place. Inter-places arise whenever our body moves along a forest path, through a hallway, over a tennis court, etc. The body’s locomotion in such cases is forward-tending, since the place-to-come-to is experienced as an aim.55 Or more exactly, the locomotion is to be construed in terms of a dialectic between the here and the there. ‘Here’ is the place from which we are departing in our bodily movement; ‘there’ is the place we are aiming at through this same movement. The lived body creates the inter-place in which the two epicenters of the here and the there are brought into concrete connection.
The question remains: How can place, plain old place, be so powerful in matters of memory? In what does the power of place for memory consist? We have seen Aristotle driven to speak of a place’s “active influence,” its “distinct potencies.” Similarly, the Romans posited a “genius loci,” an in-dwelling spirit, for each significant place: for instance, the Lar (the “owl” of the ancestors) for the home, the Lares for more public places (typically at crossroads), and the Penates for the property and welfare of the family and the state. In English we still speak of “the spirit of a place,” and ascribe to particular places attractive or repelling forces far beyond what their position in geographic space or historic time might indicate. Think of the resonance which certain place-names can possess: not only “Combray,” “Balbec,” “Paris,” “Doncières,” and “Venice” but (for many Americans) “San Francisco,” “New Orleans,” “Cape Cod,” and (for myself) “Abilene,” “Enterprise,” “Asheville.” The resonance stems from a distinctive power of place and, more particularly, from the way this power elicits remembering.
How are we to account for the power of place-as-remembered? I have already suggested one main line of response: namely, the orienting function of the lived body as it situates us steadily in and between places, helping to create that specific gravity by which they can exert their full power. Places are empowered by the lived bodies that occupy them; these bodies animate places, breathe new life into them by endowing them with directionality, level, and distance—all of which serve as essential anchoring points in the remembering of place.
But beyond the body’s indispensable contribution, we must also look at some of the inherent features of place itself. All of these features can be considered aspects of place in its landscape character. “Landscape” is here taken in Straus’s sense of the full correlate of bodily sensing (rather than of perceiving, which calls for an objective, universal medium): “the space of the sensory world stands to that of perception as the landscape to geography.”56 Strictly geographic or perceptual space answers to what I have been calling “site”; in such space all positions are determined in relation to each other and finally to the whole that is structured by a coordinate system. This space is “constant and invariant,” “systematized and closed.”57 As mapped, it allows us to travel to points beyond the visible horizon.
In landscape, by contrast, there is always a visible (or at least a sensed) horizon. Thanks precisely to our body as basis of orientation, we find ourselves surrounded by a horizon, whatever our immediate location may be. Assuming that we know the terrain in some minimal fashion, we go from place to place within this horizon by means of our moving body, needing no map or plan with which to navigate. Moreover, the spatiality of the places between which we move in landscape is at once inconstant and variant, unsystematic and open: as anyone can attes from an afternoon’s hike in the low foothills of the California Sierras. Even when there are marked trails, these follow the irregular lay of the land, converge and diverge unpredictably, vary in width and in regard to how cleared they are, and in still other ways they resist charting in strictly geographic terms. When we are in a landscape setting, in other words, we are very much in the presence of place in its most encompassing and exfoliated format, a format in which we are sensuously attuned to its intrinsic spatial properties rather than imposing on it our own site-specifying proclivities.
Landscape contributes to place’s memorial evocativeness in three primary ways: by its variegation, its sustaining character, and its expressiveness.
VARIEGATION
It is a remarkable fact that landscape presents itself to us in continual variety—as plain and mountain, path and brook, hillside and river bed, tree and bush, not to mention such urbanscape variants as building and sidewalk, corridor and bedroom, entranceway and exit. Everywhere we encounter diversity of content, even on the barest plain or the emptiest shopping mall parking lot. The very being and structure of landscape consist in this ongoing proliferation of irregularities, of expected as well as unexpected obtrusions, all of which are thrust before us by the surrounding world. Whether facilitating or obstructing with regard to the pathways we are tracing out at the time, these obtrusions act as points of attachment: as “landmarks” by which we gauge our progress through a given part of the landscape and on which we hang lasting memories.
It is just such variegation that draws us so insistently to landscape—and if landscape itself is not available to us, then to its representation in painting or photography. Landscape of sufficient variety promises surprises at every turn; at the very least, it furnishes relief from the monotony and non-surprise of strictly sited space, in which protuberant variegation has been leveled down. What protrudes in a landscape offers us something to grasp at the most basic level of sensory awareness. Thus a rock in the midst of a mountain path arrests the body momentarily in its onward motion, gives it pause, that is, gives it something to fasten onto—with the result that it no longer glides through “free space” where there would be nothing to attach to, and thus nothing to remember.58 Memory of place entails having been slowed down, stopped, or in some other way caught-in-place. Within a suitably variegated spatial scene, “the hold is held.”59
SUSTAINING CHARACTER
Landscape does more than make possible various pursuits and projects of ours; it sustains them by serving as their continuing durable ground. This sustaining occurs in two forms. First, the perimeter of the landscape-place (perhaps best called a “placescape”) acts to delimit all that lies within its compass. A perimeter can be as confined and confining as the walls of my study, or it can seem to stretch out endlessly as in sunsets at sea. Either way, it defines the outer limits of the place I find myself in. Where sites are delimited for mainly functional reasons (e.g., because a building code dictates that each construction site be precisely 1 acre), places possess perimeters in a pre-given and yet unpreplanned manner: Thus, that line of hills over there at once occludes any further vista and acts to frame the valley I am traveling through. The perimeter closes in from without; it en-closes by keeping things contained within its limits. Second, that which is thereby contained is located in a field upholding whatever specific action takes place in it. This field is sustaining from below, as it were. It stands under specific actions as a matrix of support, helping them to cohere as single events or as a concatenated set of events occurring just here and nowhere else. More extensive than a particular protuberance but less encompassing than a perimeter, the field subtends subtly but securely.60 Taken together, perimeter and field lend to the landscape its abidingly sustaining capacity: its ability to underlie a potentially immense stock of memories and to ramify into our lives in extra-memorial ways as well (e.g., by providing us with an assured sense of ease of action). When Straus says that “in the landscape I am somewhere,”61 he is invoking the sustaining power of place. The apposition of “am” with “somewhere” bears out the ancient claim of Archytas that in order to be at all, one must be in a place: supported and sustained there.
EXPRESSIVENESS
Lawrence Durrell has written that “human beings are expressions of their landscapes.”62 If this is indeed so, it is only because landscapes are themselves expressive to begin with. They come to us enveloped in a “sympathetic space”63 that favors the physiognomic over the geometric, the expressive over the merely communicative. Consider only the way that an ordinary skyscape full of clouds can spontaneously suggest human figures and faces. It is at the basic level of sensing that such expressiveness arises unbidden and unrehearsed. Sensing conveys the world’s density in all of its qualitative richness: what are labeled “secondary” qualities by Locke and Descartes here become of primary importance. Only when such qualities (i.e., colors, contours, sounds, and the like) are objectified do they lose their primary expressive capacity and become items to be represented.64
The relationship between emotion and expression is close indeed, and it is therefore not surprising to discover that the expressiveness of landscapes is linked to their inherent emotionality. This link is especially evident in the case of “special places,” which bring with them, as well as engender, an unusual emotional claim and resonance. The power of such places to act on us, to inspire (or repell) us, and thus to be remembered vividly is a function of such emotionality—but only as it finds adequate expression in the features of landscapes which have just been discussed. Instead of merely indicating or symbolizing this emotional expressiveness, these features must embody it.
A considerable part of the power of place to move us relates to its unique form of visibility, which is, along with emotionality, the other foundation of its expressiveness. By “visibility” I do not mean its literally seen configurations but something closer to luminosity—the kind of light that seems to stem from within an object rather than being merely refracted onto it from some external source. In this sense, places can be said to radiate out from the exact shape they possess in objective space, the space of sites. How or why they do this is not our concern here; it is only a question of observing that it occurs and that it contributes forcefully to the expressive power of places. Places possess us—in perception, as in memory—by their radiant visibility, insinuating themselves into our lives, seizing and surrounding us, even taking us over as we sink into their presence. When this happens—it is the very opposite of being in a sited situation, which we dominate by measurement, positioning, etc.—we feel ourselves merging with a place, which on this very account suddenly becomes invisible, dissolved in its own luminosity, disintegrated as a discriminate object. We experience this objectlessness in moments of overwhelming joy or fear or abandon. Here “landscape is invisible, because the more we absorb it, the more we lose ourselves in it. To be fully in the landscape we must sacrifice, as far as possible, all temporal, spatial, and objective precision.”65
We also sacrifice any explicit consciousness of our own body in such a circumstance: it too becomes invisible as it merges with the very place to which it has been our main link. This is a moment of maximum expressiveness, one that is rarely achieved altogether since various modes of explicit visibility tend to remain present. But experiences of ecstasy serve to remind us of its ongoing possibility. The paradox is that the power of place is most fully manifested at the very moment when place and body fuse and lose their separate identities. At this point, the variegated and sustaining aspects of a place’s power cede place to an expressiveness no longer containable by parameters of the here and the there, the without and the within, perimeter and field. Emotion itself has become e-motion, a moving out and away from the epicenters of body and place and their reciprocally realized positioning in space. Yet significance abides, and with it memorability.
The memorability of place amounts to more than what the recollection of place can yield; it is the source as well as the reinforced product of experiences of being-in-place. Perhaps the single most fateful such experience, by means of which place comes to be most deeply memorable, is that in which a given place and the lived body as its correlate dissolve as discrete source-points while uniting in a mutual invisibility. Then place becomes ours at last; but in remembering it, we remain beholden to its intrinsic power.
One of the most eloquent testimonies to place’s extraordinary memorability is found in nostalgia. We are nostalgic primarily about particular places that have been emotionally significant to us and which we now miss: we are in pain (algos) about a return home (nostos) that is not presently possible. It is not accidental that “nostalgia” and “homesickness” are still regarded as synonyms in current English dictionaries and that one and the same German word, Heimweh, means both at once. Johannes Hofer, who coined the word “nostalgia” in his Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia (1688), advised that the affliction “admits no remedy other than a return to the homeland.”66 Indeed the sooner the better: “The patient,” said Hofer, “should be taken [home], however weak and feeble, without delay, whether by a traveling carriage with four wheels, or by sedan chair, or by any other means.”67 Post haste in short!
It does not matter that Kant scoffed at this remedy, remarking that such a Heimkunft or homecoming is often “very disappointing” insofar as the home-place itself may have become “wholly transformed.”68 What does matter is that the phenomenon of nostalgia bears mainly on place; the nostalgic person is condemned, in Hofer’s words, to “think continually about the Fatherland”69—as did the paradigmatic young Swiss conscripts who, encamped on the flatlands of Holland, longed for the valleys in which they had been brought up. In being nostalgic, we are all in the position of these dis-placed conscripts.
This is not the place to pursue the nature of nostalgia.70 All that we need to notice is that the poignant power of the phenomenon—which can virtually paralyze those under its sway—has everything to do with memory of place. That the place in question is normally that special place called “home”—“there is no place like home,” according to nostalgia’s primary axiom—testifies emphatically to the strength of the internal bond between place and memory. Once more then we must ask: In what does this bond consist? Why is place so potent as a guardian of memories?
So far I have isolated three general “landscape” structures which help to answer these questions: place’s variegation, its sustaining nature, and its expressiveness. These do not yet account, however, for the peculiar hauntingness of places that we experience in nostalgia—to the point where we may be quite overwhelmed by their memory, even so obsessed by them that we overlook the particular place we occupy in the present. Nostalgia leads us to invoke the following principle: in remembering we can be thrust back, transported, into the place we recall. We can be moved back into this place as much as, and sometimes more than, into the time in which the remembered event occurred. Rather than thinking of remembering as a form of re-experiencing the past per se, we might conceive of it as an activity of re-implacing: re-experiencing past places. By the same token, if it is true that all memory has a bodily component or dimension, the memory-bearing body can be considered as a body moving back in(to) place. Aristotelian physics remains pertinent for a phenomenology of human memory: bodies of every sort move from place to place.71 Such is their fate—and ours as embodied rememberers. Our remembering/remembered bodies are ineluctably place-bound; they are bound to be in a place, whether this place be a common or a special one.72
In searching for a still more adequate understanding of the memorial potency of place, we need to notice the way in which the functions of memory and place are strikingly parallel. They accomplish a similar task at a quite basic level. This task is that of congealing the disparate into a provisional unity. To begin with, any given place serves to hold together dispersed things, animate or inanimate; it regionalizes them, giving to them a single shared space in which to be together. But a place can also draw together different spaces—as when a town square brings together several converging streets, each of which leads into a region of its own. As opposed to a sheer site—a space that acts to define and exclude—a place encourages the inclusion and overlap of a set of various spaces. These spaces become co-inherent in the place in which they conjoin. Thanks to place’s “nearing nearness,”73 they constitute a sense of neighborhood or vicinity.
Compare with this the way that human remembering—quite apart from memory of place as such—acts to draw together diverse moments of time: not only the remote past with the present moment (as in secondary memory) but also the immediate past with the given ‘now’ (as in primary memory). If it does nothing else, memory effects temporal synthesis, indeed may be the sole source of such synthesis: as Leibniz (pondering Aristotle’s doctrine of motion) affirmed in his monadology, and as Kant was to proclaim still more explicitly in his doctrine of reproductive imagination, which associates items in terms of temporal succession.74 This assertion of the importance of temporal synthesis goes hand in hand with the demise of “place” as a technical philosophical term in post-Kantian philosophy. Time is given a function parallel to that formerly ascribed to place: a congealing function (Aristotle would say “containing”). For temporal synthesis—and thus the synthesis realized by memory viewed in the modernist perspective of time—is a matter of congealing disparate moments into various forms of unity.
If congealing on the part of the lived world—i.e., that effected by place—is symmetrical in operation with congealing on the part of the temporal subject (i.e., that effected by memory), then the alliance of memory and place, as well as the peculiar power of memory of place, is assured, even in a post-Kantian world-view. The fact is that place has always functioned in human experience in a manner analogous to how memory was thought to operate by Leibniz and Kant. And if this is so, we have every reason to believe that to remember particular places, or to remember by means of them, will intensify our memorial powers: synthesis to the second power! What we have been discussing as place’s inherently sheltering role—its capacity to have and hold memories, to hold them together—can only enhance the role of remembering conceived as a power of temporal synthesis. Both roles, the one containing and the other synthesizing, are fundamentally “reservative” by dint of forming a preserve, a virtual reservation, within which disparities can co-exist. No wonder, then, that memory and place continue to reinforce each other—even in a world preoccupied by questions of time and of site.
The place/memory parallel assumes still further forms which we can designate under the headings of “horizon,” “pathway,” and constituent “things.” Let us take these up in succession:
HORIZON
Horizon is essential to the reservative role of memory and place, each of which involves a sense of intrinsic delimitation. The delimitation is intrinsic because it comes from within as well as from without, resulting in a double horizonal structure. Experienced in its fullest form, a place exhibits an internal and an external horizon75—whereas a site, as leveled-down, possesses neither kind of horizonal structure. By “fullest form” I mean a landscape construed as a coherent collocation of intertwining places. The external horizon of a given landscape encompasses all the particular places, regions, and things within its enclosure. It is exemplified in (but is not limited to) the horizonal line formed by the meeting of earth and sky. The internal horizon of any particular entity, place, or region is its immediate inner limit. Horos, the root of “horizon,” means boundary or limit, especially as this serves to define a material thing. Thus Aristotle’s conception of place in terms of innermost boundary (peras) is in fact a conception of place as internal horizon.
A place as remembered will often involve both horizonal structures. When I remember, say, sweeping the porch of my grandparents’ house in Abilene, I recall being contained by the internal horizon of the porch itself—a horizon constituted by the roof of the porch and the side of the house with which it was contiguous—and being surrounded by an entire setting composed of a yard, grape arbor, neighbors’ houses, a creek, etc., all of these latter establishing the external horizon of the scene as I remember it.
It is a striking fact that Husserl, doubtless inspired by James’s notion of “fringe,” called the retentions of primary memory “horizons.”76 These retentions surround each fading moment like a halo or “comet’s tail” (in Husserl’s favorite metaphor), forming a rapidly subsiding but distinctive horizon for that moment. Moreover, this temporally internal horizon can be remembered as such—as “the past of the past”77 which we recall in bodily, pictorial, or verbal forms. A concatenation of such horizoned moments constitutes what could be termed a “scene,” the episodic-temporal equivalent of a landscape. The temporally specified limits of this scene, its duration, represent the temporal form of its external horizon. What I called “aura” in chapter 4 is nothing other than the spatio-temporal expression of the same phenomenon, echoes of which we also discerned in reminding (i.e., the outer edge of the adumbrated remindand), in recognizing (as the limits of perceptual suffusion), in reminiscing (in the beginning and ending of the reminisced-about event), and even in body memory (as the outer arc of the lived body’s remembered movement from place to place). There are also equivalents of internal horizons in each case—too many to trace out here. What most merits noticing is that in every instance internal and external horizons are at once spatial and temporal (ultimately, they are spatio-temporal) and that both kinds of horizon are shared by memory and place alike.
PATHWAY
A second feature shared in common by memory and place is the existence of pathways in and through their midst. Such pathways are of two sorts: those that give access or egress and those that facilitate internal exploration. We witness both in our experience of place. A given place can be entered by multiple pathways through a landscape that acts as its external horizon. This place also permits exiting by the same pathways or by others that we come to discern. Once within a particular place, still more interior pathways open to us—or more exactly, to our moving bodies, which are the vehicles of path-breaking or path-following. However limited these inner paths may be, they at least allow movement in more than one direction. The resulting sense of free exploration contrasts with the planned journeys that occur within cartographic or sited space.78
Once more the analogy to memory is striking. A given memory possesses multiple modes of entry (“access,” “retrieval”), as well as of egress (whether by moving to another memory or by simply forgetting). The structure of these routes—a structure that allows them to range from random cues to highly predictable stimulus-response situations—has been the subject of feverish and fruitful research on the part of cognitive psychologists. These same scientists have also explored the interior drama of memory in terms of its complex “associative networks.”79 Such networks exhibit ramifying pathways even in the case of a seemingly straightforward memory: to remember my childhood dog “Peggy” is at the same time to enter a microcosm of that period of my life, a mini-world in which “Peggy” links up with the other dogs my family owned, with the way they were regarded by my siblings, with the way they made that domestic space more warmly familiar, etc. Each of the themes just mentioned represents a pathway in this particular part of my past; and from each pathway still others diverge: from “Peggy” the dog to Peggy Mills, the wife of my father’s law partner, to “Peg O’ My Heart,” or to Charles Peguy, the French writer. As the English and French associationists outlined in theory, and as Freud realized in practice, any limit on such associative pathways is a matter of arbitrary foreclosure. Exploration within memory—even within a single given memory—is potentially endless. This is something which St. Augustine knew long before the associationists, Freud, or contemporary cognitive psychologists:
Memory . . . is like a great field or a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds. . . . It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths?80
The unplumbable nature of memory has everything to do with what characterizes place as well: an openness to traversal by multiple pathways.
THINGS
Material things not only frequently constitute the specific content of places and memories alike, but by their special memorability they draw memory and place together in a quite significant way. I cannot, for example, remember my early experiences at my great-uncle Ralph’s home without the reappearance, within the memory, of his house (including its interior rooms), the pond next to it, and the alley behind. Hence my sense of shock when I revisited Kansas a few years ago and discovered that his house had been razed and the pond eliminated following a major fire on the property. With the disappearance of these things, the main elements of a quite special place in my childhood, and thus the source of a treasured set of place memories, had vanished.
If things do not form necessary conditions of every memory of place—one can certainly imagine cases of remembering utterly desolate, empty places—they do enter into active alliances with particular places. Aristotle was already alert to such alliances: “Just as every body is in place, so, too, every place has a body in it.”81 Things are manifestly of place as well as in place; they are its natural occupants. If horizons and pathways serve to delimit places from without and within respectively—to give them contour and structure—things fill out places, giving to their shape a substance. And as horizons and pathways delineate movements in places, so things bring about fixation and focus there. In this regard, the role of things in places is curiously comparable to that of the lived body. The body and things both lend a distinctive density to their immediate surroundings; and as the body is central for the experiencing and remembering subject who pivots around (and with) it, so things are pivotal points in a given place, constellating it by their presence.
What we have just said of things and bodies as they figure into place is above all true of things as they form part of explicit place memories. In such memories (e.g., of my great-uncle’s house), things are centers of coalescence and provide points for attentive reattachment. They augment continuing recognition of scenes we remember as well as facilitating our ability to repeat these scenes in subsequent rememberings. As the items that we recollect fill in the specific content of mnemonic presentations, so things fill out place memories by acting as their gathering-points, their main means of support. Things congeal the places we remember, just as places congeal remembered worlds—and as the present of remembering congeals the past remembered. Things put the past in place; they are the primary source of its concrete implacement in memory.
Despite the crucial importance of things in memories of place, it is only as positioned in relation to pathways and as situated within horizons that things assume their most fully determinative role. The interplay between all three factors is what helps to make place memories so potent a part of our memorial lives. A celebrated passage from Remembrance of Things Past brings out this interplay eloquently:
As soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me . . . immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents . . . and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine . . . in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.82
The “shape and solidity” of that special place called “Combray” are given to it by a diverse set of ingredients. These ingredients begin and end with things (“the taste of the piece of madeleine,” “my cup of tea”); and they proceed through particular places in ever-increasing amplitude (from the pavilion giving on to the garden, and from Aunt Léonie’s house to the town as it includes the Square, the local church, other houses, and the Vivonne river). Connecting all of these places within Combray are the pathways afforded by the streets of the town (Léonie’s house is set “upon the street,” a street eventually linking up with all other streets in the town and thus with the “country roads” leading outside of town as well). Acting as external horizon for “the whole of Combray” is the circumambient countryside, the “surroundings”; internal horizons are provided by the Square, the church tower, and Swann’s estate. The concatenation of all these components contributes to making Combray a memorable place. Beyond furnishing focus and variegation, and a space in which free movement is possible, they transform what would be a sheer site—i.e., “Combray” as a mere location on a map of France—into a full-fledged place-of-provenance for memory. Horizons, pathways, and things bestow on Combray an abiding memorability for the narrator of the novel and for us as its readers.
Or recall in this connection the method of loci as employed in the classical “art of memory,” a method in which, as we know, the establishing and revisiting of a grid of places (typically a house full of rooms or a street with many stopping points) is crucial. This technique is all the more impressive in that it may arise spontaneously—as happened in the case of “S.,” the Russian mnemonist studied by Luria. S. used Gorky Street in Moscow as his underlying grid and deposited images (often in elaborate synesthetic formats) at various points along its length.83 Quite apart from its actual utility, this mnemotechnique has the notable feature of combining the three elements which were under scrutiny in the last section. Pathways are present in the form of the routes which the memorizer takes in laying down the basic grid. Horizons are provided by factors as external as the city of Moscow or as intimate as the walls of the house whose rooms one is revisiting.84 Things appear as the images—or rather, in the images—which have been devised as particular mementos of the items-to-be-remembered. These images are typically of human bodies or parts of bodies set forth in vivid, and even grotesque, poses; and as such they act to gather together, to harbor and preserve, the content to be remembered.85
Let us consider a final case in point, one which will allow us to observe the full panoply of traits that characterize place memories. This is the Chinese garden, about which Edwin T. Morris has written
[it] was designed by highly cultivated individuals in such a way that a walk through the paths and arcades of its many sections would trigger reminiscences and images evoked from all aspects of the cultural tradition. Here a rock outcropping would kindle recollections of a famous mountain painting; there a few lines of calligraphy carved in stone would allude to a famous hermit who found solace in nature centuries before.86
Even in this cursory description of the Chinese garden, memory is very much at stake in the form of “reminiscences” and “recollections.” Morris adds that “the visitor [to the Chinese garden] brought as much to the garden as he or she found there.”87 What is brought but the personal and the cultural past—and each as remembered? Remembering such pasts is elicited by the garden itself, that is, by a place whose constituent elements were designed “in memorable ways.”88
Gardens of many kinds are conceived as intimately related to a surrounding landscape which they at once mirror and condense. This is especially true of the Chinese garden, which is designed as a microcosm of nature: “The garden is a miniature of China, transformed by the alchemy of the artistic spirit. In the garden we find represented all the great mountains, rivers and lakes, the soil, flora, and the dwellings of the people.”89 The very fact of the limited space in which Chinese gardens were set encouraged this effort at miniaturization: “A great emotional charge could be wrung from a garden that was only a few acres in physical space, but expansive in poetical space.”90 In contrast with “physical space” (i.e., sited space), “poetical space” is the space of memorable place, and it is constituted by allusions that draw specifically on memories: “Allusions were created everywhere, to stir memories already present, but dormant, in the breast of the onlooker.”91 The garden-as-microcosm, as a place within the poetical space of landscape, is thoroughly memorial. Just as a given garden would “borrow” a surrounding landscape by opening up vistas on it, so being in that garden would open up vistas of one’s memory by engaging in evocations of the past.92 Other means are used to underline the microcosmic nature of gardens: gardens within gardens, bonsai trees, and a sensitivity to seasons.93 In other words, “the inclusion of all components of nature made it [into] a miniature world.”94
The “diffused polycentrism”95 of the Chinese garden draws on all of the factors that we have found to be essential to the memorability of place. To begin with, expressiveness of an explicitly emotional sort is built into a setting where the configuration of a given garden is evocative of prior experiences of being in certain landscapes (or viewing their representations in paintings). What gives to the garden experience its moving quality is not any factor of exact representation. It is the expressiveness with which it elicits memories of having been in (or seen represented) similar places. Likewise, the sustaining character of a garden is evident in its careful reinforcement of motifs by natural as well as by cultural means. If one is not already sustained enough by the physical entities in the garden, the written signs that are placed over doorways, inside pavilions, and on furniture afford further assurance that various pasts can be richly remembered.96 Moreover, variegation was practically an obsession of the Chinese garden designer. Not only were gateways strenuously varied in name and shape—being vase-shaped, moon-shaped, fan-shaped, leaf-shaped97—but windows were asystematically different, both in terms of grillework and in terms of vistas offered. Staggered perspectives were employed to variegate vertical space;98 and in the horizontal plane there was often a complex subdivision of space: the sixteenth-century Garden of the Unsuccessful Politician in Suzhou included no less than thirty-one sub-places, each with its own distinctive design.99
We also witness at work the three features singled out for discussion in section VIII. Horizons are a subdued but crucial presence in this polycentric circumstance. Given the walled-in character of most gardens, especially in urban locations, the horizons of a surrounding landscape are less perceived than adumbrated within a particular garden: e.g., through water-and-rock combinations that serve as miniature landscapes. What would otherwise remain literally external (i.e., in the space of sites) is here made interior to the internal horizons of the garden itself. These horizons are most decisively delineated by various walls, which establish north-south orientation as well as segmenting a given garden compound. “To have a garden without a wall is almost unthinkable,”100 and the Chinese were masters of placing one wall before another in such a way as to simulate and exaggerate recession in depth. This multiplication of horizons helps to give a sense of ever-expanding space, all within an area whose actual extent may be quite modest.101
Pathways are important as well in the Chinese garden. A combination of covered arcades and open spaces maximize possibilities of movement. There is always more than one route which can be taken across a given expanse; and at any point on a given route there are striking views to be had: “While buildings frequently mark fixed vantage points for carefully composed views, the walkways and paths throughout the garden are planned for enjoying the landscape in a changing, or moving, focus.”102 In this way garden pathways become analogous to “the roads that appeared and disappeared in mountain painting.”103 Whether in a garden or in a painting imitated by that garden, pathways help to make landscape accessible from various points of view.104
A Chinese garden is also replete with things of many kinds—with buildings and plants, soil and stones. Yet these are never presented in such profusion as to confuse: there is a sense of abiding order, of clear space for rumination. Each thing in a Chinese garden counts, has its own fully accountable spot, within the perimeters provided by pavilions, terraces, and walls. This arrangement is not only aesthetically pleasing and conducive to meditation; it also gives rise to clarified remembering. Indeed, a Chinese garden is exemplary of what a well-ordered memory of place can become when brought outside the mind (where it had been confined in the art of memory)105 and into the perceptual world. Its ingenious use of viewing-places—e.g., moon terraces or covered pavilions—invites the stroller to stop and contemplate groups of material objects as if they were items of a mnemonic presentation: which they may well become by this intense and lucid viewing. The structure of such a garden is memorial from beginning to end; memorable in itself as a privileged place to be, it also induces memories of other places one has known.
I have been presenting the Chinese garden as exemplary of a place rendered acutely memorable by the employment of a number of memory-supportive factors. Their interaction results in a literal com-plication of the space of the garden, which cannot be adequately experienced in terms of what Whitehead would call “simple location.” A simple location “does not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of space-time.”106 In vivid contrast with the separative aspect of simple locations is the “prehensive” character of space or time regarded as inclusive in scope, e.g., as exhibited in that bodily form of causal efficacy discussed at the end of the last chapter. In a world in which place is characterized by prehensions, one can say that
everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.107
Although Whitehead finds the perfect exemplification of this doctrine in the Romantic view of nature,108 we could claim as much for the Chinese garden. In both cases the landscape world of nature is attained by a prehensive conception of place, whether this be the place of the poet or that of the solitary walker in the garden.
The implications for memory of place are crucial. Such memory cannot be based on the simple locations provided by sites; this would only lead to the very separatism in space which undermines effective remembering.109 Instead, place memory calls for a radically inclusive notion of space in which the full landscape contexture of given places can be accounted for. As Rilke wrote to von Hulewicz, it is a matter of instating “what is here seen and touched within the wider, within the widest orbit.”110 Memory of place does just this by locating the particularities of place—“what is here seen”—within the “wider orbit” of a surrounding landscape.
This is not to claim that there is any exact parallelism between Chinese and Western conceptions of place in relation to memory. If we set aside Whitehead and the Romantic poets, we are left in the West with the tendency, steadily mounting since Descartes, to convert place-being into site-being. One concrete consequence of the encroachment of site on place has been the favoring of architectural space, especially architecturally modeled domestic space, as a privileged domain of memorability: Descartes meditating next to his stove is the progenitor of Proust writing in his cork-lined room. In China, by contrast, there has been a concerted search for an equilibrium between the architectural and the natural—between garden and landscape, indeed between constructed and organic elements within the garden itself. The equilibrium is sanctioned by an entire cosmology. For example, the combination of water and rocks in a garden represents the conjunction of Yin (soft, yielding, dark) with Yang (hard, resistant, bright):
To understand how the Chinese garden works is to understand the Chinese view of the workings of the universe. According to the Chinese, the pairing of Yin and Yang concepts implies their very interdependence and interaction: their combinations and permutations guarantee infinite change as well as ultimate harmony in the universe.111
Such a view leads naturally to a preoccupation with microcosm/macrocosm parallels and to a special concern with varied means of representation as ways of achieving “a harmonious oneness through infinite metamorphosis.”112
Post-Cartesian Western thinking does not seek any such ultimate harmony between microcosm and macrocosm. Instead of finding a focus memorius in gardens with their delicate complementarities, such thinking focuses on the house as an archetypal place for the most significant remembering. It is a revealing fact that Bachelard and Heidegger, both trenchant critics of space conceived as mere site, alike stress the space of inhabitation, of “building” and “dwelling.” Heidegger’s project of a “topology of Being” and Bachelard’s strikingly similar notion of “topo-analysis” do not propose anything like a return to nature, nor do they intend an ideal state in which human dwelling and nature would exist in equilibrium. Heidegger’s exemplary cases of things-as-locations are such decidedly artifactual objects as a jug and a bridge.113 Bachelard defines topo-analysis as “the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives”114—where such “sites” are precisely houses, places of dwelling. Indeed, these manifestly non-natural locations are said to be the proper place-holders of memories:
Thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated.115
In China the house opens onto the garden and is thus not a self-contained place of memory; being only part of a garden compound that is a microcosm of nature, its role in remembering is that of a vestibule and its memorial significance is quite literally marginal. In the Western world, where dwellings are so often closed off from nature,116 it is therefore not surprising to be told that “the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and dreams of mankind.”117 In this perspective, houses hold memories; they are the primary exemplars of remembered places.
Precisely as self-enclosed, houses encourage memories in which intimacy is a leading value. Inhabited space brings with it what Bachelard calls “the being of within” and Frank Lloyd Wright “interior spaciousness.”118 In being remembered, each room, and each corner of each room, realizes an “intimate immensity”:
The topo-analyst starts to ask questions: Was the room a large one? Was the garret cluttered up? Was the nook warm? How was it lighted? How, too, in these fragments of space, did the human being achieve silence? How did he relish the very special silence of the various retreats of solitary day-dreaming?119
Here we are reminded of the silent memorizer, pursuing the ancient art of memory by introspecting the interior spaces of his remembered places—in contrast with the equally silent Chinese meditator, gazing directly onto nature from the Moon Terrace of his garden. If cosmological unity is realized spontaneously and with minimal assistance from architecture in the Chinese circumstance, it is only by a paradoxical twist that any comparable unity is achieved in the Western situation, where inhabited space is at once highly interiorized and heavily built-over. Even though such space is not attuned to landscape, it does give rise to a distinctive metaphysical unity of its own:
It is through their [respective] ‘immensity’ that these two kinds of space—the space of [architectural] intimacy and world space—blend. When human solitude deepens, then the two immensities touch and become identical.120
This is not the place to pursue the precise ways in which Western architecture has attempted to enhance its own memorability.121 These include a greater emphasis on perimeters and horizons than is typically found in Chinese gardens; less stress on pathways and more on various “liminal” regions such as doorways; and a more complex dialectical interplay between inside and outside. Despite such differences, one critical commonality between East and West nevertheless remains. Place memories of all kinds, however diverse they may be otherwise, require that the place remembered serve as an enclosure of some sort: as a reservative region. Even in the most disparate cultural settings, Aristotle’s model of place-as-container remains deeply pertinent to the remembrance of place. In China the garden contains nature even as it mirrors it, and in this very capacity it is a privileged preserver of place memories. In Europe and America of the last three centuries, it is the domicile that has served as the primary container of memories of place. This is especially true of the childhood house, our first “home,” itself often the subject of the most profound nostalgia. As Bachelard says in the wake of Proust:
After we are in [a] new house, when memories of other places we have lived come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Immemorial Things are. We live fixations, fixations of happiness. We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of [childhood] protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home.122
A house, especially one that has been our childhood home, is certainly not a simple location, for such a location cannot effectively contain memories. Instead, in its prehensive power, a house serves as an active enclosure for the most cherished—which is to say, the most intimate—memories of place.
Aristotle was right in another regard: “the power of place,” as he said, is “a remarkable one.” Even if place is not “prior to all things”—as Aristotle claimed, echoing Archytas—it certainly holds its own: and it holds its own (in) memories. Places are potently receptive and preservative of memories, which they hold to keep. As much as body or brain, mind or language, place is a keeper of memories—one of the main ways by which the past comes to be secured in the present, held in things before us and around us. In place, “the hold is held,” for in places the presentment of memories occurs as their implacement in non-simple locations. If it is true that “what keeps us in our essential nature holds us only so long . . . as we for our part keep holding on to what holds us,”123 then place is the primary scene in which we hold (onto) memories: we are beholden to them there, precisely to the extent that place itself is a holding power. Such is the dialectic of place memories: “They are as much in us as we are in them.”124 It is this dialectic that Straus describes as the interplay of the visible and the invisible in landscape. The same dialectic is at work in the ninth Duino Elegy: “Earth, isn’t this what you want: an invisible re-arising in us? Is not your dream to be one day invisible? Earth! Invisible!”125 It is in providing outward display for things and pathways as they exist within the horizons of landscape that places enable memories to become inwardly inscribed and possessed: made one with the memorial self. The visibility without becomes part of the invisibility within.
In closing this chapter, I wish to point to two concrete consequences of the foregoing analysis:
THE INSUFFICIENCY OF RECOLLECTION
In recollection or secondary memory, place is at best a mere setting for the object or episode that is being remembered; it may not even figure in recollection’s quasi-narrations, which can omit mention of place altogether. In short, recollection does not begin to do justice to the manifold ways in which place figures into human remembering. Nor does it adequately reflect the fate of body memory vis-à-vis place; just as the body moves us into place and orients us there, so body memories are often memories of body-in-place. Indeed, even such mnemonic modes as reminding and recognizing frequently imply implacement: we are reminded about doing X in situation Y, and we recognize person P in circumstance C—where “situation” and “circumstance” are both matters of place. It is evident, then, that the power of place exceeds what recollection—as well as other forms of remembering—can effectively encompass.
SPATIALITY VERSUS TEMPORALITY
Just as memory of place calls the exclusive priority of recollection into question, so it also brings us beyond a reliance on time as an exclusive medium for what we remember—that is, beyond the very thing which recollecting favors by its narratizing tendency. In particular, it reminds us of the centrality of space for much remembering. Body memory had already pointed in this direction in its position-taking capacity as well as in its kinesthetic dimension. Only in memory of place, however, are we enjoined to undertake a full-fledged topo-analysis of the spatiality of remembering. Precisely in contrast with psychoanalysis—which emphasizes diachrony and development in their interpersonal ramifications126—topo-analysis investigates the solitary experience of space: what it is to be, and to have been, in particular places rather than in particular times. In a great deal of remembering, this is a pervasive concern. We often remember ourselves in a given place; but how often do we remember ourselves as having been at a given date?
By its very immobility—through the stolid concreteness of things set within pathways and horizons—place acts to contain time itself. This is not to trivialize time but to make it into a dimension of space through the active influence of place. On the other hand, time is trivialized when it is reduced to calendrical-historical dates; and it is precisely memory of place that teaches us that
to localize a memory in time is merely a matter for the biographer and only corresponds to a sort of external history, for external use, to be communicated to others . . . localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.127
If Bachelard is here correct about the nature of memory, not only is narratizing of secondary interest but the idea of remembering as re-experiencing the past is rendered moot, including Husserl’s claim that “we can relive the present [even if] it cannot be given again.”128 Also contested is Heidegger’s view in Being and Time that Dasein achieves authenticity only in a resolute repetition of its past. Could it be that authenticity lies instead in the very spatiality which Heidegger makes into a mere function of temporality?129
Throughout this chapter, we have witnessed what amounts to an elective affinity between memory and place. Not only is each suited to the other; each calls for the other. What is contained in place is on its way to being well remembered. What is remembered is well grounded if it is remembered as being in a particular place—a place that may well take precedence over the time of its occurrence. Thus it is certainly true that “memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.”130 But precisely where memory is at stake, to be fixed in space is to be fixed in place. If memories are motionless, this is the work of the places in which they come to inhere so deeply. In remembering “I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say [just] where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.”131 To be there—to be truly da-sein—is to be in place, which cannot be reduced to site (the just where) any more than time can be shrunken to date (the just when). Being-in-place is a main modalization of being-in-the-world. Having been in places is therefore a natural resource for remembering our own being in the world. It is indispensable for knowing what we are (now) in terms of what we were (then).
Footfalls echo in the memory . . .
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick, now, here, now, always—132
Memory of place implaces us and thus empowers us: gives us space to be precisely because we have been in so many memorable places, enjoyed such intimacy in them, known such pain there as well. If body memory moves us—is the prime mover of our memorial lives—it moves us directly into place, whose very immobility contributes to its distinct potency in matters of memory.