Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Memory: Body: Place
Philip B. Stafford
Phil Stafford is the Director of the Center on Aging and Community at the Indiana Institute on Disability, and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He is editor of Gray Areas: Ethnographic Encounters with Nursing Home Culture (SAR Press, 2003). The following essay is drawn from his newest book, Elderburbia: Aging with a Sense of Place in America (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Press/ABC-Clio, 2009) and is reprinted here with permission of the publisher. © 2009 Praeger Press/ABC-Clio.
I suspect that if I asked you to imagine the home you occupied at age ten you would sit back, close your eyes, and traverse that space in your mind’s eye. So it is when I ask elderly residents of a local convalescent center to revisit, in their mind’s eye, the homes of their youth and early adulthood.
Opha Miller, 100 years old, closes her eyes and describes the pasture seen from her back window as if it still exists. She sits on the porch and looks out across the road at the Wisnand girls. She recalls her husband, a good carpenter, building that porch, and revisits the bedroom in which she gave birth to a daughter.
Moving further back through time, 93 years, she describes how, at age seven, she lived with her family in Texas and helped fill bags with cotton and dump them into a canvas covered wagon. She is crossing a little bridge and hears a train whistle right up close. “I jumped off that bridge and the passenger train nearly hit me!” She never told her folks about that since she knew that would mean trouble. Through the irony of dementia she confesses once again, three minutes later, and reiterates the story just as before.
Another resident nicknamed Hack shows me the photograph of his former home on the wall of his room at the center. The photo is one of those bird’s-eye pictures taken by itinerant pilots who would then hawk the images to the appropriate household. The structure is a small bungalow highlighted in front by a stone arch at the start of a sidewalk leading to the house. The arch has no adjoining fence and so does not keep things out but welcomes them in. Hack mentions how his son used to mow the grass across the road at Opha Miller’s house (yes, the very same Opha now living in the next room!). Hack, speaking of his son while pointing to the arch in the picture, says:
Hack: “He sees now what old Dad did. I did that.”
Phil: “You did?”
Hack: “A windstorm blew it down… My son said [to the insurance man], ‘There’s nobody gonna fix that unless they put it back exactly like Dad had it!’ This guy looked at it and said, ‘I’ll put it back exactly like that’... and he did.”
Pointing to the stone work, Hack says:
Hack: “I cut every one of them with a pitchin’ tool.”
Phil: “You cut it with pitching tools... You mean you dug them out of the ground?”
Hack: “You face it.”
Phil: “You call that ‘pitching it’?”
Hack: “Yeah, ‘pitching it’ is making rock face out of it... and squarin’ it up—it’s a breakin’ tool [shows me the movement of the tool in a chopping motion with his hands]... something like a big wide chisel, but it’s cut on just like that—you get that just right and it’ll break the rock. But you line it with a square, and then cut it. Put your rock face on it.”
*******
As he talks about his life, I stand in awe, reminded of how I love the work that brings me here to listen. When Hack talks about doing some “water witchin’” as a kid and not finding a forked peach branch, he lets me know with his hands how he improvised with a “coke bottle and a number nine wire.” When he tells about the man from Texas who came up to drill wells, it seems important to remark that he used a number five casing, “not a number six like they use around here.” And when Hack drew his water from a rock spring out at his Greene County home, it was cold: “It was at least 51 degrees, and that water in the wintertime would feel good on your hands.”
As he talks, his body enters into the conversation. The objects we use to construct our conversation, the pictures on the wall, help cement the relationship between us and place us in the imaginary landscape we are noting together.
A conventional, semiotic understanding of the objects in Hack’s room might suggest that the stone arch represents Hack’s friendliness and hospitable nature. It might suggest that the arch represents Hack’s valued past, which it does. The stone arch is significant. It does have symbolic import—as a symbol of his artisanship and a vehicle for a son’s pride of father.
But the arch is more than that. It’s a presence in and of itself. As Hack stands there and “faces” those rocks with his hands, that arch is rebuilt, recreated anew, re-experienced not as symbol but as home itself. As Hack’s body enters into this process of memory, the effect is transformational, in Barbara Myerhoff’s sense, in that the past enters into the present and transforms the institutional space of his room into the place of his experience [1].
Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, describes this memory of the body:
...the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits. After twenty years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways, we would recapture the reflexes of the “first stairway,” we would not stumble on that rather high step. The house’s entire being would open up, faithful to our own being. We would push that door that creaks with the same gesture, we would find our way in the dark to the distant attic. The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands [2].
Wendell Berry, Kentucky farmer, poet, and essayist describes this bodily attachment to place in his short novel, The Memory of Old Jack, in which elderly Kentucky farmer Jack Beechum no longer farms his old place. Though he lives in the boarding house in town, he dwells in the memories of place:
[But] the present is small and the future perhaps still smaller. And what his mind is apt to do is leap out of that confinement, like an old dog, still strong, that has been penned up and then let loose in the one countryside that it knows and that it knew for a long time. But it is like an old dog possessed by an old man’s intelligent ghost that remembers all it has seen and done and all the places it has known, and that goes back to haunt and lurk in those places. Some days he can keep it very well in hand, just wandering and rummaging around in what he remembers. He is amazed at what he comes upon that he thought he had forgot… Sometimes he can recover a whole day, with the work he did in it, and the places, and the animals and the people and even the words that belong to it [3].
*******
So memory of home is not merely symbolic and representational but draws upon one’s whole being as it is recollected. The proper study of it is not semiotic but phenomenological. As the original experience involves the whole body, is it any wonder that its memory should do the same?In ways that are compelling to me because they resonate with my experience of place, Bachelard, Berry, Hack, and Opha point to the role that memory plays in converting empty space into place. Important objects are not mere souvenirs (though the root meaning of the word suggests a bodily “coming back again”). They take on meaning as they evoke narrative and recreate bodily experiences.
Memory, it seems, is the hallmark of a good place. We might say that a good place remembers itself to us. More properly, we might say that a good place has a kind of mirror quality because it helps us to remember ourselves to ourselves. Kathleen Woodward cites a passage from The Stone Angel, by Margaret Laurence, in which 90-year-old Hagar Shipley finds himself in his objects:
My shreds and remnants of years are scattered through it [the house] visibly in lamps and vases...If I am not somehow contained in them and in this house, something of all change caught and fixed here, eternal enough for my purposes, then I do not know where I am to be found at all [4].
A good place is a “keeping place.” It holds people together through their common participation in its qualities. As Wendell Berry put it in another essay, “a human community, then, if it is to last, must exert a kind of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place” [5] .
Notes
1. B. Myerhoff, 1978. Number our Days (NY: Simon & Schuster), p. 225.
2. G. Bachelard, 1994. The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press), p.15.
3. W. Berry, 1974. The Memory of Old Jack (San Diego: Harcourt Brace), p. 31-32.
4. K. Woodward, 1991. Aging and its Discontents (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press), p.146.
5. W. Berry, 1990. What are People For? (San Francisco: North Point Press), p. 155.