Bernie Michalik's posterous site

Walking to work today, I thought how we see the places we are as visually
and spatially: I know where I am based on what I see and I position myself
accordingly. Some people are terrible at it, but I can mentally see the
landscape as if it is a map, and helps me orient myself at home (of course)
but also if I am travelling.

Where this breaks down is when everything looks alike. In the Matrix films,
there is a hallway of door after door that all look alike, making it very
difficult to determine which door one should choose (the same thing happens
in suburban subdivisions too: try visiting someone for the first time when
it is dark and see how hard it is). In such a situation, you might resort
to locating something temporally. Indeed, we often recommend driving for 5
minutes and then we are there, or the park is 2 minutes from my house. You
still need a direction - a temportal vector - but the determinant is time,
not space.

Because we are so visual, we tend to live and move spatially. But with
different senses, we could live temporally. In some senses, we do. The
square in this photo has spatial characteristics in relationshp with me: it
is a two streets from my house, at the intersection of Yonge and Eglinton,
which is where the subway stop is that I mainly take. These are all the
"where" aspects of it. But it is also 8 minutes from my house. I remember
sitting in the square a few weeks ago, having a cookie with my son. And
there are many more "when" aspects of the square. It is as much a place in
time as it is a place in space.

When I was coming here, I saw two men: one was a lot older than me and one
was the same age but worse off. Seeing the older man before, I would think:
"when" I get older, I will look like that. But seeing the other man, I
wondered if the stages of our lives are places, something that has spatial
qualities as much as temporal qualities. While there is no denying we get
old, the guise we take on and the other aspects of the age we are are as
much as if we are visiting a place. Much as I may dine in different places
and be different things in those places be they all be in the same city, so
too with getting old we may shift our guise if we choose too. We may chose
to occupy a diiferent place in old age than the place we thought we would
end up in.

In The Places We Go, there is this tying together of time and space. One of
the key places is The Waiting Place, a place that incorporates time and
place (and one to be avoided).

If you have read this so far, thanks. It is something of a muddle of Monday
morning thoughts. And now I must go, for it is time to go and I must leave
this place for another. Time and place.
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Sent from my BlackBerry Handheld.