TL;DR–Places are always constructed and dynamic, never stationary, and rarely purely natural.
It’s easy to forget that the Civil War was fought on a planet spinning at a thousand miles an hour while it hurtled through space going 67,000 miles per hour around the sun.
Our civil war is a hyper object—a massive thing that weighs heavily against the fabric of history. The minutiae of the conflict and its broad scope represent immense challenges to subject mastery.1 We struggle to get our arms around the whole thing. Many—myself included—choose to pick apart tiny corners of the thing to get even the smallest taste of understanding.
Fashioning the amorphous flood of sources and sentiments that fed into, crystallized, and erupted from the war years has occupied the efforts of generations’ worth of historians far more talented than I. Standing on their shoulders affords an opportunity to step back and question a necessary evil of Civil War historiography.
For simplicity’s sake, much of history is built on the assumption that historical subjects are actors on a stationary stage. They deliver their lines and act out their arcs. We applaud or hiss. The theater remains roughly the same. The boards that absorb so much shoe leather wear out in place. We can predict where the curtain will fall and where all the exits are.
The existing stable state model is brilliant in use cases where it’s appropriate to obsess over the events of a single afternoon. As soon as you begin to wonder about longer stretches of time, a certain uneasy shifting can be felt beneath the feet. This is seasickness; a deep understanding that you are in motion married to a constructed conviction that you remain in place.
Maybe this explains why Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote were content to follow the armies through the war. The momentum of retrograde maneuvers and brave advances masks the nauseating churn of life in a dynamic world.
I am not so lucky. My area of expertise belongs less to the soothing swing of great campaigns and more to the queasy undulations of an idea called place.
Grappling with a fragment of a watershed—thirteen square miles of uncelebrated creek valley, forest, and thicket in Northern Virginia—invites the frequent use of the single most destabilizing word in the English language: why.
Why did roads appear? Why did populations concentrate where they did? Why have people been drawn to this place for thousands of years? Why does this valley rarely appear in histories of the Civil War? Why is there mounting evidence that this place nonetheless figured prominently in the conflict?
The simple answer is also the most compelling: it’s complex.
All places are complex. Any attempt to argue otherwise is futile and foolish. This also explains why we avoid wrestling with the complexity of place when we tell stories. Simplicity in setting foregrounds humans and magnifies their agency. We are a vain species, after all. One that loves telling stories about ourselves. Sharing the limelight with the inanimate has never been our forte.
Personally, I think the time is right to invert that pattern. In an age of influencers and celebrity-worship, it can feel cathartic to decenter people from narratives. Besides, we live in the Anthropocene where we’re keenly aware of our impact on the natural world. So too, the increasing litany of catastrophic and unprecedented natural disasters invites a dialogue that frames the world as an ecosystem of phenomena and not necessarily a hierarchy with humanity sitting tall on top.
I want to share the framework I’ve explored as both corollary and necessary precondition to studying the place where I was raised. Like Deleuze and Guattari offer in “Of the Refrain,” “what is necessary is a simple figure in motion and a plane that is itself mobile.” Let’s stand still together for a second and let the world spin around us.2
Somersaulting Through Time
In a letter from December 1817, John Keats credited Shakespeare’s success to an esoteric psychological skill set that could be useful for our purposes. “I mean negative capability,” Keats wrote, “that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”3
Negative capability—the ability to embrace uncertainty and allow contradicting impulses to exist side by side without feeling the need to subordinate one beneath the other—is valuable when considering places.
The Virginia Site and Soil Evaluation advises that “a landscape is a collection of related landforms.”4 A monolithic face fractures into many smaller components upon closer inspection. Still deeper analysis reveals a wide variety of constituent parts therein: rocks and plants and animals. All of which have different properties that respond to one another in different ways. Over a long enough timeline, higher level forces like tectonics or climate cause these supposedly inert forms to collide and act upon each other.
Systems of systems is probably the best way to put it, because living and non-living facets of the natural world that share spaces adapt or conform to one another in interesting ways that support or squash certain modes of life. Other groupings flourish nearby and the adjacencies where they collide—the infinitely prolific ecotones—incubate still other forms of life. There is an inexpressible complexity to this physical world.
At a raw level of first nature set to the tempos of deep time where the impact of humankind is barely a trifling concern, our complex world and its many landscapes express a dynamic equilibrium. There is no single story or narrative that can render these spaces in high-fidelity. Instead, it’s worth considering that the supposedly straight forward track of natural systems is actually the mean tally of the contradictory net forces pushing against one another to constitute that place. Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis put it best whey they describe systems as gyroscopic shock absorbers that find balance by “adapting to a continuous pull in opposing directions.”5
This alone might be enough to challenge preconceptions about the stage upon which human events play out, but this model of dynamic equilibrium needs to be augmented and amplified before it’s sufficient. Assuming that nature is a closed loop neglects an impactful force on the world: human agency.
Landscape phenomenologist Christopher Tilley describes the deceptively invisible and impactful human/nature interfaces that exist in every place. Says Tilley, “A centered and meaningful space involves specific sets of linkages between the physical space of the non-humanly created world, somatic states of the body, the mental space of cognition and representation and the space of movement, encounter and interaction between persons and between persons and the human and non-human environment.”6
Murray Bookchin offered a version of these same ideas wrapped in the more conversational shorthand of social ecology. Bookchin’s theories elaborate on models depicting a sum of processes shaping the natural world by suggesting that human processes entangle themselves with the natural world. This social dynamic finds abstract patterns like philosophy, culture, cosmology, psychology, and economics honing concrete behaviors like agriculture, land use, building science, infrastructural development, and transportation that both act upon the physical world and are acted upon by this same material world in kind.7
Just as succession patterns and system stabilizing responses in the natural world channel the reverberations of impactful events in the distant past, human processes focus, interpret, and sublimate a long dependency chain of perceived pasts.
For better or for worse. Often these pasts are not entirely pleasant. Yesterday’s tragedies have a way of becoming the bone broth starter for the soupy morass we humans float through today.
In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk offers scientific proof of an intuitively understood phenomenon, by which trauma lives in the body of the traumatized. “Long after the actual event has passed,” says Van Der Kolk, “the brain may keep sending signals to the body to escape a threat that no longer exists.”8
These signals are powerful enough that they do not die with the body, but communicate downwards by genetic inheritance through the branches of the family tree. What one acutely self-aware sufferer might recognize as an inorganic behavior learned by a person to overcome a traumatic event has the potential to propagate, broaden, and ultimately crystallize from an informal reaction into a rigid cultural form.
Thomas Moynihan elaborates a particularly bleak take away from this mode of thinking that bridges epigenetic behavior with long term physiological evolution. In Spinal Catastrophism, Moynihan postulates that the human neural system itself is a refined pattern of pain responses. Moynihan eventually asks a question designed to draw electric pangs of anxiety from the sacrum up to the brain stem: “What is a spine and a brain other than a way for trauma to enter into self-relation and to recollects its history?”9
If this reactive, solipsistic, long-suffering articulation of trauma shapes behaviors that ultimately pour into relationships with and on space, it is not alone. In one of his more cogent and conciliatory passages, Nick Land pours the foundations for a model of earth history he coins “geotrauma.” Here, ancient catastrophes ripple forwards in time and leave marks on the natural world in much the same way human history sears itself into generations of homo sapiens.
“Fast forward seismology,” Land quips, “and you hear the earth scream.”10
These traumatic ecologies—be they natural or humanistic—have become the subject of intense inquiry under the auspices of Chaos Theory. A sub-sect of which obsesses over “complex adaptive systems.” This school of non-linearity eschews the idea that world dynamics achieve a laminar forward flow. As if to borrow from the dynamic model, complex adaptive systems study the push and pull of contradictory forces that nudge, shove, or draw systems—including geologic landscapes, biomes, and human societies—into “basins of attraction” that are intensely sensitive to initial conditions. Crucially, a sensitivity to yesteryear’s horror, be it the collision of continents or the Thirty Years War, affects the properties that emerge when all this complexity stews together.11
Suddenly the static stage has absorbed all of human history as a mere foot lamp in a higher drama with huge arcing feedback loops and possibilities for tectonic ruptures. It’s almost too much to handle. Our world has been and continues to be shaped by energetic and often painful cross-currents that resemble more the sheer patterns and shifting track models of a hurricane than the steady simplicity of a road map.
The easiest way to begin to come to grips with the immensity of potentials from which our spatially-rooted existence has been carved is to consider its most accessible expression: place. As Susanne Kuchler theorizes, landscape is memory.12 For an astute observer staggering beneath the existential weight of complex trauma that informs our world, braiding these forces in an understanding of place can be a tremendous relief.
The earth is striated and scarred. It has been plotted, carved up, extracted from, augmented, folded, flooded, and burned in ways that bear silent testament to intensely intriguing and immensely concerning narratives of both nature and mankind.
Interpreting this world requires a change in language to accompany a change in perspective. Gone are the actors from the old stage. In their place, we struggle to articulate a vomitorium of effects: variability, resilience, persistence, resistance, sensitivity, surprise, possibility, aspiration, colonization, erosion, weathering, wasting, and cohesion. This is the language of complex places. A phraseology of slippery focus where man and its domain cannot be fully separated from one another.
Perceptive Divide
These negotiations are rough as is. Taking spaces for granted only to have some blogger inculcate you into a deep time network of complex power dynamics is its own trauma.
Unfortunately, we haven’t gone far enough yet.
If we perceive place as a system of contradictory impulses negotiating itself, we owe it to ourselves to reconcile how similarly ambiguous interpretations buck consensus in the way humans see landscapes and negotiate their meaning.
Dickering about the when and where in natural histories demands that we quibble about the how and why in human perception. Like Heraclitus and his river, the species never produces the same mind twice. Rarely do two humans who have not been coerced into agreement by media of some form achieve natural consensus on their own.
As discussed previously, the thinking, perceiving brain is not a zero-degree device that enters the world free from bias. Thousands of years of ancestral experience leave fingerprints on our gray matter. So too, the earliest circumstances can drastically affect vision. Would Ted Kaczynski have become the Unabomber if he hadn’t have been put in full hospital isolation at nine months old? Could we have avoided the Holocaust if someone had just validated Adolf Hitler’s greeting card art? These are contingent, but important considerations.
In “The Beholding Eye,” D.W. Meinig connects the panoply of potential human perceptions to the all-important locus of place. Frameworks from the aesthetic to the historical to basic survival became archetypal relationships between mankind and its surroundings for Meinig, who prefaces the essay by offering wisely that “the individuality of places is a fundamental characteristic of subtle and immense importance to life on earth, that all human events take place, all problems are anchored in place, and ultimately can only be understood in such terms.”13
With so many adventures to choose between, Meinig accounts for the somersaulting variability of self-reference with which humans of similar backgrounds and shared geographies can embody so many divergent ideas about their habitat. Nostalgia, progressivism and barren doom co-exist with opportunism, radical indifference, and a blissful concept of infinite bounty in simultaneous and complex interrelationships.
Put simply: there is no single consensus, no exclusive ownership over the interpretation of place. Instead, another degree of complexity emerges in the form of parallax. Two people can look at the same place and have entirely different interpretations. Yikes.
An excellent example looms large in Fairfax County, Virginia, where a team of preservationists fought doggedly in the late-1980s against Jack Herrity, the development-inclined Chairman of the Board of Supervisors, to save the Chantilly Battlefield. Herrity saw the place’s highest and best use as a shopping mall while Ed Wenzel and Bud Hall felt the battlefield deserved preservation. You can guess where my allegiances fall. Even two decades later, people with whom I grew up and shared an identical education with felt very differently than I. Go figure.
Inevitable conflict between perceptions of purpose for place spill over into ruptures of scale. We delimit place and its processes in curious ways that are not uniform. This, in turn, begs another layer of complexity—time.
In what remains an avant garde curiosity deep in the complex adaptive system of historiography, Reinhart Koselleck bandied about the idea that continuity and rupture coexisted within recurring structures and phenomena of perceived time. The long and the short of his offering was that differing ideologies produced different awareness of temporal position. This accounts for the aching laments of people who perceive themselves as having been born too late or too soon or those who feel either bored to tears by their age or utterly frightened by its rapidity.14
The stratified temporal angle is important, because time is inherently bounded in space. If an ideology or inherited mentality can shape the way we understand the tempo and hour of our existence, it can surely translate into important variations in the way people perceive the vessel of time: place.
Storms of interdependent complexity that surround places are more than heady abstractions. They are productive, constitutive, definitive mechanisms for concrete things. Like a loom, human and natural systems interweave to create a geographic fabric in which history appears as flecks of color or texture.
The trick is to read the often confusing, if beautiful, patterns that splash and run across so much warp and weft. Magma cools and butts upwards before continents collide and bake the earth into a soil form that favors melting away against the last tendrils of glaciation so that a valley of alluvial soil set amongst calorie-rich acorn forests unfolds beneath a seam of white quartz suitable for the creation of hand tools, which was set at a confluence of ridges that became roads that later ushered a group of tobacco farmers down into that deep cut valley where they eventually learned to produce wheat before shepherding timber and sheep that their sons killed enthusiastically to preserve before the forests became fields for dairy and the fields became homes for people who used rare earth to make machines talk to one another—each successive generation interpreting and extracting from this same place.
Or at least that’s how I see it, because these same complex processes that have loomed the varied threads of Difficult Run together over millennia have woven me in place as well. This final conceit is the most important. I, too, am a complex person who is the product of a complex place. My genetic and cultural inheritance informs the way I act upon and interpret my place, which acts upon me reciprocally in ways I do not fully understand.
Don’t forget, Dan: you are in a complex place, hurtling through space away and toward things that are truly unknowable.