Abstract
This paper is an excursion in non-representational thought. The primacy of movement charges this creative geography. Movement as sensation, thought, matter and memory crystallizes in ongoing assemblages (effects) we term selves and landscapes. This movement ontology is animated by a stream of thought running through Bergson, Deleuze, and Massumi, and by Ingold’s temporality of landscape. Memory is vital, as past (virtual) and present (actual) coexist, pushing forward in duration, the dynamic continuation of movement and sensation. David Lynch’s film, The Straight Story, offers dramatic illustration of the entanglement of movement, memory, and landscape. Landscape is emergent as relational lines of movement, an ongoing meshwork of practices and movement signatures. Alvin Straight’s paced journey through Iowa on a John Deere lawn mower during autumn harvest is a road to reminiscence and reconciliation, an American sublime. Lynch’s movement-images and soundscapes are sensorial undulations that illumine landscape as movement of incorporation, ‘dwelling’ in the moment to moment, geographies of care. The take-home message is that we are nothing more and nothing less than agents, next selves, ‘passing’ through. The collective trace of our ‘passings’ constitutes the making and remaking of place.
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Notes
The Straight Story is a 1999 film by Asymmetrical Productions. The director is David Lynch; the writers are John Roach and Mary Sweeney. Freddie Francis is the cinematographer and the musical score is composed by Angelo Badalamenti.
Mitch Rose (2006) extends his work on animating landscape with attention to ‘care’ in the essay, “Gathering ‘dreams of presence’: a project for the cultural landscape.”
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McHugh, K.E. Movement, memory, landscape: an excursion in non-representational thought. GeoJournal 74, 209–218 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-008-9222-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-008-9222-0
Keywords
- Non-representational thought
- Movement
- Memory
- Landscape
- Sublime
- Geographies of care
- Next selves