Mingling popular, commercial, national, and personal Christmas meanings

 

Around the time of Thanksgiving the Christmas lawn art goes up

The colorful and large pieces of store-bought lawn art attract some attention of passing traffic in mid-day, but at night the accompanying lights attached or internal to the inflatable figure stand out especially vividly. This business benefits from visibility on a main road in the city so they rotate the themes of lawn displays four or five times in the annual cycle: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, maybe Easter, possibly something patriotic from Memorial Day (end of May) weekend and into Independence Day (start of July). Without asking the proprietors it is hard to say what may be the mix of motivations or to estimate which of them is strongest: business name recognition/visibility, community spiritedness, tradition of the earlier proprietors or family memories, creative impulse to express publicly, and so on.

The figures in the photo include the 1966 cartoon adaptation of Dr. Seuss' (1957) How the Grinch Stole Christmas (reindeer dog and green Grinch), the Snowman from the 1964 stop-action animation of Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, and at the right edge of the frame, partly protected by the roof overhang, is the standard Santa Claus (or Saint Nicolas) figure in costume. Both of the Christmas TV special productions concern gift giving, cold weather, community spirit, and wishes fulfilled in spite of obstacles faced by the protagonist(s). And the Santa (or British and colonial Father Christmas) also has roots in the church calendar and stories, too. None of the figures quotes Bible scripture or sings church hymns, though. But this ensemble has a cultural logic that makes this mix of figures coherent.

There are many ways to view the scene, depending on one's own interests and beliefs about the best way to kindle a Christmas spirit and acknowledge the holiday's original and its present-day meanings. Some will foreground the happy, fun, and spendy feeling of the weeks before and maybe a few days after the December 25 calendar date. Others will mainly feel a communal and nation-sized synchronicity with fellow citizens all doing something along the lines of celebrating good things in life (or grieving the absence of those things due to recent losses, change in fortune or health, and nostalgia for not achieving remembered and imagined heights of Christmas celebrating). Worshipers organized into religious bodies will celebrate congregationally with seasonal food and music and orders-of-worship to retell the story of Jesus' birth and its lead up, too. A few may resist the headlong consumerist compulsory gift-giving and disengage from the swirling mass media, pop culture, and annual merry-making; not disrespecting all those others enjoying themselves, but withdrawing from the general busyness of the season and clinging to the somber theme of the shortest days and weeks of the Earth's rotation around the Sun at winter solstice. None of this approaches is mutually exclusive of the others since a person can feeling all of these things to some degree in sequence or at the same time. Many others have religious life other than the Christian calendar at the end of the year (or none at all). So all the special efforts present a prominent, dominant, but otherwise low-relevance repeat each year.

Compared to 50 or 100 years ago, some dimensions of the Christmas season remain the same, while others bear little resemblance to what came before. As a young child the whole transformation of routines at home and out in public is wondrous and seems effortless: it just happens, like a force of nature. As an older child there is less magic and more active participation in the making of Christmas decoration, food, atmosphere and socializing. As an adult with or without children there is much more involvement in producing Christmas for others to see, to participate, and to reflect on prior experiences, too. So those life-cycle perspectives probably are similar in 2023, 1973, or 1923. But the scale, expense, and excesses of the business cycle of today surely dwarf the way things went in those earlier lifetimes.

Seeing this photo in daylight, or again against the darkness of short days, the first spark of meaning from the season's figures brings a smile of recognition and the associated positive memories when having first seen the stories they belong to. But by thinking beyond that initial reaction, it turns out that there are many layers of meaning, depending on a person's age, formative years (decade), budget, social obligations and network, primary connection to the holiday (religious or not, businessperson or not, USA born or newly immigrated) and so on.

Seeing lives from prehistory versus through written records (history)

 

Maiden Castle hillfort (c.600 BCE); Ft. Geo. Ardersier (1745)

In his 2010 book, The Making of the British Landscape, How we have transformed the land, from prehistory to today (Allen Lane, Penguin Books), archaeologist Francis Pryor looks at the land and by extension the people across the centuries. Being able to read the visible traces of earlier activity and then to posit the probable lives of that time and place is a kind of alchemy that is similar to outdoors experts who can read the traces of human and animal activity that most others do not notice; or if they seize upon a meaningful sign, their bank of experience and knowledge cannot visualize the significance of it by itself and in the larger context of the place and time. But in the case of the cultural landscape, there are major differences in available sources of information to supply hints, corroboration, and comparison.

Being a prehistorian first, Pryor is particularly at home in the lives and lands before written records began to be made. Not all documents persist for people today to study, of course, but there are enough sources to fill in a lot of detail; sometimes personalizing the place or event. In a very few cases, glimpses of the prehistoric societies encountered by the literate outsiders leaves some description, too; for example, Pytheas the Greek, who included an account of people met in Prytannia (Britannia) in c. 325 BCE. In general, though, the archaeological lens for looking at lives ancient or modern depends on physical objects and their surroundings - big picture of the time as well as in the immediate context of other finds of similar vintage and what came before and after in layers of deposition. As such there is an unvarnished honesty when looking at aftermath of activity and the actions of time.

By contrast, the lens of history privileges written records first and only secondarily (if at all) turns to the physical record of excavation and layout of cultural landscape for confirmation (or challenge) to the interpretation woven from the threads pulled from documents and sometimes visual media, too. An innate difference between the world of logic, logos, verbal expression versus the material traces of livelihoods and locations both public and private is that words can easily slip between fantasy and reality, fake and genuine. In other words, the writer can include aspirational along with actual description whereas the artifacts and their settings almost never are deliberately staged for the benefit of latter day excavators to find. That is a qualitative contrast. As well, often there is a quantitative difference for some centuries and parts of the world: written records by locals or outside observers can many times be abundant, compared to the merest traces of long-ago prehistory extracted from soil, layouts, and environmental records fitting that period of investigation. In other words, both lenses can be usefully applied to understanding times gone by, and by extension, to look at the present day, as well.

The above snapshot collage of pages 268ff (Maiden Castle hillfort) and 524ff (Fort George) from Pryor's 2010 book nicely illustrates the different lens quality and quantity when using archaeology or history to understand a place and time visible today in the cultural landscape. When the author is describing what is visible, confidently known, and reconstructed is a mix of reasonable conjecture from similar excavations and time periods then the pages of his book quickly go from one page to the next in a smooth panoramic sweep of big picture that alternates with close attention to detail and individual lives connected to the spot. In the second half of his career, Pryor has ventured into all parts of the British historical landscape, avidly consulting historical experts, their interpretations, and the (primary) source documents they depend upon. In these chapters there is rich detail and wide-angle context, too. But since he can write something like an historian while also being an archaeological thinker who keeps his feet, his trowel-wielding hands, and his sharp eyes accustomed to spotting tiny but sometimes telling fragments on the ground. But from a reader's point of view, how do the chapters differ before history is recorded and after history becomes available?

Perhaps the best analogy is family genealogy writing and knowing the past that goes with it. The people in one's family tree that are part of living memory are real, three-dimensional lives and places and events. There is so much more than birth-marriage-death (BMD) dates and sometimes locations. There are personal habits, preferences, high and low-points in the person's life, aspirations and hurdles run into. In short, the amount of detail is rich and includes many dimensions that leave no record in writing or the material traces of artifacts made, bought, or used, nor the (built) landscape associated with the person or persons. This degree of personal knowledge and personality is analogous to the rich sources sometimes available to historians for their lens on past life. 

On the other hand, going back in time before one's own living memory, there may be stories associated with the generation before that; or maybe in one or two cases the story could predate that generation beyond living memory and come from the one before it. Going back in time even further from the present, though, unless there are published materials and public records (including photos or visual art), the most that a genealogist can know are the BMD dates and locations. From those meagre facts, though, a little of the person's life can be inferred from the dominant employment available in that day and place; from local and more distant events the ancestor would know or at least be affected by; and based on technological innovations (and the forms of accomplishing work and life that were displaced by that innovation). In other words, a certain amount of the BMD can be fleshed out in a reasonable way: did the ancestor die young or old, of natural causes or some other circumstance, was it a large family of siblings and later family of offspring or small, was the person male or female, rural or urban, highly educated or not, low-middle-high wealth, physically imposing or slight (when body details can be known), affiliated with formal religion or not, and so on. This sort of educated guessing does exercise the imagination, but like a good detective story it can sometimes be surprisingly accurate in suppositions; other times with erroneous elements, though. Whereas the genealogy for ancestors of living memory is analogous to the historian's lens. This more distant genealogy sleuthing corresponds to the archaeologist's lens, relying on context and inferences by induction (surrounding conditions that guide the guessing) and deduction (firmly established facts that can extrapolate to one implication after another).

In the case of The Making of the British Landscape (2010), Francis Pryor necessarily writes of the oldest places and events, technologies and economies, rituals and cycles without knowing names or genealogical relationship of the players in the picture. But for the Roman occupation (43 to 410 CE) there are sometimes names and personality traits recorded, including occasional genealogy to include in the version of events being recounted or lists recorded (e.g. ancient historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (d. 120 CE) was son-in-law to General Agricola who was active in Britain during the historian's lifetime. In other words, prehistorians normally dig up places, including bodies, anonymously. Historians more commonly scrutinize their subject with named characters. In the case of Historical Archaeology, there is a mix of digging in the ground and digging in the documents, surveying the landscape and surveying the literature. And when proposed excavation sites are not anonymous, sometimes a living descendant will object. That is unlikely for archaeology of ancient kingdoms of Egypt or the less ancient civilizations of Meso-America, but for Korean nobles from 2000 years ago, there are still some families that tie themselves to those ancestors and so excavations have been very few and thus have been approached in this non-anonymous way.

Reading Pryor (2010) straddles the anonymous (prehistorical cultural landscapes and stages of development) and the non-anonymous (historical places, people, events, developments) chronologies. The first chapters are dominated by inference, detective work, and rolling up sleeves to get maps and hands dirty in the physicality of a place and stratum of lives unearthed at a particular depth. As such the writer and the reader freely sweep from imagined individuals or the terrain that is physically measured and the particular settings known through empirical work on site on the one hand and the much bigger picture he refers to in the environment, in the types of habitat used, and in the movements of people over the landscapes on the other hand. When he writes about events brimming with written material, then the nature of the inquiry changes from filling in blanks with probable and reasonable (generic) details to filling in the blanks with names (sometimes faces, too, on statue or other visual media) and events. In other words, the tone and intentionality change from generic to specific; from non-documentable individual lives to people with some kind of paper trail.

Naturally, a different lens produces a different visual impression. Reading The Making of the British Landscape (2010) and its tip of the hat to Hoskins' The Making of the English Landscape (1954), there is a definite sea change when Pryor's interpretations are enriched by a layer of written source material. He does not switch hats from being an archaeologist to being a card-carrying historian, though. Instead, he sees places and people as a prehistorian while also making full uses of available written accounts and primary documents on which those writings are based, too. The interplay of anonymous and non-anonymous social observation and analysis puts the subject into a different light. By using both kinds of light, a particularly valuable portrait is possible to paint for others to see.

Living high and living low near the Grand River

Lighted north-south passage under the bridge protects campers from prevailing west wind

 Fall colors point to the winter nights ahead for the many downtown residents living outside of traditional housing for private or for group residence. Shelters may not always be full, but some prefer their own company no matter what the weather may bring. Day centers allow warming up, as do public places like the bus terminal and library. When the problem is heat of summer, not cold of winter, then the same public places and a few dedicated "cooling centers" also are open in the heat of the day.

This photo is from October 2023 in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. The juxtaposition of one of the multi-story condominiums or apartment rental buildings puts the thin fabric of 21st century tents in stark contrast. With many gaping cracks in the USA system of social, medical, mental health, financial and educational support, even relatively secure members of society can go through a series of unfortunate events and have no fixed abode; sometimes sleeping in car or truck and other times losing even that piece of personal property. Perhaps some segments of the city dwellers in ancient Roman also went through loss of means, of property, of dignity, too. But for 2023's "richest" country it seems impossible that cities and also rural areas across the continental USA and indeed in all states and territories count among their residents so many who are visibly unhouses; and many others who "pass" (not visibly unhoused).

Described in the language of computer studies, this problem of no roof over one's head is the result of at least three categories of failure. One is "hardware"; that is, places and physical standards of minimum care, wellness checks, and so on. Another is "software"; that is, policies and organized groups of people, but also social institutions both religious and secular to serve those lacking an address. Finally, there is "heart-ware"; that is the often unwritten rules, expectations, reward and punishments woven into the relationships, attitudes and ideals of the society. In 2023 USA the overpowering celebration of youth, consumerism, and rugged individualism all contribute to "making invisible" people who do not fulfill these models. A person who is no longer youthful, who has no discretionary income to spend, and who does not strive to be some kind of Epic Hero does not attract praise or even validation of their identity and place in life. 

Museum reflections - "a machine for learning"

Elephant ivory carving, probably 1820s Japan

The Japanese-influenced architectural giant in USA of 100 years ago, Frank Lloyd Wright, is credited with the saying that "a house is a machine for living." The meaning is that particulars of interior spaces affect patterns of movement and rest, sight lines and ease (or hindrance) of speaking to each other. Availability of light (from windows or artificial sources) affects where a person dwells for work or leisure, too. The same is true of offices and factories; not just residential settings. Using this same way to describe the functional activity for museum-goers interacting with subjects framed and labels, one can say "a museum is a machine for learning and reflection." In other words, people who work or who visit a museum can efficiently learn about things they seek answers to, but also discover questions they did not expect to have. Some museum designs (architecture) and arrangement of displays (curation) will be better at producing learning results than others: putting things in the right order (from surface to depth) and in the right variety (theme versus variation) and in the right amount (neither too much information, nor too little), for example.

This photo from the Grand Rapids Public Museum in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan shows one of a small number of carved ivory figures on public display from East Asia as part of the permanent exhibition. It is part of the section that presents uses of ivory (elephant, walrus, narwal, and so on). The figurines date to the 1800s and therefore depict artful portraits of that time, or possibly in a slightly nostalgic turn, they imagine the clothing and livelihoods of the maker's grandparents' time. In that sense this is a kind of snapshot, frozen in time; either of the time in which the carver lived, or one imagined from before the carver's own direct experience. As such the museum visitors who decide to stop long enough to glimpse or to scrutinize the craftwork, or who follow the marked "2" nearby to read the corresponding label text, below, may learn something new about the place and the time; or they may think about the larger topic of this section of the museum and see the relationship between hunters, merchants, artists, and art-buyers (and then museums that inherit the pieces from private owners). Reflecting on the artifact in another way, though, this 1800s "snapshot" is a window to its place and time. That brings up the question about a time traveller who visits a future museum display to see the craftwork of 2023 makers. What could possibly be analogous to this ivory handiwork? So many things today are mediated with digital devices that it is hard to see the fingerprints of the creator in the finished item. Leaving aside the virtuoso use of tools, a related question for 2023 artifacts is what the figure would look like: ethnic attributes, choice of formal or informal attire, action depicted? Relatively few people catch fish, and fewer still go onto the water using paddle-power. Maybe the 2023 statuette would be 3-D printed from a snapshot source to capture a person on an eScooter in baggy clothing and one-ear plugged with earbud and dangling wire leading to phone in pocket.

Part of "People of this Place" permanent exhibition of Native Americans around Michigan

Getting back to the "machine for learning and reflection" idea, this next photo from the museum is filled with loaned artifacts from many families around Michigan. There are photos, video kiosks scrolling some images and text, as well as looping movies using subtitles to minimize noise in the gallery, artifacts old and new, home-made and store-bought, direct quotes and curator commentary. In order to help visitors orient themselves to the issues and settings, artifacts and illustrations are grouped into several parts of the floorplan. People who make many short visits can add more and more learning with each time they read and look carefully at the materials. People who make a once-in-a-lifetime visit can add to their store of knowledge and awareness, too, although the amount and kinds of information is so great that a single engagement with the displays is not enough to get a full understanding of "People of the Place." These observations are true of non-Indian museum-goers. Those who have artifacts in the exhibition, or have no materials on display, but know some of the people featured, or who count themselves among Michigan's Native Americans will likely have a different way of seeing what is behind the glass of the display cases. In all visitors, though, the museum is a "machine for learning and reflection," as well as site for researchers, artists, writers, and others to add to their knowledge, experience, and way of seeing things.

Ripping out bushes on October 18 for museum expansion project

This last photo shows the first stages of the museum expansion project. Large outdoor display pieces have been placed out of the way, fencing around the construction site is installed, and now the excavator rips the bushes from the edge of the broad sidewalk to make way for digging the foundations of the new addition. Just as the 1993 museum organizes its architecture into spaces for object-based learning, now the new building will also grow from blueprint to foundations and skeleton, to fully finished interiors for the curators to complete with their displays, signage, and amenities for visitors and staff, too. In this way the principle of "machine for learning and reflection" is reproduced in the current generation to reach into the future for people there to engage with the subjects on display.

Quest for ancestors' lives, places, and legacies

 

West Michigan Genealogical Society guest speaker Oct. 7, 2023

From 1:30 to 3:30 members of the public and of the Genealogical Society got together for the monthly meeting at the auditorium of the Grand Rapids Public Library to listen to advice and anecdotes from a long-time professional ancestor researcher. She spoke this time about the kinds of sources online and in public libraries that one can tap into remotely; not having to be physically present with printed matter. Although she sometimes travels to verify grave details, chase down archives without any digital presence or indexing (or local colleagues to help do the search), the majority of her work is carried out from a computer at home. After several decades helping many clients find their roots, her database of individuals numbers about 70,000 names.

Something like 50 people were in the audience, mostly above the age of 50 or 55. Perhaps it is most natural to take a personal interest in ancestry around that time as one's own parents and grandparents have died or are dying. One's own mortality usually comes next in order, although there are also many examples of a child dying before the parent. Thinking about the wealth of digital sources and ways to find and then engage with them, the present moment is a particularly fine time to pursue family trees. Much like the detective skills of TV dramas, there is also an art to building up a mental picture of the person one is chasing after. The transformation of a living person with a history and with aspirations to become a mere mention in the branching structure of a family tree seems inevitable as stories, images, and preferances are seldom recorded or written down, hence lost to memory. But turning the bare details of name, dates, locations into something more three-dimensional and palpable takes a little imagination.

Looking at the transformation from 3-D person filled with life to flattened, streamlined name and dates can be sobering when considering one's own place in the tree; an ancestor yet to be. And even if somebody in the distant future were to wonder what sort of person was one's own self, there are limits to what that can know. Perhaps there are video clips and photos that describe some of one's moments and decisions. Finding a signature invokes a kind of surrogate presence; a proxy for one's own hand and by extension, one's whole self. Anything you author may partly reflect something of one's voice and worldview, too. Personal writing like journals, diaries, or letters offer a lifelike trace of oneself. But even if a future person had the benefit of all these sorts of clues, along with the generalized context of the historical moment, probate records of one's chattels at time of death, and census records of basic household particulars for a place and a time, the resulting composite image of the person would not be filled with breath, words, and glint of eye. So bringing the names on a family tree back to life is only a dim reflection of what was once a fully formed social calendar and cultural landscape.

Deduction is a powerful way to invent some probable details of the person's life, based on contextual circumstantial particulars. The state of the art for medicine, transportation, (tele)communication, and so on can be pictured for most points in history and possibly fine-tuned according to location (rural vs. urban, semi-tropical vs. temperate) and social patterns for people similar in socioeconomic status (education, employment, wealth). According to the guest speaker, though, until about 1960 many local papers would chronicle individual accomplishments, travels, and other notable experiences of interest to the general readership. These "society pages" gradually disappeared after that, though. But finding one's ancestor's doings there can bring them back to life, if only for a moment; making them flesh and blood, again, something greater than the "born__ - died__" hyphenated lifespan. See the guest speaker's notes and illustrations in blog form at https://genealogyframeofmind.blogspot.com .

Putting one's branching ancestry into visual representation produces a fan of bifurcating lines, something like the branches radiating from a central tree trunk. But the custom of following a single surname on the father's side leads to less effort and therefore knowledge of the surnames collateral to the father's own line, and neglect sometimes of the bloodline of the mother, as well. When asked how many generations to travel back in time before the many lines are too confusing or blurring into a point of relatedness to thousands of others, the guest speaker said her practice is to continue until there are no more records to go back in time.

In an immigrant society, one's own image (presentation of self) and one's own abilities for successfully doing particular products and services is more highly valued than one's status resting in a family name. In other words, you see yourself and others define you by what you DO, not WHO you are. As a result, roots and relatives are overshadowed by the luster of gainful work and peer-praised recognition. But by middle age and into elder years, the urge grows stronger to know one's roots and to know where one fits into the larger family tree. The surprises turned up in the genealogy process may be happy or sad, or something in-between. But thanks to software and personal computers interacting with online databases, there is a pretty good change that one's searches will bear fruit: names and dates will come up. Then it remains to turn the dust-dry data points into real lives, if only long enough to trace into the family tree in fullest form.

It's a deer's life (urban park particulars)

wetland and surrounding park in north Grand Rapids, MI

What once was considered waste land too wet to drain and too thickly filled with plant and animal life for housebuilding is now seen by residents and other visitors as a jewel in the city landscape of streets, parking lots, residential, industrial, and commercial developments. In 30 to 40 minutes of easy walking a person can circle the park on a paved trail and its recently replaced boardwalk. Early in the morning the deer and birds have the place to themselves. On weekends and some evenings during the summer in the adjacent park area, converted into parking lot and multiple baseball fields, there can be a lot of commotion from shouts and cheers and the sound of pinging aluminum bats hitting softball or baseball pitches. But on this weekday around the time of sunrise, all is quiet except for songbirds and their predators.

Seeing this deer nibbling grass and another one elsewhere pulling down low-hanging leafy branches to eat, thoughts about the deer habitat and their Umwelt world of experience in the city comes to mind. Apart from residential lawns, school grounds, and a few golf courses around town, there are not too many woodlots and wetlands within the city limits. So basic needs of small, medium, and large wildlife is very much limited to these ecological islands of food, water, safety and shelter. In the space of one deer lifetime a fawn has to survive the springtime "starvation season" when weather can be cruel and food sources are limited. If the creature reaches adulthood, then the time of mating and reproducing the species is uppermost. Hunters with the appropriate license during fall and early winter may kill some bucks and does in the countryside, but in the city limits there is relatively little chance of death by arrow or bullet. Injury or death by car collision is not uncommon, though. Some animals may survive just one cycle of reproducing young, but others may last two or sometimes three seasons. Eventually, though, by disease or collision each deer will breathe its last breath. The carcass may feed scavengers or be hauled away by the city's parks and recreation workers who collect roadkill. There may be few deer that reach a ripe old age, but this pattern of reproducing and dying before too long does result in a steady population.

Seen from a human perspective, it may feel suffocating to live one's whole life in small islands of green, surrounded by pavement, fast-moving cars, and parking lots. From birth to death is just a matter of 30 or 40 months at most and in that time each deer needs to learn survival skills to find food, water, shelter and safety away from cars. Once an animal's replacement number is born and able to survive, then it is only a matter of time before accident or injury end the deer's life. 

In summary, measured relative to the "three-score and ten years" (70 years) that defines a full human life (at least in Biblical passages), the scope of travel and timeline for deer is much smaller. Of course, it is impossible to talk to deer about their perception of life's risks and rewards, but seeing this photo of a breakfasting deer and remembering the "big picture" for deer-dom of short lives and small circle of places to live in, there comes a twinge of melancholy since just one year from now the life in this (semi)wild creature may be ended one way or another as the next generation fills in the gaps in the herd.

______________________________________________________

Coda: The handful of houses bordering the south end of the park is now being bought up by a developer to erode the greenspace of the park habitat that hosts so many forms of life. So this island of green in the city will be just a little more littered with humans. Some online residents are sharing details of the developer's plans and are creating an online petition against any degrading of the parkland. But all through colonization of this Indian land and up to the present #ClimateEmergency money and development tends to trump habitat and natural complexity. With housing development comes noise and disruption of waterflow and deafening the space for birds and other creatures to communicate in. Doubtless more human-deer collisions and interactions will also arise. Things do not look too good for the deer in this case.

Telecommunication by voice first and then all the rest

from about 1999 to 2024 voice calls seem now to be secondary

When cellphones began to reach ordinary people, not just high-powered government and business people who needed to be just a phone call away from their office or clients, it was imagined as a cordless phone of unlimited mobility, no longer limited to the device's cradle transmission distance. Physical shape ('candybar' and later 'flip' or slide-open design) and presence of dedicated keypad had some likeness to landline phones and cordless ones, too.

With the addition of a crude camera,  people were puzzled: why add a camera when film and even the start of point-and-shoot digital cameras give better results as a dedicated device. But as cellphone cameras became better and even offered short video with synchronized sound, more and more people started to see the device as equally important for visual recording as it was for making and receiving phone calls. One result was the rise of photo sharing sites, increasing use of pictures in online communication, news gathering, publication and other professional purposes, as well as hobby uses.

The processing power and improving screen display (size and resolution, too) ramped up and makers of dedicated specialty apps attracted more and more interest, too. So what started as a new form of telephoning on the go, now became a (video) camera with the secondary use to make voice calls. As more and more people experienced the convenience of SMS text messaging, they substituted short messages for what used to be open-ended, sometimes meandering voice calls. That way the interaction was brief and the timing of the question or comment was less intrusive and less all-demanding of the person's attention. Sometimes even people on a date could be seen texting across the table instead of looking eye to eye in spoken dialog. State governments began to acknowledge the attention stolen by texting while driving and the deaths caused as a result of driver and sometimes also the victim struck who were staring at the screen of their portable device - whether it was cellphone (or smartphone) or tablet.

Now in summer 2023, there are people from all walks of life and in all sorts of locations intently gazing into their screens. Sometimes they are swiping, scrolling, using navigation gestures. Other times they are putting in text by thumb-typing or by using the dictation feature that often works. A few people may plug their ears with bluetooth earbuds as they playback a podcast, or listen to streamed radio stations for music or talk shows. And very occasionally they seem to be talking to themselves, but in fact are engaged in an old-fashioned voice call. In summary, what began as new-fangled way to carry a phone far beyond the range of cordless phones, now has made telephoning almost incidental or insignificant on a daily basis or cumulatively in the life-time of a cellphone. 

People pay a heftier price every couple of years, sometimes spending more money than they do for a full-size laptop or desktop computer of much larger capacity. But when more and more of your business and pleasure is mediated by the battery-powered device in your pocket or purse, then such prices can be rationalized in various ways. It is worth considering what may come next in this shift away from landlines at fixed locations and the diminution of voice communication even as other forms gain more and more use and attention (and expectation).

Making meaning in mind or heart or in the world, indoors or outdoors

 

Boardwalk to wetlands of Meijer Gardens - berries on leaf

Many walking paths and forest hiking routes seem to pass by a cairn, usually less than 1-foot in height. Sometimes it is near a camp site, other times at a river crossing, or by a log where people sit to rest. How this began (from ancient times in mountains of Scotland, Korea, maybe also in Himalaya routes, too) and why it should spread far and wide lately is a puzzle to figure out another day. But when it comes to marking a place (Biblical description of 'ebenezer' stone pile to mark an important event) physically or with a name, people seem predisposed to do so. Attaching language with land makes it convenient to refer to in conversation when others know that name and that location, too. It is a way to make meaning: give it a name, leave a mark. These days with digital devices a person can mark a location with a map pin or by taking a photo. So the many forms of making meaning now expands with each new way of interacting with the surroundings and with each other electronically.

This photo just an arm's length from the boardwalk fencing near the wetland area of Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park shows one person's mark: it could be a bit of artistic expression (all-natural elements; contrasting colors of red+green on a brown background), an act of well-intended kindness to an unknown wild creature to feast upon (or bait for a hunting animal to seize whatever ventures there to dine, or it could be altogether a mystery --somehow the person felt like doing this. Singly or in some combination these and other meanings could be part of the actions leading to this result. Of course, even without imposing human intentions onto the environment, there is preexisting meaning in the cycle of the day and night, the annual pattern of seasons, and the circle of life. A careful observer can see these meanings play out or interpret them indirectly when signs are there, something like reading a book or decoding a riddle.

Whether it is inserting human meanings and purposes into a scene or working to read the preexisting logic and tensions of the natural world on its own terms, people are hungry to make meaning or find it already there for them to discern. The lack of meaning or having no point seems worse than meaning that is misguided or interpretations that are incomplete or simply wrong; at least there is some form of meaning, out of tune though it may be.

Iron planet at surface, mantle, core and sewers

Cast iron replaced by newer pieces 5/2023 zip code 49505

 Normally these sturdy pieces of cast iron sit quietly out of sight in the ground and under the road surface. But for this fundamental rebuilding of the sewer line a few miles north of downtown Grand Rapids, one section at a time, the old pieces come out and the new ones go in. Thinking about the foundry products in the widest possible frame, it is worth seeing this collection from its source to its final destination. The service life between installation a few generations ago and just now being removed from service is only a small part of this iron's long life.

Going back to the formation of planet Earth and the circumstances that led to this iron ending up in iron ore that was close enough to the surface for humans with their mining gear to extract it, this life story can begin from those mines perhaps 50 or 100 years ago; very possible from the Mesabi (Missabi) Iron Range around Duluth, Minnesota or the iron ore sources in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Trucks moved the ore to crush it to sizes suitable for rail travel to the lakeshore loading ports where waiting ore carriers hundreds of feet long took on the ore and delivered it to mills where iron could be separated from the rock; maybe Gary, Indiana or Cleveland, Ohio, for example. Depending on market prices and customer requirements the newly pooled iron could go to one of several processes to end up for use in cast-iron, steel sheets, rods, beams, or thinly rolled form. The pieces in this photo all are cast-iron products of specialty foundries like the ones at Neenah, Wisconsin and East Jordan Iron Works (EJIW) in northwest Lower Michigan.

Local governments will order cast-iron pieces for sewer lines and water supply to create and maintain their infrastructure and basic services. Accidents, upgrades and newer technology, and wear and tear of age all lead to the retirement of the old pieces with new replacements, as shown in this example. Thanks to a profitable market for certain scrap metals, it is probable that one or two years from now these old pieces will be reborn as another type of cast-iron fixture. The energy to mine, crush, transport, smelt, do business, and arrange delivery to final user is many times more expensive than to bypass the first steps and begin from smelting, foundry, and delivery. Of course, each municipality is different: some may take this heap directly to the scrap buyer or foundry operations. Others may wait to fill a railcar or two before transacting the sale. For small towns, it could be that heaps are built up for many years before they look for a rising market price to sell their scrap. So without knowing the details in this city, it is hard to predict where these pieces go next, where they end up in a few years, and how long this cycle of use and recycling for recasting (reuse) goes on into the future. But as long as this kind of civilization with sanitary treatment of wastewater and door to door supply of clean water continues, there is no reason to think that iron will not be in demand over and over again, century after century.

In the case of ghost towns, evacuated disaster sites, and other catastrophic situations, though, the pieces of cast-iron in the ground may well remain untouched and unused indefinitely. Fast forwarding thousands of years, if there is moisture and oxygen in the surrounding soil then the process of rusting eventually will turn the solid forms into flaking particles, not bound into ore but still distributed in the soil structure as an orange or reddish coloration in the ground. Thus, there are many story arcs for iron present at the Earth's origins and once mined then fashioned into useful products to be used, scrapped and remade anew again and again, except in a few cases when the structures are abandoned. The ones in this picture, though, seem likely to go to a fiery future to be remade by the foundry into somebody else's infrastructure taken for granted in daily use.

Roadwork today versus Roman Empire times

 

Sewer line replacement: road surface cut, 8-inch cast-iron pipe, fire-plug replacements [zip 49505]

Even 2000 years later much of the built landscape from Roman times can be seen in its original location, sometimes still functioning as road, bridge, aqueduct, retaining wall, or other engineering purpose. Other times the original structure is disassembled and pieces of stone end up in buildings of other centuries. Basic infrastructure like clean water supply and sewer removal of waste, efficient stormwater redirection, sturdy bridge and port facilities, and long-distance, durable road surfaces have stood the test of time. So for a person of that era to visit 2023 would be endlessly fascinating, no doubt, both for our tools and processes, but also to see how much has NOT changed in human needs and infrastructure functions.

Obviously, the petroleum powered machines, the vast amount of specialized steel found in many parts of the pipes, the equipment, and the non-power tools, as well, would amaze them. Image - a self-propelled vehicle. And the laying of hard road surfaces (and removing them) atop a roadbed that is more or less the same design as Roman Times would capture their attention, too. Maybe most amazing of all is the relatively small crew performing these tasks with the aid of massive machinery and fossil fuel engines (and plastics and other products coming out of petroleum). For ancient Romans to excavate sewer (or water) lines, replace pipes, then rebuild the roadbed and cover it with a hard surface would take hundreds of workers (slave or paid or corvee labor commandeered) and many more weeks than it does for the team of workers in 2023.

People speeding past in their modern, high-powered cars with windows up and air-conditioning or heating adding comfort to the trip, maybe entertained by radio or another medium, hardly think twice about road construction projects during the work season of March to November. But what goes unnoticed or taken for granted perhaps is equally important as the other things taken for granted, too: air, water, food, shelter, and so on.

Airports and "life is a journey"

Morning coffee line at Detroit Metro Airport, Saturday 2/18/2023

Liminal spaces and times connect a situation that was before and another one that is after the event or ritual. It is this in-between status that can be unsettling since it is neither here nor there. This 7:30 a.m. photo shows the terminal concourse traffic Saturday looking in the direction of the morning coffee drinkers lined up as others pass by in various states of leisure or haste. After 30 minutes the number doubled. People present at the airport gate area fit into many different types: foreign or domestic, seasoned travelers and first-timers, business and leisure, fulfilling a dream or fulfilling an obligation, variation in age-gender-generation-region-income/SES, group trip versus lone traveler, and so on. Then there are aircrew both new and old-hands who may know this "workplace" like the back of their hand. Similarly, the concessions workers know the concourse area very well, hardly paying attention to the ebb and flow of passengers and crew. Some workers are there daily, others are project or limited-time contractors. Still others are responsible for the infrastructure, rather than retail business with travelers: cleaners, security, maintenance, or the person in a high-visibility vest marked in all capital letters, "contract auditor" (employed from 3rd party lowest bid agency? or full-time airport worker whose job is checking on contract business performance?). 

Depending on the person's status (long-term home base in the terminal building versus just passing through to some distant destination), they will notice the surroundings of the place and the people there is different ways. Someone who knows the place like a "local resident" will see small changes or positive and negative details that people just passing through probably do not see or do not consider significant. A solitary traveler may be aware of the building, the weather, and go one to reflect on the subject or about any other topic that is triggered by airport impressions. But a couple, family, or group tour may confine their attention to the social bubble they occupy at the moment. Probably only an architecture or engineering fan will pause to scrutinize the concourse features and decisions going into the building. With travelers' and workers' minds in so many places, few will consider the long scale of weather changes, although momentary attention on a sunrise or sunset, stormy changes, and so on may draw the eye of many who are in the building.

This portrait from the Detroit Metropolitan Airport (DTW) on Saturday morning gives hints of the familiar metaphor about a lifetime or a daily frame of lived experience parallels the nature of leaving one's familiar home area to visit a place for the first time or one seen many times. For example, just like the diversity of people whose paths cross this morning, in life there is a similar intersection of strangers, occasionally punctuated by a spark of recognition when seeing someone known elsewhere. And the mild sense of anxiety when moving through an unfamiliar place like an airport concourse is also like the times of life when there is a lack of familiarity. Furthermore, the "tunnel vision" of travelers in search of their assigned gate fits with the kinds of people in life who focus on a goal to the exclusion of the surrounding situation and its ambience or possible meaning. As well, some people in the world are very much "passing through" rather than dwelling on the here and now of a locale: their body is present, but their mind is engaged with future plans and opportunities and threats. For people who see the world from the perspective of having arrived at the destination (not looking for someplace far away) like the concourse retail workers or the airport authority, there comes a sense of settled ease or non-striving. They are in their workplace, on duty, fulfilling employer expectations. Finally, the number of people who stop to reflect on all of this are relatively few and far between, too. If the airport represents a complex habitat with layers and layer of design and engineering know-how, most of those working or traveling take it all for granted, just like life itself that so often goes unexamined and unappreciated. So, watching the streams or food traffic of the airport terminal concourse offers a kind of mirror to the human experience: mortality, traveling alone or in the company of others, sometimes settled but other times on the way to other destinations. All these layers and facets intersect moment by moment, putting together fellow travels - of the airport, or of life's roads.

In conclusion, pause to look around at the many lives co-present and moving at different speeds. You may well see yourself in the picture, too.

Cultural landscapes - local knowledge versus outsiders' fresh eyes

Downtown Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin 1/2023

Thinking about cultural landscapes as I walked to my nearby grocery store, I imagined myself in a month or two immersed in my Japan project - biking and walking, on the lookout for features that attract my eye. The photos of traces from the past will serve as writing prompts so that I can explore the past (1875-1925) when infrastructure and modernization of mass-everything got going; and to appreciate what the society is now by contrast to then. Being able to "read" the landscape implies many things, things which set apart the people with local knowledge (deep or shallow) from those who have little or no way to fasten onto/tune into the surroundings.

This photo shows the old commercial district of the town, a place attracting buyers before the big box era of shopping centers at the outskirts of a town. For a first-time visitor one impression is the scale: this is comfortable to walk, possibly able to fit under the roof and footprint of a very large big-box store of today. A long-time local resident might know some of the shopkeepers and staff and may have purchased things over the years from some of the merchants. The cycle of annual events such as parades, debates and speeches, contests, seasonal decorations and entertainment will provide some memories of growing up in the area or the times as a parent with children of one's own. And even if not ready to spend money, being able to talk informally with a store owner about how to solve a problem is another way of making meaning here. Doubtless, a person of modest means will have a different set of relationships and memories in this scene than a person never wanting for money. And there could be patterns of difference in experiences by gender, age, ethnicity, religion, and so on, too.

What is called "local knowledge" has at least two dimensions. One is the ancient Greek distinction of Nomos/Physis (glossed as culture/nature, or perhaps subjective/objective). In the same way that Berlin and Kay did their famous color-chip sorting piles to discover where people of various language/cultures would make distinctions in the rainbow of the color palette (one calls it 'green' but another classifies it as 'blue'), so too of cultural vision of a place --one's own, or a place visited far from one's frame of reference, assumptions, meanings. That is to say, people local to a place are accustomed to labeling the cultural elements with familiar terms and distinctions. But outsiders may project their own understanding of what a thing is and how it could have value or else lack meaning. Or consider the metaphor of "Head Up Display" (HUD) used on fighter planes and now airlines, too: pilots looking through the front glass can also see useful and consequential information layered on top of what is outside in view. This is something like the way that terrain of infinite shades of gradation can be neatly labeled and divided into types or categories drawn from language or culture.

The other dimension of seeing the cultural landscape is based on meaning; not the labeling/projection phenomenon, above, but meaning in the sense of memories and personal involvement (not a spectator to a terrain, but an active agent with intention, purpose, meaning, expectation, precedents). A person who "knows" the place [important semantic play of Conocer (know personally) vs. Saber (know facts, analytics)  --Spanish example of separate "know" words that English lumps together] is able to see cultural capital (status level, past and present value, aesthetic degree of depth), and social capital (knowing names and relationships past and current of various residences, services, businesses; and knowing who to ask when solving any given problem), financial capital (past and potential/future sources of gain or risks of loss), and maybe linguistic capital (powers of verbal expression by voice or by writing). By contrast, a foreigner or even a citizen of the country who is unfamiliar with the locale, will lack almost all of the foregoing meanings that blanket the land, turning it from meaningless space to meaningful place.

Since I am an outsider to my Japan destinations planned for April and May 2023, but with some language and cultural experience and professional anthropology expertise of a general kind along with lived experiences gained by age, these many kinds of meaning will mostly be invisible to me. So, perhaps, I will have to imagine: granting the meanings to be all around and filling the terrain, even though I am practically blind and deaf to this local knowledge at the start.

In conclusion, locals with insider knowledge and layers of memory probably know their way around the physical plane and also the invisible terrain of events, personalities, and situations that are good or bad for one's own condition. Outsiders will faintly perceive only a fraction of all of those things. But a person who is looking out for the many meanings and sources of significance in a place is perhaps best positioned to see and to appreciate the worth of the many elements distributed around the terrain. For in-between the familiar and the taken-for-granted viewpoint of locals on the one hand, and the distant spectator stance of outsiders on the other, there is a flickering middle ground where some of the local meaning is hinted at and can be scrutinized to understand it more. In this middle perspective some of the meanings and lives, as well as possible futures and pasts of the place, come to mind. The beautiful complexity of cultural significance, social connections, linguistic play, and financial patterns all comes alive, together with the awareness that human meaning (nomos) neatly imposes itself on the much larger and more basic reality (physis), a system of meanings that is preoccupied with certain distinctions but oblivious of other ones.

Cultural landscapes accommodate all these viewpoints: locals, outsiders, and those with an inquiring mind who occupy the in-between space in order to see a bit of the outsider standpoint and the perspective of the local residents, too.