Sensing and Caring: Living In Unknown Landscapes
By Lucas Era Paiva
This project is a journey in uncertain landscapes, and a reflection on the importance of our vulnerability. As I take you with me for a walk into the darkness of COVID-19, we discuss the meaning of being “lost,” the importance of the unknown, how the concept of the Anthropocene can matter to our perception, and, finally, the importance of paying attention and caring about the world when sensing the landscapes that we are part of. I move between past memories, anthropological theory, the present and the future, attempting to create a reading experience that mimics my main topic: our (inevitable) move towards the unknown.
— Lucas Eras Paiva
1. Sensing While Displaced and Vulnerable
As an international undergraduate college student, I have often felt slightly haunted by the idea of moving. I remember quite vividly how I felt during the weeks before leaving from Brazil to the United States, back in September of 2017. The not-too-cold end of Brazil’s winter was especially cold that year, when thoughts about leaving home lingered in every corner of my house. During the last few days before my flight, every little interaction with my surroundings felt like a meaningful event. I remember the last few times I sat in my room, my very last shower, my last walk with my dog around our favorite park. The list of routine actions that were suddenly meaningful to me would not fit this page.
Critical to this project is the idea that displacement — both in its figurative and material sense — produces much more than just strong memories. Not only did the prospect of moving make me further solidify memories about the last time I was in my room before leaving home, but it also made me notice different aspects about that landscape. An hour before leaving, I was laying down on my bed. With my eyes to the ceiling, I noticed how I disliked the white color of my room’s lamp, hoping that my future home would not have the same type of light. (I certainly felt bad about that lamp before, but never actively realized its importance to the space of the room). I then let my arms fall to the sides of my bed, noticing how small the mattress is — I never cared about its size, but just imagining that in the future I’d be sleeping in a different bed every day of my life made me aware of the present bed situation. The reason why I was laying down was because I was digesting what had just happened: I sat down to play the piano and started to feel the most connected to the instrument that I’ve ever felt. Its keys felt particularly special, as if they carried the memory of all past songs that I’ve learned through and with them. The connectedness of the present, past and future is an inescapable part of what makes up the landscape, even if we are not always conscious of how memory and aspiration can affect our present experience.
The anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that the landscape bears within its material existence records of past activities that occurred in that space.(1) In this sense, landscapes are records, and the material world is infused with the past. When we are displaced in time and space, the material can shout records to our faces, such as my keyboard communicating years of friendship to me. I believe this happens because through the vulnerability that often comes with displacement, we lower our guards to our surroundings (which includes the non-human) and allow them to speak to us more directly. In other words, we sense differently; we listen more, especially because we feel displaced, looking for something to hold onto. The unknown asks us to sense differently. Thus, this project is as much about how we sense landscapes as it is about the landscapes themselves. By investigating different displacements that have recently occurred in my life, I aim to further investigate some of the ways that being displaced (in space and in time) can have effects on our perception of the world.
After arriving at the airport to finally materialize my move to the U.S., it was time to say goodbye to my mom. Right next to the security entrance of the airport is where we finally let go of each other, after 18 years of living together. In hindsight, I should’ve hugged her for longer. But I wanted to feel capable of enduring this change, so I attempted to show that I thought that it was all ok. We hugged for a bit longer than usual, and I left to the gate after saying goodbye. Later, after I found my seat, I sat down and quietly sobbed. Displacement to the unknown leaves us vulnerable, and this vulnerability can manifest itself in various ways (in my case it was through sorrow and mourning, but it could have been otherwise). Yet, in all of its manifestations, it begs for more attention to our surroundings.
I will focus in three ways that displacements to the unknown can be meaningful to how we perceive the landscape around us. Part 2 discusses what it means to be lost in the unknown, and how time has been distorted by the sudden emergence of COVID-19. Part 3 focuses on finally getting to meet Portland, while the coronavirus was approaching the city. I then introduce the idea of the Anthropocene, interweaving it with the city and the virus and considering how the concept can help us sense the world differently. Finally, part 4 is about the importance of care and attention when experiencing the unknown. It is also a call to embrace our vulnerable existence not as a problem, but quite the opposite, as a reminder to maintain our capacities of listening and caring for the other, including the non-human.
2. The Cabin: Sensing and Being Lost in the Unknown
During this last Spring Break, me and two close friends of mine decided to venture from Wesleyan University (in Middletown, CT) to the other side of the country, Portland, OR, visiting one friend’s home. Quite soon after we arrived in Portland, the three of us drove for around two hours to a cabin that was by the coast; it was surrounded by pine trees, blooming flowers, various plants and animals, quite far from the urban environment. We settled there, planning to stay for three days before heading back to the city.
The cabin was a small Airbnb, mostly made out of wood planks with a metal structure holding it all together (this juxtaposition of metal and wood is a good symbol to what follows). It had a fireplace surrounded by a metallic structure, as well as an electric heater with a thermostat right next to it. It had designated places to put candle lights, but also a set of warm lamps that were very pleasing to the eye. In the same vein, a corner of the cabin had both a broom and a vacuum. As I dwelled in the space, I noticed just how purposefully the landscape of the cabin was layered with disparate forms of material belongings. The electric devices reminded me of a reality of electric luxury, in which phones are charged at any corner of the house and laundry is washed with the click of a button; meanwhile, logs of wood and wide windows opening the cabin to the green light bouncing off trees reminded me of a reality of appreciation for nature. These two realities — the “electric” and the “natural” — made up most of my perception of the landscape of the cabin.
To experience this unknown landscape that I moved into, I allowed myself to juxtapose and experience these two different landscapes simultaneously — both coming from different memories from different times in my life. This is an example of how past landscapes matter to present landscapes — it matters where we come from when experiencing the present. More explicitly, the unknown is not experienced in isolation: when we engage with a new space, we necessarily engage with a multiplicity of temporal and spatial realities that we recall from memory, and that inform our attempts to understand the unknown. Unknown futures make us vulnerable, and it makes us recall different moments from our past, in a search for comfort and security.
Inside the cabin we had a small television with a DVD player, and we were wise enough to carry with us a few DVDs to watch at night. During our last night in the cabin, we decided to watch the animated movie Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by the creator of Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki. As with most of Studio Ghibli’s movies, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind happens in human worlds but with extraordinary elements that escape our imagination — after a certain time watching the movie, you start to grasp the gist of the world, and eventually it becomes a bit more normalized and easier to comprehend. This was the perfect setup to what Nour, one of my friends, had to communicate. I heard Nour saying “Hey Lucas, Roby… Wesleyan is cancelling in-person classes.” At the same time, and only by chance, I was seeing Nausicaä struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world with a devastated ecosystem and giant insects coming from the skies that could possibly destroy human life.
This moment mentally displaced me into the vulnerability of disorientation. I looked out the window, and I knew that the ocean was right ahead, even though I could not really see it — it started to haunt me, the type of haunting that can happen during moments of despair. The ocean, although calmly hidden behind a hill, now reminded me that it constantly threatens to bring a tsunami to life. Opposing the ocean, the trees were suddenly a symbol of mindfulness, a reminder to allow the passage of time to occur more calmly. The cold temperature felt stronger, and the decision to make a fire in the cabin became a way to communicate some need for warmth. The coronavirus brought to us an intense recognition of our vulnerability as humans, and my perception of the landscape shifted accordingly.
In the midst of feeling vulnerable, I also felt more present, disregarding a lot of the past memories that I initially used to make sense of the cabin. As the writer Rebecca Solnit comments, when we face and attempt to understand the unknown, we often get lost. She defines “to lose yourself” as “a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away” (2). This exemplifies the complex nature of displacement in the context of understanding the landscape. It is not always the case that the unknown makes us recall the past; sometimes, it denies it, reinforcing the present. This convoluted relationship with time is now part of how I experience the landscape around me.
3. Portland: Sensing the Anthropocene
We drove for two hours to go from the cabin back to Portland. It couldn’t get much more symbolic than this ride: two hours together, mourning the future.
As we got closer to Portland, our surroundings transitioned from non-urban to urban. The city reminded us of COVID-19, which gave us reasons to wish that we were not going back to the city at all — the more-than-human felt safer than the all-too-human landscape of the city. I felt the same as I did when I was 8 years old, when my family decided to live on a ranch for 4 months: I initially hated being there, but grew very familiar to it and did not want to come back to the city afterwards — again, the unknown can make us recall the past to understand the present.
Before leaving for the cabin, I was astonished by the number of trees in the “city of roses.” Coming back to it, I had a different perspective: the buildings, cars, asphalt, lights, and bridges were intensely “popping out,” as highlighted aspects of the landscape. Human-made structures overwhelmed the trees, almost rendering them in my head as gimmicks used to make the landscape look like something that it is not. The key point I want to make here is to repeat that landscapes do not exist in isolation. They are, in fact, always situated in innumerable ways — with the past and the future, with other landscapes, even with the microscopic world. Thus, one’s experience of a landscape is also always situated. I went from sensing Portland as a great city to sensing it as not so different from any other metropolitan area that I’ve visited before. My experience in the cabin combined with COVID-19 now informs my perception of the landscape of Portland.
It is interesting to think of our time as the Anthropocene under this context. To briefly explain, the Anthropocene is a name proposed for the current geological epoch. A lot of what defines the Anthropocene are the negative effects of human action in the world. Some authors such as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing have discussed how Capitalism and its intrinsic ideology of progress have turned humanity towards a fatal future.(3,4) In this (theoretical) sense, COVID-19 is not that shocking — it is the world’s way of signalizing that we are going the wrong way. Yet the lived experience of COVID-19 is certainly shocking: this virus has managed to change people’s lifestyles on a global scale, and has caused uncertainty and inflicted pain to many. This, I think, demonstrates how oblivious we are to the precarious conditions of our current likely future, blinded by faith in the systems we’ve gotten so familiar with. In this sense, this virus-context begs for authors such as Haraway and Tsing, people who can talk about the fatality of the future that those with financial and political power have decided is worth striving for, futures that we’ve subscribed to. Maybe if we take the Anthropocene seriously, it can also inform our sensing of the landscape around us.
During my time in Portland immediately after returning from the Cabin, the virus was not relevant yet, and the city was still in normalcy. For two days we ventured around the city, getting to know restaurants, parks, vistas and some of Roby’s friends.
One day, Susan, Roby’s mom, decided to take us to visit Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), where she works. Because the three of us are science students, we were all excited to visit OHSU. We entered a building with a sign that said “Knight Cancer Institute,” while she further increased our expectations by saying that it is one of Oregon’s greatest creations. As we entered the room, colored dots on a big wall show what countries have donated to OHSU to construct the building. She said that not only was the building LEED Platinum certified — a “green building certification” — but so was the entire facility. The building embodied the “potential” of science. We walked around three different floors, seeing different types of labs and office spaces. On one of the floors, Susan pointed to a poster of Brian J. Ducker, explaining that he is the director of the cancer research program. Similarly to how Susan explained, his bio on the OHSU website describes how he “revolutionized the treatment of cancer through research that resulted in the first drug to target the molecular defect of a cancer while leaving healthy cells unharmed”.
Having lost friends and family to cancer, the Institute gave me hope about the future. But I was conflicted, because while this passion for technology and progress that drives our society “forward” produced OHSU, I was still immersed in a future shadowed by the coronavirus, which has brought the flaws in our precarious forward-thinking system to light. In this sense, my visit to OHSU is analogous to how I experienced the landscape of Portland: the city and its “progressive spirit” incited hope, while its gradually more-timid streets and businesses incited hopelessness. As Tsing impactfully says, the future of the Anthropocene is one of ruins, and the coronavirus tints the colorful landscape of Portland with a reminder of how fragile our “modern” landscapes are.
4. Sensing the Landscape with Care and Attention
The microscopic world is, and has always been, part of the landscape, whether we see it or not. And because it is so easy to disregard what is invisible to the eye, we have sustained lifestyles that are mostly oblivious to it. Our capitalist ways of production and consumption mistreat the planet and its resources, and those in power do not care enough to stop themselves from getting richer. We use fossil fuels, expelling man-made chemicals in the air and in the water; the industry produces for the present, forgetting that we are also producing the future; humans take over habitats with no respect to the environment; finally, our culture engages with ideals of progress that makes us want to keep increasing our human “potential”, using more and more resources and conquering Earth and beyond. The microscopic world has been undergoing all of these changes with us, whether we like it or not.
In this sense, the general landscape of the Anthropocene is one in which these encounters with “contamination” are inevitable, mostly because the Anthropocene is composed of “unpredictable” side-effects of capitalist action.(4) These unknown worlds present themselves to us and expose our vulnerabilities, by literally showing that there is always more than what meets the eye. COVID-19 brings the “unknown” to the landscape, which requires even more attention and care, if we ought to succeed in surviving and thriving through and with it. It is through care and attention to all aspects of our landscapes that we can start to embrace them as important parts of our lives and perhaps survive the Anthropocene.
About how landscapes are constituted, Ingold posits that: “Through living in it, the landscape becomes part of us, just as we are part of it.”(5) In other words, the landscape is never something exterior — this means that to care for our landscape is to also pay attention to ourselves, caring for the ways we interact with our surroundings. As I walk around my current neighborhood, I notice empty streets, closed services, masks and gloves, people on porches, movements from sidewalk to sidewalk to avoid strangers, and so on. The threat of the virus goes beyond the “abstract” — it is both expressed through and reinforced by the actual, the material reality. We are caring about the virus, and making sure that our lives do not cross its path. This hints that in order to recognize the importance of sensing and caring for the unknown that resides in the landscape, we must accept that we cannot live in our own terms — we must listen, attentively, and then consider, with care, about the ways we decide to engage with the world around and within us.
Footnotes:
(1) Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25, no. 2 (1993): 152-74. Accessed May 15, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/124811.
(2) Solnit, Rebecca. 2005. A field guide to getting lost. New York: Viking, pp. 6.
(3) Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. University Press, Durham.
(4) Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 10581.
(5) Ingold, p. 154.
Featured Image by Finding Dan | Dan Grinwis on Unsplash.
