MANJU ON PERSONAL SPACE – 1

“TANGY TOMATOES & TAILOR-MADE TUNES”

When we were kids, a friend and I once walked the streets, with a guitar, wondering how life could ever be this good. We sang new tunes and enjoyed eating wholesome slices of spiced-up tomato on the balcony. If life blessed us with tangy tomatoes and tailor-made tunes, who needed space? Twenty-four hours wouldn't have been enough for us to be together! We were like two peas in a pod, with as little space in between.

As babies, we can't seem to get enough of our mothers. As we grow older into kids, we can't seem to get enough of our friends.

And then somewhere down the road, a more ‘mature’ relationship touches us like a delicate feather dropping onto the shoulder. Suddenly space emerges as a high-flying word in the dictionary. You need to hang out with your friends while he needs his football buddies.

If you ever get to work out the space index at this stage, you might walk the altar with this man. Now, space suddenly begins to shrink considerably. You want to do everything together like a happily married couple.

So you squint painfully at the TV, watching the baseball game with him. And soon space is hovering like a tiny bubble right above you.

Come Thanksgiving, you’re at your wits’ end, preparing a dinner for HIS family. Dinner over, you decide you are too tired to go upstairs to the bedroom and slump onto the couch.

The space bubble has grown even larger and is glistening in a multitude of colors.

If the kids eventually happen, there is NO space in the house! In a medley of school trips, piano classes, football games and SAT scores, you’re holding onto your sanity as the space bubble grows and shrinks undecidedly all the years.

When the kids have moved out, your husband has settled nicely in a routine of newspaper and the net.

Now the space has made a decisive invasion into your life.

‘Will someone please call? you wonder.

ADAM ON SPACE AND GEOGRAPHY – 1

SOMETHING GAINED. SOMETHING LOST.

Before the advent of MapQuest or Google Maps, I used to like to draw maps to help explain to others how to get to my home. These maps were oriented a bit like a Saul Steinberg drawing, where the representation of my home – typically drawn as a simple box with a triangle rooftop – was way out of proportion to anything else depicted. Streets, freeways, or an important surrounding landmark such as a nearby park or shopping center, all receded in stature. In effect, my home was the center of the world. (Or at least, the center of my world.) I probably should have added these words at the bottom of my directional maps – “Map drawn to emotional scale”.

If you were to search for my home on GoogleMaps, you’d find it’s presented entirely differently from my hand-drawn abstractions of the past. On the Google map, the streets and landmarks are shown with clean, uniform and orderly lines. Everything’s in proportion and to scale, and there’s a little red pin-like icon pointing out my home.

While the location has been called out, it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s the Steinberg-like center of the world as it did in my maps. In this homogenized depiction my “home” has become a “house”, just one of millions of others in the big city. There’s an emotional trade out going on here – more precision equals less personality or personal space. On some level, it feels like my little private space has been absorbed by the vast collective public space.

Which may help explain why, at times, I feel so lost in the modern world. And even though there’s a perfect Google map in front of me, I still “can’t find my way home….”

GUY ON SPACE AND GEOGRAPHY – 1

THE RELATIONSHIP

Geographies are many-dimensional. Each point in a given geography's framework is defined using many different measures. But while you might think that space is no more than just such a geographic dimension, you can also look at space much more completely. Space permeates, defines, and is defined by every one of a geography's dimensions. Space is meta-dimensional when it comes to geography.

The most accessible concept of geography is its original one, the description of the surface of the Earth. This description includes political, topographical, meteorological, and many other dimensions. Each, it seems almost absurd to say, is defined in spatial terms: nation X has such and such a shape, its capital city is so many kilometers from the western border, etc. We don't usually realize, though, that each dimension in turn defines space in some or in many ways. Nation Y's roads are such and such a standard width, so its buses must be so many meters wide, and therefore their seats tend to have this or that much room between them, or this or that shape.

This is how geography defines space, rather than just the other way round.

And as you can see, such considerations easily redound upon each other—one space causing another space causing another. The difference in rail gauge between Germany and Russia before World War I was a major consideration in German war planning – in the German Army's use of space; in the outcome of the war on the Eastern Front. And indeed, the Russians' use of space in war, or more technically speaking their use of geography, is legend in military history.

On a more intimate level, geographies have obvious and profound impacts on individual space. It takes only a moment of thinking about it to see that it's so. Ascending a high tor explodes your personal space exponentially (an overused word, but in this case quite literally correct). Enter a gorge or ravine and space becomes largely vertical, reaching to a perhaps distant sky above but hemmed in on either side. Or how about a little topography? A nice, average forest defines a restrictive space around you radically different from the heart-freeing air of a mere meadow.

So, if geography is defined by space, but space is also defined by geography, are they in a co-dependent relationship? Or are they just one?

LORRAINE ON SPACE & GEOGRAPHY

THE GEOGRAPHY OF BEACHES

A beach is a beach a beach of course… not!

As I lay me down to sleep… instead of praying to not wake up dead (as Christian tradition dictates) I prefer to cast my mind around the globe to beaches I have known and loved. Instead of a journey of places, it becomes a journey of spaces in my mind… perhaps too many, perhaps too few of a certain design, but, with focus, I will find an ideal shore to suit my restive mind.

I dither among the options I know with the intention of landing upon the one I know for sure will jet me into dreamland.

But first, comes the magic of floating in space high above the human race. Where to go? Where to land, this moment? On the sand? Scotland, India, Italy? Or close to where I call my home?

To zoom from such a lofty height down onto a universe of sand. From tiny coves along North Tahoe’s shores where the water laps gently, yet so cold… brrr! To Stinson Beach’s wide expanse… golden, inviting (even in fog) and the whispered thrill of shark attacks! … mmh!

Bali beckons laced with exotic sands and local hands, kneading away Western cares, exploring spaces within my body… aah…

My hometown, Aberdeen, Scotland, with its glorious beach that stretches like a golden band as far as the eye can see facing north – if only the North Sea were less frigid… ouch!

Inevitably I land on Santorini – reputed to be Atlantis, the lost city. Along with which comes perhaps my favorite beach of all… not sand, but a shore of black lava smoothed by oceans of time into tiny pebbles that shuffle as the tide ebbs and flows, in and out, in and out, like the breath…

Om.

RO ON SPACE & GEOGRAPHY – 3

“RED SLATE. BLUE SLATE.”

“Man's relations to his environment are infinitely more numerous and complex than those of the most highly organized plant or animal.” Said Ellen Churchill Semple (with a Kentucky accent, perhaps?). In less enlightened ages, environmental determinism held that geographical influences such as altitude, fertility of the soil, and proximity to an ocean were closely related to the personality – and even looks – of a culture.

A bit narrowed, that thinking, but certainly true for Wine.

“Terroir” – the combination of geographical location, soil, weather conditions, aspect (or the angle of the slope) and the grapes themselves – is manifest in the specific personality of the wine.

The Riesling from Austria’s Kamptal displays different characteristics from the Riesling cultivated in Germany’s Middle Mösel, or the one from Australia’s Clare Valley. Even the same two Rieslings cultivated in the same estate with the same philosophy and vinified with the same methods, reveal different characteristics depending on whether they grew in Red Devonian Slate – or Blue. The Red Slate wines tend to be very mineral-driven even when young and dominated by primary fruit; whereas with the Blue Slate, citrus and white peach flavors predominate in the wine’s youth, turning to a pure expression of the mineral soil as they mature.

The personality of a Wine is not only the result of a “terroir” harnessed, but of winemaking savoir-faire as well. For instance, a wine matured in French oak from the forests of Limousin expresses different nuances from one barreled in white American oak from, say, Missouri. Several other factors such as cellar conditions and length of aging are also major influencers. Winemaker Stéphane Tissot in the Jura region of France goes so far as to believe that “… you can find in a wine the personality and the character of those who made it because each gesture, each operation, each decision has its importance”.

Consider the influence of Religion on Wine. It was monasteries that preserved viticulture in the Dark Ages of Europe. It was the Cistercian monks of Cîteaux who lovingly nurtured the vines at Clos de Vougeut in Burgundy since the Twelfth Century. And it was the sparkle in Dom Perignon’s eyes, which facilitated the fermentation process in the Champagne Method and contributed to his bubbly advocacy of organic winemaking.

What if we were to even touch upon the impact of Politics on Wine? Does the Roman Emperor forbidding the import of French wines to eliminate competition have a faint resonance with Parker's softness for Sonoma?

Let’s continue this discussion over a glass of complexity.

RO ON SPACE & GEOGRAPHY – 2

THE WORLD THROUGH A WINE GLASS

A glass of wine has the ethereal, magical quality of calling to mind the “somewhereness” of a certain place on earth. If you were sipping a Sangiovese and you let your imagination wander away, it could evoke the green curves of Tuscany’s hills, the sun’s gold glinting off the wires to which tendrils of vines cling.

A Grenache-Mourvedre-Syrah blend would no doubt conjure up a village in the South of France – Roussillon, perhaps? Poised precariously upon a hillside in layers of terrace, it would be daubed with hues of chalky ocher, sun-tanned saffron, smoky sienna, mustard yellow and burnt brick. Your nose would scent the wispy wafting of lavender set against a startlingly blue Provençal sky, which, at sunset, would change its garb again and again like a fickle woman. Now, a filmy wrap of Lilac-Blue, then an iridescent stole of Peachy-Gold; now a chiffony wrap of Fuschia, then a flimsy veil of Flame-Red georgette! Next, a translucent mantle, the color of bruised blueberries. And then – running a little late for its sexy nocturnal tryst – a velvety cape of the deepest shade of Midnight, speckled with glittering diamanté.

Put your glass to your ear, and you might even hear the faint howl of the icy-fingered Le Mistral, sometimes blessing the land, sometimes threatening to flatten the vines with its mean gusts – but always challenging them to struggle and stress, so the result might only be character of unquestionable integrity.

Could one really discern the distinctive taste of the Missoula floods in a glass of Washington Red, and be transported to the Ice Age, as Northwest vintners loftily claim? Or sip the misty beauty of Sonoma’s winding wine trails, peppered with a multitude of wayside flowers, its creeks giggling to the gossip of birds? I am going too far, you think.

Apparently not. A journeyed palate could scan the geographical characteristics of a wine within the space of a wineglass. That palate would guess the grape variety, based on the typicity of the grape (the bell pepper notes of a cool-climate Cabernet Sauvignon, or the herbaceous leafy character of a Cabernet Franc, if you’ll pardon my viticultural racism), and also its origin (Tempranillo, usually from Spain). Not to mention its vintage amongst other things (it was a warm summer).

It’s an educated guess that often employs the process of elimination. To put it in broad terms, “It isn’t a Pinot Noir, because it’s too pale and thin a red, too muscular in body and too tannic on the tongue”. Or, “It’s reminiscent of coconut, so it will likely be a New World wine from Australia, New Zealand, or the Americas.” And then, “It can’t be from Australia because it’s too rustic and chewy with dark berries and spices… (and so on and so forth) so it must be a Petite Sirah from California.”

So the next time you raise a glass of wine, think of all that travel that lies ahead – at the very least, in your own imagination.

MAX ON SPACE & GEOGRAPHY

GEOGRAPHY ON THE TONGUE

The spaces of geography have a funny way of making their way into cities - with different accents. In New York City, for instance, there are three predominant accents. 1) The uptown accent, 2) The Manhattan or the “normal” accent, and 3) The regional Brooklyn-Staten Island accent. The further north you go, usually anywhere past 96th street, you hear the real street slang. People drop their “R’s” and words like “here” turn in to “heah”, and “over” turn into “ova.” There’s a very distinct New York street accent that is really found in, well, found in the hood.

So now, traveling down toward the middle – There is the “normal” accent. “Normal” being what we perceive to be the way the English language should be spoken. We pronounce our all of our consonants and vowels and we say, “coffee,” “orange,” or “forget about it.” The words come out with no deviation from the way they are supposed to be pronounced.

Now, once you start heading south into Brooklyn, the stereotypical New York accent runs rampant. “Coffee” is turned into “Caw-fee.” “Orange” is turned into, “Ah-ringe.” The phrase, “forget about it,” turns into one giant mashed up word – “fuggetaboutit”. In Brooklyn, you don’t hear, “I’m going to call him later.” No, no, you hear, “I’m gonna cawl him lata.” Similar to the uptown accent, all the “R’s” are dropped off of all words and replaced with an “A.”

Different spaces in the geography of the city create these different accents. Despite living in Manhattan for barely a few months, you start to pick up on all of these little nuances, and you catch your self saying, “Whateva, I’ll cawl him lata,” without even realizing it.

[Max Kestenbaum, originally from Los Angeles, studies and plays in New York City.]

RO ON SPACE & GEOGRAPHY – 1

“THE SUN IS A VERY MAGIC FELLOW”

“November has tied me
to an old dead tree,
get word to April
to rescue me.”

How do the Spaces of Geography affect the cultures that live within them?

Perhaps we should ask the Grapes.

In spaces of increasing geographical latitude, grapes look to natural sources of light and warmth to ripen – just as people do for their happiness. The angle of the sun (also called “aspect”) is everything. If a certain slope is more exposed to sunlight and warmth than another, it is likely to produce far more vigorous vines – and far more qualitative wines.

When vines grow on South-facing slopes, the quality of the grape is said to be exemplary. Not too dissimilar to South-facing apartments in Manhattan, New York, where quality of life is also enhanced by this rather dear orientation.

In the Rhone region of France, the outstanding wines of Châteauneuf-du-Pape are outstanding because of the characteristic terrior; Pudding Stones or “Galets” soak up the Provencal sunshine during the day and hold on to the heat, to reflect it onto the grapes, long after the sun has left for an assignation with the other side of the earth. This helps the grapes ripen and the wines get concentrated in a peculiarly delicious way, accounting for the "outstandingness". In Germany’s prized Mosel-Saar-Ruwer wine region, the Riesling grape grows in Devonian Slate, which locks in the moisture and heat to radiate warmth to it at nightfall. In Bordeaux, it’s the gravel that does it.

In a manner alike, Northern Scandinavians resort to natural sources of light and warmth with an abundant use of candles – in their offices and during meetings as well – to fight Winter Seasonal Affective Disorder, an inexplicable “sadness” that creeps in with the onset of winter darkness.

Serotonin brain chemistry has long been known to change with changing seasons, suggesting why people tend to be less happy, with lower energy levels during winter’s bleaker days. Social, scientific and economic researchers have found that even stock returns are significantly related to the amount of daylight through the fall and winter – the shorter the day, the higher the aversion to risk, it seems. The influence of climate upon happiness, with climate variables such as rain, hours of sunshine, average temperature, and windiness are strongly linked to household costs, financial satisfaction, and general satisfaction.

It’s just as well, then, that Wine makes us so happy.

RO ON THE ABSENCE OF SPACE

"DEATH: ABSENCE OR PRESENCE OF SPACE?"

As Silicon Valley continues to mourn the sudden and shocking absence of Rajeev Motwani's space on Earth, I reflect on his continued presence in the media. His Facebook wall, for instance, where people are sharing their sentiments. (Rajat Mukherjee has a very considered post on just this - a link I've shared at the end of this musing.)

When a person ceases to exist physically, their space will never quite stop occupying mind, memories and heart.

What of the space taken up by the physicality associated with both Rajeev's life and its cessation? His reading glasses, his clothes, the home he left behind, the mark he made on everyone's computer as advisor to Google's founders, the Stanford classrooms he lectured at, his wife Asha, his children... even that wretched swimming pool which so wrongfully took away his space? The sound of my husband Vedant's voice as he told me how he felt about this (over the phone when I was in India) still rings in my ear.

All of those physical representations make his space that much more sharpened by its absence.

In many ways, Rajeev's space is so much more expanded just by the fact that he no longer exists. And he is so much more alive than he ever was.

I hope his soul reads his Facebook wall with a smile:

ERIC B ON SPACE & CITIES

PARIS: WHEN LIFE WAS DEFINED BY A CERTAIN DISTANCE

I say this with affection and regret: Paris is like a tough old whore. Not one of those who market themselves on the Internet, but a woman who stands in a doorway for hours, smoking cigarettes and screaming out to people across the street. She is plump and sweaty, old enough to be your aunt.

There are fewer street hookers around these days—victims of changing tastes and government crackdowns. They can be found in the dusty streets near the rue Saint-Denis, where they service men above cut-rate dress shops and agencies that sell plane tickets to places like Cameroon. From a distance the hookers look like spots of colorful paint flicked down from above. Up close, their yellow hair, red clothes and blue eye shadow don’t look quite bright enough. Drabness, like time, is their enemy, and with each day they get a little paler. When one of them gives out and disappears from the street, no one takes her place.

The pleasure lanes near rue Saint-Denis and Les Halles used to have names like rue Tire-Boudin (“Sausage-Puller street”) and rue Trousse-Nonain (“Tumble-Nun street”) and rue de la Pute-y-muse (“Idling Tart street”). The streets are still there, but their names were changed long ago to rue Marie-Stuart, rue Beaubourg and rue Petit-muse. By the time the German Baron Haussmann was done redesigning the city in 19^th Century, the collection of streets whose names evoked “shit”—the rues Merdeuses, Merdelet, Chieurs and Chiards—had disappeared. Paris was becoming hygienic.

Haussmann went much further than sanitizing street names and installing sewers. The thousands of buildings he put on the city’s boulevards are all about people’s relationship with shit. The prime living spaces were put on the third floors, called the étages nobles, where there were tall windows, spacious apartments and ornate balconies. The idea was to let the wealthiest tenants live as far as possible far from the piles of wet manure on streets while still not having to climb too many stairs. The further up you went past the étages nobles, the smaller and stuffier the apartments became. In a city where horses were still everywhere and there were no elevators, quality of life was defined by one’s distance from shit.

All of that has changed. The top floors are now the most valuable, both for their light and their distance from car noise. There are toilets in apartments and the smell of shit is gone. So are most of Paris’s native street whores, called traditionnelles. The tight doorways that functioned as their offices on the rue Saint-Denis and its tributaries are unoccupied. The doors are their gravestones. French-born hookers now make their connections online and take cabs or the Métro to meet dates. They don’t need to stand out in public, so they wear the same clothes as everyone else. The remaining street trade is left to women from places like Kosovo and Sub-Saharan Africa, who are willing to put up with a higher risk of violence.

No matter how pretty Paris’s streets are now, all of them have tasted blood. The ancient neighborhoods of Les Halles and Saint-Denis are soaked in murder, which no amount of urban renewal can erase. The slaughterhouses have been replaced by an indoor shopping mall and the mass graves in the Cimetière des Innocents are gone. But the traditionnelle spirit remains. It glows like a pink ghost in the evening sky; it calls from the music in porno DVD and tattoo shop; and, in the cold looks of cops, it still frightens.

With their wicked and dangerous attractions, the French street hookers of this quarter were a core element of Paris life. The few who are left are like the last living speakers of a dying language. Once they are gone, the tongue is extinct.

[This piece is a contribution from Eric Bewrkowitz.]

GUY ON SPACE & INDIVIDUALITY - 1

DEFINING, FINDING, AND “SEPARATING”

Discriminating something as individual or unique in some way is a process completely distinct from any concept of space. Space, spatial relationships, and spatial metaphors help us understand the individual, but do not define it.

It's easy to think of examples of people, places, or things that are undistinguished by space and yet contain individuals within them. Janus. Yin and yang. Yourself reacting with an equal mixture of fascination and horror at some dramatic event. This last example is illustrative: fascination has a pleasurable aspect to it, horror a painful one. Each feeling is individual and what we would normally call "separate" … and yet you can experience them at once, in response to one thing, at one moment. There is individuality, but no physical, temporal, or spiritual space to be found.

In more detached terms, individuality applies only to our ability to recognize something by its features. That ability is independent of any spatial relationships that may or may not exist at that moment of recognition. Fascination—how it looks, what is causing it, and how it feels—is perfectly separate in all these features from horror. A sensation of its own, unique to each being that experiences it. Thus definable and individual, without enclosing, filling, or being separated from anything else by space.

So once we imagine any space existing with reference to individuality (when we say, as I casually did above, that something is "separate" from anything else), we are artificially creating a construct in our minds. Space thus helps us examine and understand individuality, even if it is not intrinsic to the individuality of all those, animal, vegetable, and mineral, that we encounter every day.

So the relationship of space to individuality rests only in how we apply it. We can enclose with space; we can fill with space; we can create distance with space.

Fascination. If we enclose fascination with space, we see that it ends with familiarity: what always fascinates is what is always new in some way. If we fill fascination with space, we see that it suppresses understanding: we are too entertained, while fascinated, to question. If we create distance around fascination, we appreciate the particular kind of gratification it provides.

Bread. If we enclose bread with space, we understand, among many things, that it is destroyed by desire: cravings must be fed. If we fill it with space, we know that bread ends deprivation, because whether spiritual or material, bread provides sustenance. If we distance bread, we begin to comprehend the warmth, contentment, and satisfaction it brings.

A nice exercise. How would you apply space to your own individuality? Your friend's? Your lover's?

RO ON SPACE & INDIVIDUALITY

‘I’ IS A SINGLE-LETTER WORD

My approach to individual space springs from an ingrained desire to acknowledge and respect my own existence. This strong belief has fed the choices I have made even as a child, unbeknownst to my family, and even to my conscious self.

Today, it’s reflected in my single, carefree lifestyle; in the emotional and physical space I surround myself with; in my one-on-one interactions, be they professional or personal; in the fact that I don't have a large family or any offspring; in the specific choice of my husband.

Yet, when I look at dear friends who have chosen to create miniature versions of themselves, I believe their individuality is not at all diluted; if anything, it is intensified, and multiplied manyfold.

So what are your thoughts? Is individuality selfish – or self-respectful? Are you the pure essence of yourself? How individual would you want your space to be? Or would the freedom that comes with too much space be a chain of loneliness around your ankle?

RO ON REDEFINED SPACE

CRAVING CONSTANCY. WOOING CHANGE.

Once, my life was a pancake that was constantly being severed from its griddle, turned over – and over again. Once, my life was three fluffy egg-whites on Teflon, refusing to stick. Imagine the chemistry of my brain, the constant high I was on, because my space was in a continuous state of redefinition.

Perhaps living two lives – in diametrically opposite circumstances – gave me a certain internal richness? Perhaps I was bitten by the-grass-is-really-greener-on-the-other side syndrome? One was single and carefree although in a full-time job; the other, married and delightfully captive. One was in the Northern Hemisphere; the other in the South. One was in swelteringly tropical weather; the other in foggy howling cold. One was in my own home within the boundaries of my individual space; the other in a shared apartment with a girlfriend. One was in a city I craved changes in every time I returned. And the other was in a city I wanted sameness from, to be exactly where, and how, I left it.

In the two years I was doing this, I began to notice some key differences in the way this redefined space affected those around me. My flatmate in Singapore really welcomed my visit every three weeks, because my presence redefined her space as well. She’d originally rented a two-bedroom flat anticipating living there with her fiancé, and then they’d broken up. So now it made for the perfect balance – not too lonely, not too crowded.

In San Francisco, I’d dropped off people’s "calendars", as many didn’t really want to “invest” any more time in a friendship with me, given I wasn’t "available” or “dependable” any more. I was often perceived as flaky, and friends were awfully judgmental about the fact that I left my husband alone for three whole weeks. In Singapore, however, where expat culture is the very artery of life, my entries and exits were simply legitimized excuses to throw even more dinners in the name of “welcome” and “bye-bye” at the black-and-whites they lived in, and have more intense one-on-ones over brunches at Marmalade Pantry. The sorrow, by the way, would be really, really sweet, given we all knew I’d be right back.

Eventually, my sandals developed wings, and lost the capacity to find ground or form roots. The only constant ground I knew was in the air. Every time I returned, it would take my husband and me about a week to reconnect, and just when we were warming up, I would leave again. (I daresay it kept our relationship sharpened.)

So I had to redefine my space once more and learn to stay put.

About a year later, we moved to New York, a city where space is constantly redefining itself. Perhaps it has also taught me to redefine my space to be where I want to be.

When I crave Asia, I close my eyes and travel to Bali through my Squeezebox. Gamelan fills my ears as I sleep peacefully, deeply.

GUY ON REDEFINED SPACE

CHANGING LIFESPACE

My aunt drove me. It wasn't far—there's little that's far in a modestly sized Midwestern city. But it was off to a less frequented corner of town, as I was able to recognize now that I'm old enough to understand a map. My parents can't have been all that hip to have lived there.

"My goodness, it sure looks different! Wasn't it green? I don't like the new paint job," I said as we pulled up in front of the tiny frame house that had seemed so big back when I was so small.

"Well sure, I don't remember," said my aunt, parking nearby but not right out front so as not to alarm the current inhabitants if they were home.

We walked up, but we didn't walk right up. Approaching an old, once so familiar space after an absence of many years, one takes one's time. I took an odd path full of curves and hesitations, to get (eventually) to the front door and the screened-in porch where I'd once sat to watch thunderstorms.

It was all different. It's funny how spaces that were intensely familiar in bygone years are redefined when you experience them again. Some parts of this old home came back to me again alike, if not the same: the lawn, which I'd half forgotten but spent so much time on, was only altered in perception, by seeming so much smaller than it once did. Other parts were quite literally redefined, however. An extension had wiped out the back patio, making it Inside Space now, not Outside Space.

The new inhabitants let us in, and I got to see once again the living room—really just a living alcove!—the dining area, and particularly the upstairs attic, where I'd lived and which had been a storage space before my father and my aunt's then-boyfriend took to it and redefined it as the boys' bedroom. This was yet another change in space: in broad strokes, the attic was unaltered from my memory, yet it was now completely unrecognizable to me. There were too many shifts in dressing, perception, and milieu for me to be able to draw the temporal line from then to now.

We thanked the fellow who'd showed us around and drove off to find lunch, a great space in my memoryscape now redefined forever.

LORRAINE ON REDEFINED SPACE

OM IS WHERE THE ART IS

People typically think of space as external – as in outer space or deep space, or the lesser distance between two objects, or between themselves and an object or other person or persons.

Yogis, however, talk about space in the body, especially creating it. In warrior pose, as an example, you are meant to root your legs into the ground like a tree while your arms reach for the sky thus creating ‘space’ in your spine and torso. Personally, I take my yoga one Om at a time, rarely gaining new, physical dimensions. Until recently…

After six years of living in chronic pain as a result of a car accident, I found a miracle worker, aka myofascial release therapist, and had the space within my body redefined. Literally.

While I recognized the physical injuries my body had been subjected to over the years, I didn’t realize that all the knocks life had doled me psychically and emotionally had been stored physically and added up to quite an internal mess.

Now with the redefined space in my body, I can do things I didn’t realize that I couldn’t even do – if you can understand that. Which brings with it a whole new experience of external space so that is also redefined. Consider this - if you can’t walk pain-free, you’re not likely to be going on any major hikes… and now I can!

And once you start being more engaged physically with the world, guess what happens? Your emotional and psychic space is redefined too.

I am so looking forward to doing backbends – I can hardly wait!

Om.

ADAM ON REDEFINED SPACE

MAPS, SPACE & I

Ro’s latest topic, Redefining Space, got me thinking about maps. How they continually challenge my understanding and experience of space. How, curiously, I’m both attracted and put off by them. And how they seem to me to be an abstraction masquerading as facts.

For starters, I love the cautionary disclosure that’s often found on a map – “Map not drawn to scale”. Almost as much as I love the warning that’s ghosted on the side mirror of a car – “Objects are closer than they appear”. In both instances my bearings, which aren’t exactly that reliable to begin with, are put on notice - “Hey buddy, you know that thing that you think you know, well I got news for ya, it isn’t what you think it is.” Now, I’m very comfortable with these warnings. They help remind me that “not knowing” is ok, and actually can be part of a safe and sane outlook on life.

On the other hand, I’m a little put off when the wording on a map states that it’s been drawn to scale. It’s as if this information makes the map more real, more understandable, and more meaningful. Come on! Drawn to scale or not, I, for one, can easily find myself all-turned-around and feeling hopelessly lost using a map. Indeed, how often is it the case that the space that a map depicts has actually changed? Which reminds me that I often rationally know that something “is”, and yet, emotionally I’m still at a loss to fully recognize or deal with “it”. Indeed, emotions are never drawn to scale and almost invariably are closer than they appear.

Before the advent of MapQuest or Google Maps, which I now religiously use to find where something is located and how the heck to get there, I use to like to draw maps for folks to help explain how to get to my home. These maps tended to look a bit like a Saul Steinberg cartoon, where the representation of my home, typically an iconic box with a triangle on top, was always way out of proportion to anything else depicted. Streets, freeways, an important surrounding landmark, such as a nearby park or shopping center, all receded in stature. In effect, my home was the center of the world, the center of my world. I probably should have added these words at the bottom of my maps – “Map drawn to emotional scale”.

If you were to search for my home on GoogleMaps, you’ll find it’s presented entirely differently from “my home is where the heart is” map. The Google map has a little red pin-like icon pointing out where the house is located. Sure, it’s has been called out, but my home is certainly not the center of the world for GoogleMaps. It’s been homogenized. Redefined according to Google. Surprisingly, there’s also a photograph that accompanies the Google map. I believe it’s been put there to imbue it with a greater sense of “reality” and to confirm its “truth”. (There’s a bit of big brother going here. I wonder who actually took this photo? Kind of creepy. But that’s another topic for another day.)

As an exercise in exploring how maps can define or redefine “your space”, draw a map to your home from the airport to your doorstep. Compare that with GoogleMaps’ depiction. Then ask yourself, which one is more real? Or, which one do you prefer and why?

GUY ON HOMELESS SPACE - 2

SPACE ON THE ROAD

In my last post I referred to a kind of continuum that may exist from home-space at one familiar end to homeless space at the other. The idea is that when a permanent change occurs in your living conditions, such as foreclosure, you may be thrust into homeless space, even if you are still living in a home afterward (someone else’s home).

On the near end of this continuum is a situation I hadn’t mentioned: the transient homelessness experienced by the traveler. I have done a fair amount of traveling in my career: enough to feel disconnection from my home-space, but not enough for my traveling space to become a home-space of its own. There is a certain homelessness to the traveler, especially when trips come back to back.

What’s interesting about this kind of homeless space, I think, is its distance economically and materially from what you’d normally associate with the word “homeless.” Instead of being played out in stressful or dramatic places—the street at night; underground; in rail-yards—it occurs in comfort and refinement—in hotels, in airport lounges, in conference rooms, in restaurants.

So, homeless space on the road is temporary, and mild in its effects. But over time it does shape, even disturb, one’s character.

I recall one particular trip that had all the feel of the traveling salesman’s midway journey. I was staying in a perfectly fine, perfectly shapeless business hotel halfway down the Peninsula in the Bay Area in California. There was nothing wrong with the room; there was nothing wrong with the food; there was nothing wrong with the bathroom. In fact, there was aggressively nothing wrong with anything. I seemed to be halfway between here and there, with “here” and “there” themselves being halfway points, never ending.

One’s sense of distance from oneself is heightened by such spaces. I felt somewhat lost by this disconnection to anything with an edge to it. While at the hotel, I presented on a Webinar, calling in from my room; and the strangeness of communicating with hundreds of people regarding a very focused, technical topic, while actually sitting alone in a stark, bland but comfortable place, depressed my mind and pushed me into premature exhaustion.

I think you are pulled by any travel out from your home-space and into a homeless environment, mitigated by your trappings, like your clothes, a book, your iPod, your cel phone. Habitual or regular travel extends this light homelessness through time … and since time is the enemy of homeless space, eventually it must pass and your travel-space becomes familiar space and therefore home-space. But if you do not reach that point you will be, like I was on the Peninsula, suspended, disconnected, waiting.

GUY ON HOMELESS SPACE - 1

AND THE BUBBLE BURSTS

Home foreclosure right now is a wave sweeping the country and globe. And like a wave curling over and crashing on the beach in great slow-motion, the nose-diving economy and resulting wave of foreclosures is encircling the space of the American home-space and smashing it into millions of small floating bubbles of wandering, homeless space.

What forms does this homeless space take? When we think of the homeless, mostly we think of people living on the street, or in the park, or in the wild. But the national or global phenomenon of mass foreclosure today reminds us that, like after Hurricane Katrina, people can be homeless who are actually living in a home. In relatives’, friends’, or foster homes, or even government-supplied temporary homes, they can be said to be living in varying degrees of homelessness.

At least at first. People are made homeless by an event, like foreclosure, that takes them out of the warm, comforting, well-worn space they call their home, without them having a new home-space to move into. You can imagine this being the first degree of homelessness: Moving into a family member’s house after foreclosure. There could be further degrees, like government housing or homeless shelters, leading eventually to the final level of homelessness—where a person actually is on the street.

But we build our homes around us. They don’t require physical walls, fireplaces, stoves, or washing machines. They require no more than warmth, comfort, and familiarity. And this can be found, in time, by the lowliest beggar poorly clothed and wandering.

Time is the key. For eventually, it is human nature to find familiarity in one’s surroundings: even if you wander from town to town aimlessly, this constant change in your surroundings becomes, in time, familiar. And with familiarity comes comfort, and with comfort, warmth.

Economist have a measure called the “velocity” of money. It is roughly a measure of how frequently the same money changes hands, allowing more people to benefit from it. What foreclosure does is increase the velocity of space in one dimension, by moving people’s home-space into homeless space—the wave crashing down. But that is not the end of the story. Eventually, even those totally bereft find home-space wherever they are.

And in that sense, home-space and homeless space are one.

MAX ON HOMELESS SPACE

BREAKING & ENTERING

When we see homeless people we often see them on the same plot of land that we always do. It’s a spot that is either secluded so that they can hide from the world or it’s spot right in the middle of the hustle and bustle where we can see them. These places that they happen to live on become their homes, so if we are constantly walking by them, are we breaking and entering?

I’m so always considering what the other person feels and when it comes to homeless people and their space, sometimes I just feel bad. It’s bad enough being homeless as it is, but being homeless in New York City must be horrible. There is no place to hide, no privacy. There is this one guy who lives in the entry to the subway on 86th and Lexington and I see him every day. And every SINGLE day, I see people staring at him and I just wonder, “What the hell are those people thinking about?” then I wonder, “What is this poor man thinking?”

Even though at times we feel like homeless people invade our space, have we ever thought about how it’s possible that we could invade theirs? Sure, we could be walking along, busy yelling on our blackberry’s about god knows what and feel alienated when a hand pops out asking for change. But what about that guy who is asking for change? For some reason, life has thrown him curves that have led him to this point, sitting on a box begging for pennies that people won’t even give. His 4 by 4 box, his home, that we’re constantly running by and not even respecting because we feel like he made decisions that got him to this point. We are always looking out the windows of our apartments or houses or cars envisioning something, like a better life. Where as our homeless friend sits on his box, constantly looking up at the windows above wishing he was there. And when he asks for some spare change that we have, we close our windows to our souls and keep him from breaking and entering.

[Originally from LA, Max E Kestenbaum now lives, studies, writes and clubs in New York City]

LORRAINE ON HOMELESS SPACE

LOCATION. LOCATION. LOCATION.

Around the corner from where I live, a camper has been parked in the same spot since 1964. Every Tuesday at noon, the street cleaners commandeer that side of the street and I have witnessed the camper on the corner poised to swoop back in and reclaim its turf the minute the sweepers pass by.

I often wonder how the homeless decide on which space to make their own. From a tent pitched on a central divide to six feet of sidewalk between a set of potted plants to a particular patch of parking lot – and not in the private corner that one might think. Often the location seems random, as if suddenly the person got too tuckered to continue, such as the two bodies in sleeping bags stretched head to toe along the curb by a row of parked cars. Then days later there they are - the same two sleeping bags – suggesting that indeed a choice was made.

It’s been reported that up to 5,000 people live in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and over the years various city regimes have attempted to oust them. One wet winter I watched the bulldozers shove mud from A to B and then back again in the name of landscaping. The problem was that the chicken wire blocked access to the park for all citizens, not just those in search of a lawn to pass out on. As soon as the park reopened, the homeless were back in droves. I didn’t blame them. Camping in the urban jungle seems more appealing than the cement jungle. Besides, the location had a 24-hour supermarket, Laundromat, McDonalds and a French coin-operated toilet in its favor. Location, location, location.

Which brings me back to the question.

I have spoken briefly with the gentleman who resides in the camper. James is a gentle-spoken African American as eloquent as an English professor. Perhaps he chose the spot for its proximity to the library. I imagine he has lots of friends on the street who invite him in for dinner, pass on a barely-worn coat, maybe even have him baby-sit. I do know that his block is the only one in the neighborhood that doesn’t have two-hour resident parking, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to park there, which gives me reason to believe that at some point someone made a decision to let him have his space.

[Lorraine Flett is also the author of Sassy & Single in San Francisco]