(What one visit to a museum can cause)
A sharp focus on a fragment of one’s life can open suddenly on an early afternoon in a city that contains in its air a scent of the Pacific and is washed by a light of a low winter sun. The Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver is perched above a vast expanse of water through which ships enter the city’s harbor. A range of mountains to the north, menacing, and frequently shrouded in dark clouds, is visible beyond the shimmering plain. The magic of its location, its grandness, would suffice for many to develop a melancholic attachment and formulate an iron clad promise to come back to this place. But for me it was something more, some details, something that I could call a realization of unity that went beyond such a promise and developed into the idea of “Landscapes of Identity”.
Not many things could be more surprising than an almost transcendental experience greeting me at the windows of the grand hall. Just outside it there is an elongated pond with a pebbled shore on the building side and grassy undulating hills on the opposite side. The grass continues into the water as though the water came after the grass and covered some of it, still not having enough time to delineate a clear boundary. The combination of the light, late fall or early spring, grass, and ripples on the water, created an image that had found a perfect reflection, fitted into an exact “mold”, in the vaults of my memory. It transported me back to my childhood with such power that for a moment I lost the awareness of where I was and when I was. It wasn’t a simple remembering though. That mold was not created in my mind when I experienced that view for the first time. It was there before, because when I experienced that image for the first time, it caused already a response from my “identity”. My emotional and intellectual landscape was fully developed in me, I just had to find its counterpart in the outside world to form the unity that would allow me to understand myself, develop a balance, and satisfy this disquieting existential yearning that can lead in some to the heights of creativity and in others to the depths of despair.
This first connection was visual, water, grass, light, as visual perceptions are probably the most powerful for many, or I took it as such for the visual part of it seemed to speak out the strongest. Soon I was going to discover another component of landscapes of identity that had little to do with images but more with the language. In this case the images conveyed the content, but the content itself was what spelled the magic. Surprisingly I found a “match” in a part of the exhibit that was called “The Marvellous Real” (spelled with double “l”). Mexican artists showed their concepts of art through five dimensions. The fragments of this exhibit shot through my soul in powerful emotions that rendered an ordinary time sequence obsolete. Instantly I was somewhere else in a different time. Or more accurately, in a timeless zone, transfixed. Right at the entrance to the exhibit, in a large vestibule with dimmed lights, I saw bright letters projected on the gray floor with meanings that inspired a metaphysical reflection. They were parts of sentences cut off by the edges of the projector’s beam rectangle.
“The marvellous real is distinct ….”
” These vertical structures,… , objects and symbols, communicate …”
“…art movements, like surrealism, or in this case, conceptualism and pop art …”
I am not sure now if I was reading these sentences aloud myself, or there was a recording played as the letters scrolled on the floor right at my feet. Or maybe those two were entirely disconnected. There was sound coming from different parts of the exhibit. But the heart of it was here, as the artistic statements became art themselves. Incomplete but marvelously whole. It was a direct hit, and my ready mold accepted it. The words, the entire atmosphere connected me to something in the past that instantly brought back this precious mood of existential unity. I knew I felt like that before, but it was not caused by the same surroundings, just some elements of it, words, light, timelessness.
It was my individual experience, but in a larger context, the perceiving of reality in a heightened state of consciousness is not unique. All such single experiences combine to form societal experiences, for we share them through social interactions to seek stimulation and happiness. Our singular worlds build sensibilities that can be appropriated by others. To be clear, the experiences are individual, but certain aspects of them transcend the individual perception. A large number of people can share a magic of a poem, although it is still an individual experience for each single person, to a larger or smaller degree varied from the rest. The sharing, or allowing other people to participate in our experiences, goes along the fault line of personality characteristics. For some it is a necessity, for others – a possibility, and some others still it is an intensely private matter not to be shared openly.
Whether we are actively seeking these experiences, or accepting them as accidents, we are building a landscape of identity which allows us to relate to the outside world on a deeper level. They form our understanding of the world, open emotional channels to events that have special meanings whether we fully understand their message or not. Would that landscape be ever complete? Probably not. And for two reasons. First, it might not be possible to encounter all reflections of our beings. Self- discovery is a highly intuitive process and there is no ready road map presented at the beginning. The roads are plotted as we move on and it is easy to miss a turn or even skip a whole section of a map. Second, our beings are very likely shaped as continuous, fluid landscapes that could respond to an infinite number of reflections. So there always will be gaps, undiscovered territories. But the more we discover, the more responses to our internal landscape we encounter, the better chance we’ll have to lead a fulfilled life.
These “Landscapes of Identity” create platforms where we can meet other people that respond to similar “signals”. When we find someone whose landscape of identity overlaps with ours, has some similar fragments, or even is to a large degree identical, we find soul mates. Do we know it without comparing experiences? We do, because our landscapes are derived from the core of our beings. But we can make those connections stronger if we experience the formation of individual landscapes together.
This recognition of connection might be well described in how Hans Castorp is drawn to Pribislav Hippe in Thomas Mann’s iconic work. “… Hans Castorp did not worry about the intellectual or emotional basis of his reaction, or even what name he would give it if he had to.” Something in Pribislav’s look was the key: “But his eyes, bluish-gray or grayish-blue eyes … had a curious, narrow, and, if you looked closely, slightly slanted shape, and right below them were prominent, strong, distinctive cheekbones…” Hans finds the same attraction to Clavdia Chauchat and connects them through the way they look but doesn’t quite have a rational explanation to this attraction: “It was Pribislav, it was him all over. I never would have thought that I’d see him so clearly again. And he looked so strangely like her – that woman up here. Is that why I’ve been so intrigued by her?” Thinking in terms of images that invoke or revoke emotional reactions, we could easily include faces as a distinct category. We are drawn to certain people by different factors, but the power of facial “landscapes” is unquestionable.
One could dismiss these phenomena as mere memory tricks, as something that we remember from childhood and what lies forgotten in the dusty corners of our minds waiting for a signal to surface as a nostalgic dream. There might be some truth in it, but we are all different, and we are different from day one. From very early on we know what we like and what we don’t like. And doesn’t matter how much we are steered in one or other direction, we always choose our own path. Discovering our own universe is like appropriating the world that has always belonged to us, silently waiting to be embraced. There is some mystery in it, and maybe it is better if it is not fully explained, for leaving something unknown is a thing that we all respond to so well. In a landscape that connects us all.
Zbyszek Konofalski
