Spirit of Place and Metaphysics - Lent 2022: Day 43

To what extent are we people of place? I'm a Pole born in England, a Varsovian Londoner; my corners of these two cities are the district of Ursynów and the Borough of Ealing.

My dreams, as I've often related on this blog, span the two countries. One end of a bridge is in Warsaw, the other in London; Ealing Common and Shepherd's Bush are but a bus ride away from Góra Kalwaria. This is disjunctive cognition of setting, a common feature of dreams. Rarely do my dreams stray from some version of Britain or Poland; early this morning (as I wrote in an addendum to yesterday's post), I dreamt I was at Cambridge University but it was set on the side of a hill or mountain and featured bigger and grander architecture than the real Cambridge. Another frequent dream setting is a vast, dark, brooding Brictorian railway terminal, riddled with tunnels and passages, ramps and staircases, underneath a cast-iron and glass roof. Having passed through Paddington station daily for several years while studying and working in London, that makes sense.

Can a soul - a consciousness - attach itself to place by way of its qualia memories of it? 

Can qualia memories of place transfer themselves across generations? I remember when I first cycled through the area around which my paternal grandmother was born - Mogielnica, south-west of Grójec - having a strong, preternatural, connection with the landscape of gently undulating orchards. And although I have never been to the area in north-west Ukraine, pre-war Wołyń, where my mother spent her childhood, I can sense the spirit of place of early spring, wide muddy roads, silver birches on their sides.

From the outset, this blog was intended as a place where I could record my surroundings in words and photographs, with the aim of creating a beacon for the future; triggers for qualia memories.

The notion of where I'm from is very important to me. Roots here, roots there - but deep roots. Roots that are embedded in the soul. And so when I have exomnesiac (or xenomnesiac) flashbacks to another place in another time, beyond my history and geography, I take note. They are life-long, familiar and similar in quality, in klimat. If I had to pin them down, I'd place them in America from the 1920s into the late 1950s. It was a klimat long gone; a klimat I searched for on my first visit to the US in 1978 and could just about feel especially in rural America, not yet subsumed into identical strip-malls, flyovers and interstate highways.

Paradoxically, it was something I felt to be chimeric, growing up in grey West London; the qualia memories came back more strongly and more frequently on moving to Poland - to Mazovia - in the late 1990s. In London I tended to dismiss the flashbacks as mere imagination, having no terms of reference; no flat landscapes under blue skies, no rural homesteads with electricity and telephone wires stretched along the straight road. The nearest I got to it was the fenlands of East Anglia. See what I mean? Memories triggered in a way that no Alpine vista or Mediterranean island can do.

Are we rooted in place? Can we will our next incarnations to a geographically specific location? 

This time two years ago:
Lockdown stroll, S7 roadworks

This time three years ago:
Construction updates

This time nine years ago:
Pigeon infestation by Dworzec Centralny

This time 12 years ago:
Magnolia in bloom, Ealing