A Place of My Own (7 page)

My brain crammed with these elementary principles, I paid a visit to the site, aiming to see it now with the eye of the geomancer, or fêng shui doctor. It appeared I had a good balance of yin and yang, since the site stood at the meeting place of forest and field. Also, the big rock seemed to offer a suitable yang to the yin of the clearing. The land rises precipitously to the east of the site, so I had what seemed like a nice-size dragon exactly where I wanted it. But try as I might, I could not find a tiger anywhere, which was discouraging, at least until I read in one of the books that wherever you find a dragon, there will automatically be a tiger too. I had no idea how they could be so sure, but decided not to worry about it for the time being. Because right now I had chi flows to worry about.

As far as I could tell, chi has a lot in common with water. At least it helps to think of it that way, especially if your spiritual development is as retarded as mine. Like water (which also animates life), chi flows down from high ground through rills and swales in the land and then accumulates in lakes and rivers or, less propitiously, in swamps (where, hemmed in, it’s apt to turn into
sha
, the negative energy that is chi’s evil twin). And in fact several authorities state explicitly that water is a “conductor” of chi.

As soon as I’d begun to think of chi as flowing water, I could visualize its movement over my land, as it searched out grooves in the earth and openings in the forest on its course down the hillside. To map a landscape’s dragon lines, a fêng shui doctor will sometimes travel to the top of a ridge and then run down it several times as heedlessly as possible, noting the various paths he naturally inclines toward, the points at which they intersect, and the places where his momentum is checked by hollows or inclines. The practitioner is said to be “riding the dragon,” something animals do as a matter of course. (And in fact animal paths are considered reliable conduits of chi.) Though I wasn’t quite prepared to ride the dragon, I thought I could picture where it would take me more or less, and it looked as though there was a positively torrential flow of chi coming down the hillside, most of it streaming down the cow path toward the pond.

This seemed auspicious. At least until I delved deeper into the literature of fêng shui and learned that the quantity of chi isn’t everything—speed is just as important. And when a dragon line is particularly straight or steep, the chi is apt to travel too swiftly through the site to confer its benefits. Ideally, chi should meander through a site; torrents were no good. I felt proficient enough at visualizing the flow of chi to see that it was moving at a very rapid clip through the property, and probably whizzing right by my site in a feckless blur.

I don’t mean to make fêng shui sound like a lot of hocus-pocus, because the more I learned about it, the more its images of energy flow and velocity began to square with my own more secular experience of landscape. Don’t we also think of landscapes in terms of speed and energy? We commonly describe a hill as rising “slowly” or “rapidly,” and we conceive of curves and straightaways in terms of their velocity. Once I began to think of fêng shui as a set of time-tested metaphors to describe a landscape, rather than as spiritual dogma, it became a lot less strange, and potentially even useful.

I realized, for example, that everything that had been done to improve our property in the last century or so—the scooping out of plateaus for the house and barn, the opening of fields on the gentler hillside slopes, the repair of the drainage around the house, and, most recently, my digging of a pond—had the unintended effect of improving the fêng shui. My predecessors here and I have been unconsciously engaged in the work of moderating what had been (and to some extent still is) a tumultuous flow of chi through the property, creating fields and ponds, plateaus and gardens where it might slow and linger, and rerouting one main artery so that it would circle around the house.

I started to see how a fêng shui doctor analyzing a given landscape’s chi and the picturesque designer studying its genius loci would end up recommending much the same improvements. Both would advise that straight paths be made to curve, that flat land (where chi is thought to stagnate) be rendered more hilly and rugged ground made to slope more gently. It seemed to me that the “eye” whose attention Humphry Repton or Capability Brown spoke of attracting and directing with their clearings and paths and follies isn’t so very different from the chi that fêng shui seeks to attract and direct. Likewise, the picturesque sensibility’s preference for variety in the landscape—its emphasis on the transitions between field and wood, hill and dale, light and shade—might just be another way of expressing the geomancer’s preference for those places in the landscape where yin and yang land forms meet. I don’t know if it’s ever been checked out, but I would bet that the fêng shui of English landscape gardens is exemplary.

Over the years my own landscape had come a long way, in fêng shui as well as picturesque terms, though clearly there were still problems. But I figured I was better off with an oversupply of chi close by my site than a shortage of it. The question was whether it could be encouraged to stick around long enough to be of some value. And there seemed to be only one way to find out. What I attempted now was so alien to my constitution, so ridiculous to my accustomed way of thinking, that I still can’t fully believe I actually did it. I told no one, not even Judith. But I decided to ride the dragon.

On the appointed afternoon I walked all the way to the top of the hillside, keeping an eye on the road to make sure I wouldn’t be observed. Then I started walking fairly rapidly in the direction of my site, quickly picking up speed until I was just about flying down the hillside. I tried as best I could not to steer, emptying my mind of any specific destination. I found my feet were quickly drawn to the cow path—obviously a dragon line. And if I stayed on this course, a powerful sensation of momentum promised to propel me straight past the big rock and smack into the middle of the pond. Had I kept to that trajectory I’m not at all sure it would have been possible to stop. But when instead I leaned my weight just slightly to the left immediately before reaching the rock, something that the lay of the land seemed to encourage, I moved into the site itself and immediately felt the gentler slope of the terrain slowing my velocity, welcoming me. My body still registered some forward momentum, but now it was an easy matter to slow and pause and rest. I felt the truth of a metaphor I’d earlier used to describe the site, that of an eddy shunted off to the side of a rushing river; there was definitely an eddying of chi taking place here.

As I stood in the clearing catching my breath, it occurred to me that this episode represented the first physical effort I’d applied to the project, and it had yielded more than I would have guessed. By riding the dragon, and temporarily shelving my usual cerebrations, I’d managed to elicit the testimony of my senses, acquired a kind of bodily knowledge of my site. For though my well-read eye had prepared me to see that the clearing’s fêng shui probably had a lot going for it, it was my legs that had confirmed me in this, given me a vivid, physical sense of its hospitableness. Now I knew I had—because I’d felt it—an ample, if still slightly obstreperous, supply of chi. Knew it, in fact, in my bones.

But was I prepared to credit that bodily knowledge? Of course not. Reverting to type, I decided to subject my site to one last, impeccably Western test—a scientific analysis. I read up on human habitat selection, a relatively new discipline that seeks to combine the insights of sociobiology, geography, and what is called environmental psychology. I figured that if I could now justify my choice of site on scientific grounds, I’d be set.

The theory of human habitation selection was first proposed in 1975 by an English geographer named Jay Appleton and seconded, more or less, by sociobiologist E. O. Wilson in his 1984 book,
Biophilia
. The premise of this Darwinian theory seems reasonable enough: Human beings, like other animals, have a genetic predisposition to seek out for their habitats those landscapes that are most conducive to their well-being and survival. Having spent 99 percent of our time on earth as hunter-gatherers, Homo sapiens should have acquired a predilection for landscapes that offer a high degree of what Appleton calls “prospect” and “refuge”: places that offer good views—of potential supplies of food as well as sources of danger—without compromising a sense of shelter. For the hunter-gatherer, those places that allow one to see without being seen have an obvious survival value.

It is no coincidence that the type of landscape richest in opportunities for prospect and refuge is the savanna, where it is thought that the species evolved. For an upright, ground-dwelling biped, these flat or gently rolling grassy plains, punctuated by bodies of water and copses of trees, are at once abundant in visible sources of food and water and relatively safe: From the shade of the trees, one can look out over a great expanse of land with little risk of detection. Sociobiologists like Wilson suggest that a predisposition toward our optimum primordial habitat survives in the form of a pronounced aesthetic preference for savanna-like landscapes—evident in the design of our parks, picturesque gardens, and suburbs.

In his collection of lectures
The Symbolism of Habitat
, Appleton demonstrates the importance of symbols of prospect and refuge in the history of landscape painting and architecture. A pleasing landscape painting or garden, he maintains, will be one that offers both kinds of symbols, along with some visual means of traveling from one to the other. Among the symbols of refuge he mentions are trees, copses, caves, and buildings; horizons, hills, and towers function as symbols of prospect, and paths or roads serve to link the two kinds of imagery, facilitating the viewer’s exploration of the scene. The picturesque painters and landscape designers were masters of the symbolism of habitat, Appleton contends, and this is why their ideas and creations have endured.

Whether our attraction for the symbolism of habitat is a matter of biology or simply an old and successful habit, Appleton’s theory does help account for the gravitational attraction we feel toward certain kinds of landscapes—and, specifically, for the attraction I felt for my site. For certainly the clearing by the rock offered a high degree of prospect and refuge. Any rock this big affords a sense of refuge, and this particular rock—at the wooded edge of a field, and overlooking a pond—offered fine prospects as well. On my next visit to the site, I decided to try to see it through Paleolithic eyes. The perspective of a twentieth-century hunter was the best I could manage, but I could easily imagine such a person crouched down close to the rock, peering unseen into the lower field or down toward the pond, where grazing animals would be apt to congregate. Prospect and refuge, seeing without being seen: this was the very essence of my site.

So could it be my site had the sanction of the human genome itself? Maybe my instinct about the place (my first instinct, that is, not the subsequent one that drove me into the stacks) was the voice of some dim primordial urge—maybe, in other words, it was not merely a metaphorical instinct but the actual genetic mechanism that governs human habitat selection. It’s hard for me to think of myself as being even remotely in touch with such a thing (hence instinct number two). But perhaps this is where Charlie’s campsite test comes in: The exercise of trying to imagine a place as a safe spot to sleep is a way of putting us in closer touch with any deep, atavistic impulses we might feel about it. For what is camping, after all, but a temporary reversion to the life of the hunter-gatherer? Sleeping outdoors, beyond the envelope of civilization and technology, instantly renders the value of prospect and refuge vivid once again.

At first it seemed uncanny to me that the three different perspectives I’d tried out on my site could have overlapped so closely. Yet of course if the scientific perspective is correct, and there is some biological basis for our landscape preferences, we should probably not be too surprised that cultures as different from one another as Ming Dynasty China and Augustan England would have developed vocabularies that find so many similar things to praise in a landscape: Both may be articulating the same deep attractions.

Yet what confirmed me in my choice finally was no one test, but the very fact that all three perspectives—science and art and mysticism—had evidently concurred: this uncanny, almost mystical alignment of theories and metaphors. The analysis to which I subjected my site may have had all the trappings of rational inquiry, and I suppose I brought the proper enlightenment skepticism to bear on the process, but in the end what was I really doing? Hunting for a patch of sacred ground on which to build, and an authority—or, in my case, three authorities—to consecrate it, to say, Yes, this clearing in the woods is the right place.

I figured that if the artist, the geomancer, and the scientist all agree, then maybe this place was really as special as it felt. None of them may possess the “truth” about what makes a good site, but together they represent a couple thousand years of human experience of the land, which might be as close to the truth of the matter as I could hope to get.

It’s possible that this almost magical sense of place I’ve been describing is an anachronism, something we will overcome as we accustom ourselves to the Enlightenment idea of space that Thomas Jefferson was advancing with his great grid—the powerful concept that space is the same everywhere, that it’s continuous, centerless, edgeless, and organized in strict adherence to the laws of Euclidean geometry. Someday we may feel perfectly at home on the big Cartesian grid, giving our addresses in
x, y
, and
z
coordinates.

And yet powerful as this notion of space is, I’ve discovered it doesn’t rhyme very well with the body’s own experience of space, whether riding the dragon or simply sitting in a chair. The testimony of our senses seems adamant that space is full of interruptions and breaks and places qualitatively different one from another—places that seem to us special, if not magical. All the vocabularies of place I consulted, and the long human experience they represent, concur in the conviction that space is in fact discontinuous, that place is sometimes found and not made—that there is finally something more than a modernist’s glass jar giving structure to the landscape. Something like these bodies of ours.