This is sort of an off handed remark, but it would seem that Neha knows exatly why “place” is important and how different kinds of spaces push, pull, draw, and create tension. I believe she’s moving back to blogger.

Place is a particular kind of spatial definition and awareness, non-generalized, locatable, emotive; place is source and destination. It’s a nice reading chair, a pleasant spot under a pine tree, the space around a grave site of a loved one, it’s that one spot in the Seattle race that gives me headaches. Place is different from what Edward Casey in his book Remembering: a phenomenological studylikes to talk about as “site.”

All weblogs are “places” rather than “sites” or should be. Casey argues that we really really need “place.”

I have the sim, the room, but I also have the poem, set on the page printed and ready to go. There are more to read and cover, but Im going to begin with Neha Bawas poem Untitled, a poem about a womans reflections. Untitled is a seven stanza poem that focuses on multiple places in a persons life through sustained imagery and narrative repetition. Heres the first stanza.

Once she was sixteen
reading short stories aloud
in her tiny blue walled classroom
when she saw her brother standing in the doorway.
Father had sent bhaiya for her.
It was time now for her to look pretty
with flowers in her hair
and kohl in her eyes
so she could be sent away
to her new home.
Ma had bit her lip when she was sent away to a new life. (1-11)

The first stanza begins with a girls age, a factor of time. The girl is sixteen and reading short stories aloud in a room described as small and blue. The speaker doesnt tell us what the girl is reading but we know that shes engaged in a storywhatever it may bebut is also about to be pushed into one, a story that she herself had no hand in writing but may indeed have to read. In a way, the memorial, recollected spaces that the poem deals with read with a particular melancholy. The girls brother comes to propel the girl from one story into another, described in terms of banishment. The girl is in a particular state of waiting, almost statuesque in her still posture of reading again the blue background of the walls. The first stanza contains, therefore, two possible narratives.

The second stanza, however, retreats back into the girls past thus into another memorial context. The transition is indicated by the concentric Yesterday, a framing devise for successive examples of youthful exuberance, freedom, and a carefree dance of childhood. Yesterday she was a little girl / playing hop-scotch barefoot / on dusty streets, unmindful / of the drop of perspiration . . . (12-15). In addition to play and unmindfullness, the girl laughs at the antics of the boys slipping on their marbles. This stanza transitions in both time and place, taking the girl away from the period when her brother comes to get her, years later, it would seem, as if the girl of stanza 1 is herself involved in a retreat into memories of days less constrained by the coming responsibilities of marriage. Memorial distance, or its imagining, can be taken here as a question of time in formal terms. Both the first and last stanza repeat the word once: Once she was sixteen of line 1 and Hands leathery, the wrinkles carved by time. / Hands that once churned butter, chopped wood, and came together in prayer of lines 40 and 41.

Stanza 2 gives the reader play and laughter. Stanza 3 snap-shots onto the girls relationship with her grandmother. The girl rushes to receive sweets and bracelets after bending over a pile of red chillies [sic] in the verandah, /
picking out the ones grandma / would want to grind in to dinner that night (19-21). These are memories. Yesterdays. What separates the past from the present is a strange silence in the poem. The word silence in brackets forms a stanza of its own after which the melancholic voice propels the reader into the girls present or now:

Now all has changed.
Shadows that dance on the mud caked walls
by the light of an oil lamp
are the memories of her loved ones – those who passed on
and left her here, alone.
Those who had walked away
were the ones she had nurtured
since they had been placed into her arms.

She sits in the light of late afternoon
tracing the shadow of the window with her old fingers.
Her face is weathered, eyes filled with memories that spill out in tears.

Hands leathery, the wrinkles carved by time.
Hands that once churned butter, chopped wood, and came together in prayer.
Now they lay by her side,
resigned, aching to feel.

The shadows on the wall are the memories . . . These shadows play like a memorial geography of events, relationships, and resentments (. . . those who passed on / and left her here, alone. / Those who had walked away . . . (31-33). The woman sits in light. She, therefore, must be surrounded by shadow and darkness.

The poem can be divided into topological elementsinto its experiential spaces and times: past/childhood/whimsical action (plucking the chilies happens in a youthful space)/what was and present/age/melancholic reflection (numbed hands occur with age)/what is. Ironically, the shadows on the mud walls for the adult are memories. Yet the poem is structured by memorial image. The poem, therefore, can be read as one of the shadows on the wall or those shadows given verbal poetic form. The poem itself, as a literary space, develops by placing the images into a series that step from past to present, image to image, context to context, and ends on the image of the still hands aching to feel.

Untitled is verbalized memorial space where past and present overlap onto particular memories which form the poetic story of life for the woman. For her, there is no other life (no other memory), no alternative childhood that can make sense. The final stanzas are emphatic about positioning the woman in a place where she can be seen, in the light, but what she sees are shadows, what she traces with her wrinkled fingers is her story. In a way, shes gone back to that small blue schoolhouse room, reading a story, but in a different time.

While working on a few entries on language and designed space, Spinning hits with this and uses language to create two spheres.

The Mrs. started in just as I happened by their side window, and eventually the kids were screaming too. It took a while, and she went over all her complaints that I’d suspected she was feeling. They’d had to move here just this spring because their home had been practically leveled and would take too long to rebuild. The grocery is too far away now, and while they’re further from the traffic, she doesn’t like the closeness of the neighbors with their lights shining in their yard late at night, and sounds of tv’s and supper dishes clanking as if they were right in the next room.

The sim runs on a square box in the square room. It runs within a border marked by plastic, creating its native enclosure. On the screen is a perspective map of a seductive track (Apricot Hill), distant hills, the sun in the sky, shadings. Because of the use of perspective, an illusion of spaciousness is created within the plastic frame. I stare at the screen. The space looks grand, distant, lighted, and big. This is a motion landscape with tilt, flash, and texture. All on the screen. This is why I had claimed that the sim space drills into the room, because from my perspective the screen shows space drilling into the distance, but behind it is just the rear of the TV.

The arrangements of objects are augmented by sound in Gran Turismo. Sound adds to a sense of spaciousness. I perceive a larger space because of the aural mix, the growl of engines, the screech of tires, the aggressiveness of the opponents machines rushing up, coming beside, or going past. This design gives an impression of behind, sideways, and ahead just as a silent window in a room gives a greater sense of perspective to an otherwise abrupt space. In Kafkas The Trial K enters a Cathedral to meet with the Italian. While waiting the authors delivers a sense of the interior of the space by playing with light and darkness.

In the distance a large triangle of candle flames gleamed on the high altar; K. couldnt say for certain of he had seen them before. Perhaps they had just been lighted. Sextons are stealthy by profession, one hardly notices them. K. happened to turn around and saw not far behind him a tall, thick candle affixed to a column, burning as well. Lovely as it was, it was an entirely inadequate illumination for the alterpieces, most of which were hanging in the darkness of the side chapels; it actually increased the darkness.

Here a few points of light are the only landmarks that position K. in what may or may not be a massive space. Yet, the light isnt enough to reveal the details. The cathedrals darkness spreads around K, hiding edges, shrinking or confusing distances, obscuring panorama. The Italian had been as right as he was impolite not to come; there would have been nothing to see, and would have had to rest content with examining a few paintings inch by inch with Ks pocket flashlight (207). K does exactly this, examines a painting with his flashlight. In the space of the cathedral he must move close in order to make out objects, and is able to only see parts of a painting because of the restricted light.

. . . K. approached a small nearby chapel, climbed a few steps to a low marble balustrade and, leaning forward over it, illuminated the altarpiece with his flashlight. The sanctuary lamp dangled annoyingly in the way The first thing K. saw, and in part surmised, was a tall knight in armor, portrayed at the extreme edge of the painting. He was leaning on his sword, which he had thrust into the bare earthonly a few blades of grass sprang up here and therebefore him. He seemed to be gazing attentively at a scene taking place directly in front of him.

This absurd study is played against the suggested size of the space of the cathedral, a place so large and dark, that to perceive the details, K. has to put his nose to a painting and even then he can only see it in contextless pieces, much like listening to a few seconds of a song and having to identify it. He wonders over the knight, asks questions. Whats the knight doing? Why? K. realizes after groping over the piece that the painting depicts the entombment of Christ.

To move back a bit then, Id asked the question: can one infer a sense of time in the monotone of the desert? The same can be asked: in the landscape, can one infer a sense of spaciousness with the eyes closed? Spatial knowledge becomes that much more complex. The sense of smell, hearing, and sight aide in our judgment of where we are.

Technology is an extension of the limbs and of the senses (and the perception [and interpretation] of sense input), an extension of human control and physical reach; technology extends the human body outward into and through space, either into the primary areas of our everyday experience (in this sense, experience, space and time, are pretty much one phenomenon) or into simulated space, say the image of a plane flying over massive land, as in the film Out of Africa. Radar allows the sailor to see at great distances. Chalk provides a teacher the magic of making sounds hover above ground. Shovels are hands, telescopes eyes. A plane is a magical body, the arms extended and flapping. Who is flying, however, the pilot, the plane, or the passenger? All technology conforms or casts to some human sense or some aspect of the reaching body, perhaps.

Spatial extension is an outward and nearward (bringing the distant near) experience but theres also an interior or interiorizing process to this, which may or may not be paradoxical.

I say interior to point to the phenomenon of thinking. The mind is perceived as enclosed in the head, knitted with the brain, therefore our thoughts must be enclosed somewhere as well. The thinking self is inside, bottled up, within. The self I is inside or enclosed and even has echo and reverberation. W. James and M. Heidegger have had lots to say about this issue of mind in terms of primary and secondary memory and time space issues, but Im not really intending any drawing out of these much studied bottles of wine, at least not yet.

Nevertheless, its hard to describe the location of the mind with nouns and adjectives. Where are memories? Here I dont mean to a physical place, such as the hypothalamus. But I know where I am in terms of location. I enter the garden and Im in the garden. Simple. Not so simple, really, since I can also be attached to the machine, and where am I then?

Repetition (to myself): technology makes the body larger, more effective, massively strong, eagle-eyed, immensely small, but technology also enlarges us on the inside, within the malleable room of mind. Both Descartes and Einstein liked the idea that human beings are spatially extended but we perceive that extension (and dont really understand it) in a continuous act of locating ourselves and in remembering in its multiple forms, but we dont blend into the landscape or necessarily feel part of it, depending on circumstance, although we use arts of design to get close. Technology enlarges us (accidentally?) outward and inward simultaneously. Consider architecture in this sense and Frank Lloyd Wrights idea of interior spaciousness. The fact that I can make a room more spacious can result in greater relaxation, control, and movement. In a larger room a man is larger, better able to act. A woman can see more, listen to the echoes in a grander space, but its not an outside feeling. Its a feeling of being freeingly enclosed.

What is the narrative of GT 3?

It depends on whos playing. In my case, the narrative of the sim is built around a desire not necessarily to win but to be competitive and to organize what I have in such a way so that that requirement can be met: to be competitive. But its also a narrative of economics. As more money is accumulated in the sim, more money is required, and money comes with skill, but only so much. I imagine that theres some code out there that will give me lots of cash, millions of dollars with which to jazz up any machine. But part of the games design has to do with working for what you get: in many ways this is the heart of the simulation, living with what you have and working with limitations, an aspect of logic. As you learn, you realize deficiencies and these deficiencies in the vehicle can be reduced, if you have the means to overcome them. In a certain race, I realized that my car just didnt have enough handling, and I learned that there were ways of dealing with this: more practice such as better breaking, timing, slowing, and working with better angles. Then theres the acquiring of power, mechanical stabilization, and weight distribution.

Here are two scenarios about power.

You race, get used to a machine, do pretty well, then need to move to a more intricate and more competitive course. The machine Ive been driving has become comfortable. I know how it behaves, how fast it brakes, how quickly it accelerates. Im even attuned to the sound: of my engine and the engines of my opponents. In a sense, Im an operating cyborg, connected to the machine through my senses, inside it, among its sounds, arrested by attention to technique, texture, and panorama. I react physically by leaning into space, clamping my teeth, searching the corners and straights for landmarks, shadows, massive logos, the stands, bridges, feeling the sensation of surface disturbances, disruptions to balance, of yaw and force twists. I also know the course each moment prior to something happening, or try to learn this, as in chess. I can feel the angles, dips, curves, and the atmosphere of each track. If the machine goes through an upgrade, tires, turbo charging, anything, all of this intimate feel for the workings changes because all cars and their possible upgrades have been anticipated systematically: the programming already knows how each upgrade will effect performance. Acceleration changes the speed into which I enter a curve, and the equations change. Momentum, force, friction, speed all work against me. So, even with a new machine, I have to make adjustments, and will usually loose a few races before slowly but surely I re-learn the machine. So, the impetus is to upgrade, but becoming competitive in the sim means that the opponents are ready, and they know the courses better than I do. I fight the machine at many levels because its always fighting me.

As I improve, I know that things will only get faster, more aggressive, more challenging, but the game design presupposes this journey: I will make money, upgrade, drive faster and more precisely at greater speeds, when able. The game wants this. Just as a teacher presupposes improvement and learning on the part of the student, so does a game designer. This is one of the connecting points between games and the classroom, two spaces with similar characteristics.

How did this happen? How did I win, and how did I learn?

In GT3 now, space has change in subtle and challenging ways. But so has my own personal world. We have a room, a console, and a running game. The game when its running drills illusorily into the space if the room and becomes a part of it, flat, suspended, three dimensional, a part of its density and light, affecting artificial space within what I perceive as the real world. I see the room and the game. To see them takes time; the sim running on the console uses Standard time but is experienced in game play through signs as Standard duration sped up. From ignorant to novice has taken me in a few weeks what it would have taken years to accomplish in real-time, and yet, as a response, I feel that I want to go faster, win, win, win, money money money: bigger and better, but skill hampers, economics gets in the way, and in many ways my frustration is getting the best of me, because my desires are better than the cars that Im driving.

This is true of all narrative possibilities. If we had our way, Hamlet would act differently, Caesar would know that Brutus is conniving, and that that plot on the soap opera should be figured sooner. Time is always central to the experience and structures of narrative. Then again, in reality, in space and time, I am always what I am; I am never what I was, because was is lost, part of Augustines time past. Memory and artifact. But it must be remembered: memory is not the experience it recalls, just as GT3 is not driving. People hold onto images of a loved-one or family member at a distance. When they step off the plane years later, we begin again with updated images. Experience in this light is transpositional. Our positions are always changing in remarkable ways.

I remember those first few days of trying to figure out when GT3 was fun. But now that it is fun and I am into the game play (into the narrative of the game, a narrative of stage and level progression characterized by the understanding of the games conditions and physics), the first few moments are consigned to memory. We move on. We live with that inevitability. Ive moved into permanently changed space, a space where I am comfortable with the play and know what needs doing. Overall, my primary goal is to win all the races I possibly can, a narrative climax, each race playing the role of complication in the complex story of play. Thats how the game is won. The levelsbeginner, amateur, pro, Rally, Endurance–accomplished. But that climax is subsidiary to my position at each moment: my space and time at this or whatever point in the game.

After the first few days, the game got into my head when I wasnt playing (but I think I was playing, as in playing out or practicing), just as work and love does, even gardening. At night, I recall specific tracks, and visualize how to traverse them. Of course, the problems that stay with you, not the successes. Id imagine coming to the end of a straight-away, prep for the vertiginous turn, visualize the line, break, ease around, accelerate out, anticipating swerve. This cognitive exercise isnt limited to games, but to any other problem before us, anything that needs solving. It may be work, a recipe, a drive to an unfamiliar city, an unpleasant conversation thats played over and over again, muddled over. This is in a sense a mapping or exploratory exercise or conceptualization, a covering of ground in the imagination.

Time for a pause and some re-imagining.

It really does me no good to order the two spaces Im concerned with into primary and secondary, since what plays on the computer is real in the sense that I perceive it and what makes it is just as primary as anything else. The equations that describe GT3 effects are the same equations that describe motion in reality. Newtons laws apply to GT3s effects just as they do to elephants and feathers. A lot of writersfrom the Ancients to the Modernshave knocked heads over where to start with differentiating between what is out there, our relationship with objects (subject-object philosophies) and how out there should be described, categorized, and judged against a perceivers position, from Plato to Husserl. By I dont intend here to chase after Leibniz in this telling of an experience. For Schopenhauer, the way the world is laid out for us is a reflection of the way our minds operate (for us the mind operates the way it operates and not some other way) at a lot of levels (thanks John for reminding me of this). We make ourselves and the world. The world is mass and we order it or disorder it. This makes sense in a lot of ways, but also presents problems when we begin to talk about and, again, differentiate between different kinds of things in the world in orders of complexity and mutuality, rocks, trees, love, and their causes, effects, and natures. When we ask the question what is love we arent asking a kind of question that will result in the same answer as will come with the question what is a rock?

There is no primary space then, only a continual dialectic between this and that, me and myself and my dog. That water dripping in the faucet all night is proof of something. Given this problem, I think its best that rather than working with classes I work within a dialectical pretension and describe different kinds of spaces and their characteristics, from the space of a poem to the space of interactive fiction to the space of a sim to the space of memory, all of which are different but share certain characteristics.

The game plays off the CD, on the screen, and inside the room, where I’m playing. It is real, as is the experience it stimulates, but the experience it stimulates is not the same experience of driving a car.

Most of us don’t have the experience of driving a car over 80 mph into a tight curve. In high school we took a friend’s RX7 up to about 110 mph on a straight road, and that was scary enough. Now, I rarely beat 75 on I84 and mainly keep to a modest 45 mph to and from work to the chagrin of other NE drivers.

But there is something to speed for us, and driving the line over a race track is a way of creating it. It’s about getting beyond the body, stepping out of physical, motile limitations. As Yi Fu Tuan writes in his book Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience

Tools and machines enlarge man’s sense of space and spaciousness. Space that is measurable by the reach of one’s outstretched arms is a small world compared with one that is measured by the distance of the spear throw or arrow shot. The body can feel both measures. Size is the way a person feels as he stretches his arms; it is the experience of the hunter as he throws his spear, feels it shoot out of his hand, and sees it disappear into the distance. A tool or machine enlarges a person’s world when he feels it to be a direct extension of his corporeal powers. (53)

Technology is an extension of the limbs and of the senses (and the perseption of sense input), an extension of human control and physical reach; technology extends the human body outward into and through space, either into the primary areas of our everyday experience (in this sense, experience, space and time, are pretty much one phenomenon) or into simulated space, say the image of a plane flying over massive land, as in the film Out of Africa. Radar allows the sailor to see at great distances. Chalk provides a teacher the magic of making sounds hover above ground. Shovels are hands, telescopes eyes. A plane is a magical body, the arms extended and flapping. Who is flying, however, the pilot, the plane, or the passenger? All technology conforms or casts to some human sense or some aspect of the reaching body, perhaps.

Inside the game I purchase a Mazda Miata and start racing. The track is Mid-Field and Im racing cars similar in capability to mine. A camera bends around the car, lands me in first person mode behind the wheel, and the countdown begins. In front of me are all the other cars and the stretch of track, rearing stands, and rendered sky. Press the X for acceleration. 3-2-1. Go.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what Im doing. The PS2 controllers (there are two experiences with the game: 1) with the controller 2) and with Forced Feedback, that is playing the game with driving attachments, which include steering wheel, pedals, and more) are easy to figure out, but the Miatared by the waymy starter car–isnt. I come in to the first turn, a right curve, at about 80 mph, slip off the road to the left and smash against the barrier. All the other cars zoom by and I sit in the car and on a chair wondering what to do. I wrestle the vehicle back onto the road, regain speed then, after creeping through a shallow S, smash into every other opposite barrier to the in-line of a curve throughout the race, coming in dead last, smashed up, and puzzled. I have no idea what Im doing. And this is one of the simpler tracks.

Cut ahead. A few weeks later, Im winning $1,000, $2,500, $5,000 purses at beautifully rendered Midfield I and II, Rome Circuit, Seattle, Tokyo, Deep Forest, where light streams down through shadow and some of the track is so deep in dusk that you smash through blackness without touching anything but empty space. All in my Miata (and in an RX7 Infinity). Ive juiced up the Mazda, bought softer tires, got all the racing accoutrement, won a few cars (selling two for more money), and have a better feel for how a rear-engine car maneuvers. I take the first and last curves of Midfield as if I had had a feel for them all along, following a tight line and breaking out like a champ. I dont remember the initial problems because Im driving more intuitively: the game space has basically changed and Im no longer the player I was at the start. Now I know that I should qualify for a race because this allows me to learn a track and get a better starting position, third to pole. The games AI, I know now, turns opponents more aggressive the more aggressive I drive, which is good, because they begin to slip off the road too. I make the programming nervous, in other words.

How did this happen? How did I win, and how did I learn? How did I climb inside the world space of GT3 and attune or connect my senses to the system? Im almost ready to go into the amateur leagues, where theres real money to be made. I dont want to go yet, though. I want a few more cars first, more practice. Withal, I have yet to experience an 80 mph curve in my Jeep. In the game, however, Ive done it plenty.

What I’m trying to do is set up a conditional tension between spatial awareness, which, of course, is perfectly real, and temporal awareness, also real, and image (physicality), which may or may not be “present.”

Conclusion: existence is a constant (not inconstant) act of cognition and memory. Existence is a big and dynamic map I constantly create and draw.

Try to see a room, a white room. In the walls are three windows that look out over lawns, gardens, and life. Getting in or out is simple. Against the wall that has no window is a TV monitor and a PS2 game console, a place to sit and play, and a game running, a simulation, racing: Grand Turismo 3 to be precise. Why this game: it’s a simulation and I like to screw around with these sorts of things.

All these items on the screen are real in the sense that the words I’m using point to real things rather than imagined beings like Hobbits or super detectives. Anyway, that a sim is playing on the console works pretty well for me. A player begins to play Grand Turismo as you would any game, by traying the CD and working through the intro material and figuring out when the fun begins and how to make the fun happen (of course, I mean fun in general). In this case, I begin the game with a few thousand dollars with which to purchase a low-end vehicle. Vehicle options include manufacturers by country. Japan offers Toyotas and Nissans; Germany, Mercedes Benz; US, Ford and Chevy, and so forth. Prices range from 10 grand to well over a million dollars for highend rally and touring cars. Other options include upgrades to any vehicle, such as turbo boosting, stabilty controls, tires (several options here), and a whole host of other under-the-hood and powertrain items, some of which are pretty pricey. In this sim, you can’t just buy and power up whatever you want–you have to earn what you drive. Once a player purchases a beginner car, the money’s pretty much gone and a player has to win purses (by winning fairly simple races) to upgrade that Miata so it has good acceleration, traction (tires range from 5 to well over 15 thousand dollars), stability, braking, and, best of all, competitive capability.

To cut into this for a moment, the room I described before getting to the game is what we might call a first order space or primary space. The room is immediate and can be altered fairly simply; it may even be mine. Even the garden outside the windows is primary or first order (these terms will change, have changed, but they’re good enough for now). The player is in the room, as any person, family member, or thief, might be. That is, the room is part of my regular experience and I rarely think about it. It can be defined, built, and decorated and it also has economic value, significance, and is objective on many levels. The game console is a part of the room, but the game running on it , on the other hand, is second order “reality,” meaning that the images of cars and menus on the flat screen TV have been programmed and designed to “simulate” in its specific context (in this case, the context or desired simulation is a kind of control of kinetic energy and friction) first order space as a Renaissance painter would want to do. The game plays off the CD, on the screen, and inside the room, where I’m playing. It is real, as is the experience it stimulates, but the experience it stimulates is not the same experience of driving a car. Perhaps as the word “cat” is to the animal, GT3 is to racing in terms of visual grammar, but this I don’t know, and it’s perhaps not the best comparison.

I’m the kind of player who likes to just jump right in, and as sims would have it, this isn’t always a good idea . . .