Place is the repository of all things. Setting or Place being as important as character and plot in fiction, best described by the subgenres I have termed ‘Northwestern’ and ‘Wildflower’ (or alternately, ‘New World (New Wild)’ and ‘Wildfire’), not just a geographical location but a phenomenological, literary style emphasizing the juxtaposition of many of our urban centers with the rural areas that surround them. These centers in fact being only extensions of an undifferentiated and indivisible, space. Artificial boundaries that we continue to live in, even as we forget they exist.
Northwestern as the objective, realist mode of fiction, non-fiction, journalism, including the more literal interpretations of mythology, while Wildflower represents the speculative modes of fiction i.e. sci-fi, fantasy, subjectivism, romanticism and epic modes of literature and poetry as they relate to the more figurative interpretations of mythology.
While NW might be limited to the real and the past, WF moves forward until it falls upon something to describe or be described, even if that thing is hithertofore unknown. It discovers, but also creates (rediscovers), where rediscovery seems like discovery to something or someone without perspective on concepts such as no time, all time or the bigger picture of the mind-at-large.
At the risk of sounding like a dualist, the two modes can be further defined in terms of science and humanities, or analytic and continental philosophy; two sides of the same coin.
We are not only of History, we are also of nature. This would be a speculative realist point of view, while at the same time, hermetic and phenomenological.
Wildflower precedes the objective condition of appearances, just as time precedes space and wild precedes civilized. Access to the wild is therefore only possible through contrast; not this and that, or this or that, but this in that; the one issuing from the other. Nature being to History, what the cycles and processes of growth are to architecture and art. It is only through these dualities that we see the one from the other, but this is only a human way of seeing them. We are never out of the wild, as we are coming to recognize by its resistance to all our measurements and attempts to describe. Only now, as our measurements become more and more precise—as precise as the mind in its perception—can we see that the deeper we go, the closer we get to the unified field, that seems to favor the subjective over the objective, or the unmanifest over the manifest, because it, and not matter is the source and ground of all being.
The Time of the Place 
You must be logged in to post a comment.