Methodologies
Take, for instance, a walk down Kilburn High Road, my local shopping centre. It is a pretty ordinary place, north west of the centre of London. … In two shops I notice this week’s lottery ticket winners: in one the name is Teresa Gleeson, in the other, Chouman Hassan. Thread your way through the often almost stationary traffic diagonally across the road from the newsstand and there’s a shop which as long as I can remember has displayed saris in the window. Four life-sized models of Indian women, and reams of cloth. On the door a notice announces a forthcoming concert at Wembley Arena: Anand Miland presents Rekha, live, with Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, Jahi Chawla and Raveena Tandon. On another ad, for the end of the month, is written ‘All Hindus are cordially invited’. In another newsagents I chat with the man who keeps it, a Muslim unutterably depressed by events in the Gulf, silently chafing at having to sell The Sun … Overhead there is always at least one aeroplane – we seem to be on a flight-path to Heathrow and by the time they’re over Kilburn you can see them clearly enough to tell the airline and wonder as you struggle with your shopping where they’re coming from. Below, the reason the traffic is snarled up (another odd effect of time-space- compression!) is in part because this is one of the main entrances to and escape-routes from London, the road to Staples Corner and the beginning of the Ml to the North
(Massey 1991, p. 28).
My imagination was reworked some winters ago, while in the northern Lake District, in north west England. It would be easy to write of the Lake District, or of Keswick, the town where I was staying with my sister, as a bundling of different social stories with different spatial reaches and differing temporalities. Longstanding farmers, the grey-stone country houses of the aristocratic incomers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, poets and Romanticism, ancient mining, middle-class cottage owners, Roman remains, an international tourist trade, a focus of a discourse of the sublime … But just out-side the town looms Skiddaw, a massive block of a mountain, over 3000 feet high, grey and stony; not pretty, but impressive; immovable, timeless. It was impossible not to consider its relationship to this place. Through all that history, it seemed, it had presided.
It is evident, of course, that much of the landscape here has been etched and moulded into its present-day basic shape by the glaciers of ice ages, the last of which retreated some 10,000 years ago. The traces are everywhere: in the U-shaped valleys inherited and reused in the last advance of the ice, in the hummocky landscape of moraines (material dumped by ice as it passed), in so-called roches moutonnées (rocks which have been scraped smooth and striated as the ice ground over them then plucked into jagged shapes on the downstream – down glacier side), and in drumlins, of which there are many in these parts, egg-shaped hills deposited under the ice as the glacier passed on and over, from what is now the valley of Derwentwater north to Bassenthwaite. The hotel where we were staying stands on a graciously sweeping road which takes its shape not just from some designer’s preference for curvaceous avenues, but from following the foot of a drumlin. Ancient ice ages plainly readable in the human landscape. One thing it might evoke is the antiquity of things. But another is almost the converse: that today’s ‘Skiddaw’ is quite new. I knew, too, that the rocks of which Skiddaw is made were laid down in a sea which existed some 500 million years ago. (They are composed from the erosion of still older lands.) And ‘not long’ afterwards (in the same -Ordovician – ;geological period) there was volcanic activity. There are reminders of that tumultuous era too in the present-day landscape. Today’s mountains bear no relation to the ancient volcanoes, but these more resistant volcanic rocks to the south give rise to a markedly different scenery of cliffs and waterfalls. And for those who know how to spot them, there are outcrops of Javas and tuffs. Some volcanic rocks form the cores of drum-linshaped hills: the remnants of volcanic activity from over 400 million years ago, plastered millions of years later by debris deposited by the retreating glacier (Boardman, 1996). A long and turbulent history, then. So much for timelessness… But it’s not merely a question of time: that history had a geography too. Sitting in our room at night, hemmed in by the (apparent) steadfastness of nature in the dark outside, and poring over local geology, the angle of vision shifted. For when the rocks of Skiddaw were laid down, about 500 million years ago, they were not ‘here’ at all. That sea was in the southern hemisphere, about a third of the way south from the equator towards the south pole.
Doreen Massey, ‘Migrant Rocks’, For Space, pp. 130-133
Seeing is a great deal more than believing these days. You can buy an image of your house taken from an orbiting satellite or have your internal organs magnetically imaged. If that special moment didn’t come out quite right in your photography, you can digitally manipulate it on your computer. At New York’s Empire State Building, the queues are longer for the virtual reality New York Ride than for the lifts to the observation platform. Alternatively, you could save yourself the trouble by catching the entire New York skyline, rendered in attractive pastel colours, at the New York, New York Resort in Las Vegas.
(Nicholas Mirzoeff 1998, p. 1)