Favorite Depictions of Place

[Butte Silver Bow Public Library]

The essence of place—and the social qualities that connect its past, present and future—have been the subject of two recent Montana projects (each supported in part by Humanities Montana): Butte, America, the documentary film by Pamela Roberts, and the Butte Digital Film Project, sponsored by the Butte Silver Bow Public Library.

What are some other depictions of place—in film, fiction, non-fiction, poetry—that have impressed you as particularly evocative or surprising?

[Ken Egan]

"Now that the weather had changed, the moon of the falling leaves turned white in the blackening sky and White Man's Dog was restless. He chewed the stick of dry meat and watched Cold Maker gather his forces. The black clouds moved in the north in circles, their dance a slow deliberate fury." James Welch, Fools Crow

I always return to this great opening as winter settles in. Welch's narrator locates us near the Backbone of the World (the Rocky Mountain Front). This passage seems especially moving and appropriate today given the announcement of a settlement between the federal government and many tribes (including the Blackfeet) over treaty violations and unpaid fees for land use.

[Lee Phillips]

I have a personal stake in the Butte Digital Film Project because of my experience growing up in New Jersey. Born of an Irish emigrant family who worked hard and dreamed of greater things for our generation. Here is a link to the film short that sums it up for me, and many others I would imagine. The Butte Digital Film Project will hopefully be as cathartic for the Butte participants as my hometown's troubles were for me.

[Jason Neal]

Nice post, Lee. I wasn't expecting that! I swear, I've listened to that song probably 200 times, and it never fails to capture my attention. It's such a simple and eloquent assertion that our hometowns are not just places, but places wrapped up and complicated by our families, our work, by memories good and bad, by our hopes and aspirations. And when those places go to ruin, the loss is felt so much more deeply than real estate prices and unemployment statistics can measure.

[Lee Phillips]

Thanks for sharing Jason, I was just testing the posting features and kinda fell into really thinking about the question and how I feel about "home". Knowing that my hometown did come back I really believe Butte can too. I hope I can generate a spark with the project to start the discussion about Butte's tomorrows.

[Noelle Sullivan]

Description can be emotional as much as physical. I'm reading Kate O'Brien's novel WITHOUT MY CLOAK, which won the James Tait Black prize in 1931, and I came across a description from the fictional town of Mellick, Ireland, which might as well apply to Butte, Montana:

[The main character discovers] "the crumbling Old Town that looked so gently beautiful at evening, grey, sad, and tender, huddled on humpy bridges about canals and twisting streams -- and found that under its mask of dying peace it lived a swarming, desperate, full-blooded life, a life rich in dereliction, the life of beggars, drunkards, idiots, tramps, tinkers, cripples, a merry, cunning, ribald, unprotesting life of despair and mirth and waste....."

[Lee Phillips]

The string of descriptive nouns are so melodic... the rhythm almost has the sound of a Irish ballad. I wish I could afford to be so creatively observant. Nice Noe.

[Clair Leonard]

We Are Living

What is this room
But the moments we have lived in it?
When all due has been paid
To gods of wood and stone
And recognition has been made
Of those who'll breathe here when we are gone
Does it not takes its worth from us
Who made it because we were here?

Your words are the only furniture I can remember
Your body the book that told me most.
If this room has a ghost
It will be your laughter in the frank dark
Revealing the world as a room
Loved only for those moment when
We touched the purely human.

I could give water now to thirsty plants,
Dig up the floorboards, the foundation,
Study the worm's confidence,
Challenge his omnipotence
Because my blind eyes have seen through walls
That make safe prisons of the days.

We are living
In ceiling, floor and windows,
We are given to where we have been.
This white door will always open
On what our hands have touched,
Our eyes have seen.

- by Brendan Kennelly

'Not so sure how I feel about home, but here's a poem from Brendan Kennelly I really like that reminds me of home and in some way touches upon notion of place. As the song goes It's a long, long way from Clare to here. I can hear Christy Moore singing it now as I type. 'Might just have to google Christy, crank up the volume and bask in the music.

[Thomas Thackeray]

This is my favorite, from Dylan Thomas's "Child's Christmas in Wales."

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."

[Clair Leonard]

That's it! I can't stand it another second, I am going over to the book store at noon to buy it, AGAIN! I am going to get the cd and the book this time, so I have twice as much pleasure. I won't rest until I have "A Child's Christmas in Wales." Thank you for reminding me of just what I am missing...