With a name that sounds like a couch/bed, you know this is looney-bin material.
Posted on 06/24/2007 6:41:49 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
(Adrift in the world, professor Yi-Fu Tuan anchored himself as a pioneer in his field)
The young geographer would tell strangers he was hunting uranium. In 1952, that explanation seemed more understandable than the truth about what he was doing in the desert.
Who would believe the broad, flat rocks called pediments had led this slender man, 98 pounds, into Arizona's San Pedro River Valleyto map remote country under a blazing sun? At night, he camped out in a beat-up Ford coupe, and read by Coleman lamp until, tired, he pulled down the seats and slept with his head by the steering wheel, his feet stretched back into the trunk.
Decades before Yi-Fu Tuan became one of America's pre-eminent geographers, before he came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught students to think about landscape in new ways, the Chinese native slept outside ghost towns. The dark outlines of buildings, human places eerily devoid of humans, sometimes scared him. He dreamed of ghostly figures wandering toward him.
One night he heard hooves.
Twin shotgun barrels poked through the Ford's window and a rancher on horseback demanded: What are you doing on my property? The startled geographer apologized and told the rancher his business - not the story about uranium hunting. He was just a graduate student from California come to learn from the desert. The rancher let him stay.
The truth was Tuan loved it there, the miles of mesquite and cactuses, the clean, sweet smell of sun-baked desert plants. People speak of "love at first sight," and mean another human.
Tuan fell in love with a place.
The geographer would talk about loving places; when it came to loving people, he kept silent.
Today, at 76, Tuan has officially retired from the field he helped to pioneer, humanist geography. During a long career, he broadened the study of places by leading geographers back to the human eyes that see and interpret those places.
But it was a lonely quest. In one of the few articles ever written about him, The Chronicle of Higher Education said Tuan "may be the most influential scholar you've never heard of."
In retirement, he still writes books (one was published in March, and two more are in various stages). Every day, even Christmas and New Year's, he walks the mile from his Madison apartment to his office on the third floor of Science Hall. He trudges through snow, a backpack slung over his narrow shoulders as if he were a student, and not a white-haired professor emeritus.
And he still uses geography to delve deep into the mind, somewhere the old textbooks with their lists of cities, crops and mountain ranges never went. The mental landscape he travels has no boundaries.
"In my 16 years as a resident in Madison I've sat almost daily in the lakefront café of the Memorial Union and watched the changing scenes over Lake Mendota ," he wrote in a letter from a 2002 collection. "Only yesterday, however, did it occur to me to wonder what I would see if I were a submersible at the bottom of the lake's cold, murky depths where sunlight never penetrates. And I'm a geographer! How extraordinarily limited and conventional one's perception is. We are very much creatures of the surface, condemned to superficiality (even in the imagination and thought)."
In fact, Tuan never let himself rest at the surface.
A half-century ago he ventured into the desert and met what he would call "my geographical double," a place of uncluttered beauty and open space, but also of barrenness and isolation.
There, Tuan found his inspiration for ideas on the human response to landscape: the fear or comfort that wells up inside us at the sight of a dark forest or a wide open plain. He began to create his own vision of geography, blending philosophy, art, psychology, religion and other disciplines to produce books with grand themes such as "Place, Art and Self."
"To Yi-Fu, geography is about a set of moral questions: who we are; how we should live in the world; how we should relate to the natural world and to ourselves; and what constitutes the good life," said Denis Cosgrove, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Such moral questions are not to be confused with issues such as global warming, the domain of environmental geographers. Tuan focused instead on subtler ways in which man transforms the natural world to suit his tastes. Humans shape garden hedges into swans. They raise animals as pets and force water to dance in fountains.
With such an approach, Tuan plowed new territory, largely by himself. Though admired by many geographers (this spring, colleagues named one of his articles the most significant in the 90-year history of the journal Geographical Review), he was imitated by few.
"I've developed my own way of thinking, but I'm always looking over my shoulder at what he's doing," said David Harvey, perhaps America's best-known geographer, now a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York.
In his own thinking, Tuan displayed unusual rigor, copying quotations and ideas from the books he read into elegant hardcover journals. Over the years, he filled 42 of these journals, each containing more than 200 pages of meticulous script and as precious to him as a wedding ring might be to a colleague.
"One of the things I fear losing the most is one of these books," he said, "because it's a whole life of reading and thinking that's gone."
But living so completely in a world of ideas proved a hard bargain. For one part of life to be so full, another had to go empty.
"There are two Yi-Fu Tuans," said Kevin Warnke, a former UW student who lived with Tuan for five months. "The brilliant, courageous, revolutionary professor. And the shy, lonely, anxious, hurt man who hates the thought of growing older alone, more isolated from society, no longer capable of remembering anecdotes, names, events, and eventually no longer able to take care of himself."
Both personalities found expression in the desert: the inspiration for his ideas, but also the mirror revealing something barren and nomadic in himself.
Tuan would write: "Socially I am likewise adrift for a simple reason - I am single. The one portable soil - family - in which an individual is given natural grounding is not available to me."
Although the desert suited this solitary life, he finally settled in the rolling hills of the Midwest, a place he called "a family landscape." He last saw the desert 25 years ago.
After Tuan retired in 1998, he wrote his autobiography, "Who Am I?" He published a book of his letters to colleagues. He wrote a travelogue about a visit to China, published this year. He wrote a book on religion, not yet in print. And then he started what may be his final book, on human goodness.
Over the years the geographer's focus on place became for Tuan an image in the rearview mirror, receding gradually as he journeyed down other roads.
"This is how life progresses," he said recently. "We all end up abandoning place. We die."
In popular imagination, geographers embody what Cosgrove called "a hairy-chested masculinity." They are hale, virile types, men like Robert Peary, who discovered the North Pole and was awarded one of the American Geographical Society's highest honors, the Cullum Medal.
Tuan was the antithesis, a man so slight he was recruited by the rowing team at Oxford for the role of coxswain (though he lacked the other important qualification, a drill sergeant's gift for barking commands).
In 1951, he boarded a train in New York and headed west past the famed 100th Meridian, the invisible line in the Great Plains that separates the moist, closed-in landscape of the eastern United States from the arid, expansive West.
From the train window, Tuan not only saw the West's "Big Sky," he felt it liberating him.
"This is the American Dream that you go west," he said. "That's your future."
Bound for the University of California at Berkeley, he told himself he was finished with the Old World.
To that point, Tuan's life had been rootless, a series of new people in a string of new places his family called "home": Tianjin; Nanjing; Shanghai; Kunming; Chongqing; Canberra; Sydney; Manila; London; Oxford. The endless moving burned into Tuan a temperament suited to geography, and to the desert.
"I have a dread - more than other people - of disorientation," he said.
The dread gripped him the first time he entered the rain forest as a teenager in the Philippines. It grips him still some evenings as he drives through Madison's dark maze of streets, lost and on the verge of stopping the car in despair.
Geography gave him a context for these feelings. The desert answered them, providing the long, clear view that rain forests and city streets denied him. The place soothed his fears and nourished his appetite for deep, philosophical questions.
The interest in philosophy stretched back to childhood when he'd had an unusual dream. In the dream, he was not being chased by monsters or fighting dragons. He was thinking. He was thinking that he was alive, and that being alive had one consequence. It meant he would die. The knowledge made him sweat and struggle until he woke up.
A decade later in the desert, Tuan came across cattle skulls, bleached white and smoothed by sun and sand.
"If that's what death means, so clean," he said, "I don't mind it so much."
In the San Pedro River Valley, rattlesnake country, Tuan found himself craving human contact. He could work alone in that "lunar beauty" for no more than five days at a stretch before returning to the run-down boarding house in Tucson that he used as his base in the early 1950s. Eventually, a colleague from Berkeley, David Harris, began accompanying him on his research.
Ten years passed. Tuan wrote his dissertation, taught at Indiana University, then moved to a job at the University of New Mexico. He went back into the desert with his old friend. Harris was now married and the father of two little girls. Except for the job, Tuan's circumstances were unchanged.
Watching Harris and his family, he observed that they were always "in place" in the world, because they had each other - they had "community."
"You can't have a community of one," Tuan said.
In the autumn of 1964, Landscape magazine published his first major article, "Mountains, Ruins and the Sentiment of Melancholy." Although mountains were a familiar subject in geographical journals, Tuan's opening sentences announced a new, literary approach. He focused on the way we view these dramatic features of the landscape and even use them in our poetry to evoke sadness.
"Mountains," he wrote, "are erosional ruins. They are the bare stumps of their former selves. They shall be leveled down."
Four years later, he examined another response to the natural world in his book, "The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God." The hydrologic cycle is the process by which oceans produce clouds that pass over mountains, depositing rain and feeding rivers that flow back into oceans. Tuan, now teaching at the University of Toronto, wrote of the cycle's "beautiful economy of means and ends," explaining why it made sense that men would view this as evidence of "a wise and provident God."
As his reputation flourished, he moved from Toronto to the University of Minnesota. There, Tuan resurrected an obscure word from a poem by W.H. Auden and made it the title of his best-known work, the 1974 book "Topophilia" (from the Greek words topos, meaning "place," and philia, meaning "love of"). The idea for a book about the love of place stemmed from the deep kinship he'd felt with the desert.
While writing "Topophilia," Tuan realized the existence of an equally powerful, but opposite force - a topophobia, or fear of places. This became the subject of his 1979 book, "Landscapes of Fear."
"In a sense," he wrote, "every human construction - whether mental or material - is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists to contain chaos...Every dwelling is a fortress built to defend its human occupants against the elements; it is a constant reminder of human vulnerability."
After 15 years in Minnesota, Tuan moved once again, his own version of a midlife crisis.
"There is not a cloud in the sky, except for the distant thunder cloud of senility and death," he explained. "That, precisely, is the problem."
Other male faculty members dealt with midlife problems by divorcing their wives. Tuan viewed his move to UW in 1983 as something similar, a divorce in favor of a fresh, young partner - one who had been courting him.
With his next book, Tuan moved even further from conventional geography. "Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets" was a radical twist on the theme of man transforming nature. Geographers usually examine the ways we change nature for economic reasons, for example, digging into a mountain to extract coal. Tuan surprised colleagues by looking instead at the way humans adopt animals as pets - an act that shows our twin desires to dominate and love our fellow creatures.
Despite his penchant for working outside the mainstream, the mainstream embraced him. In 1987, the American Geographical Society awarded him its Cullum Medal, the same honor given to Peary, the polar explorer.
Tuan had come to embody an alternative to the rugged mountaineer geographer - the classroom sage. He wore a coat and tie to lectures. He played no music, showed no movies, displayed no visual images. In time, he even dispensed with maps. Students seemed to require no more of him than ideas.
Years later some would describe Tuan as almost an oracle.
"People never came in late, never left early. They never sat at the back of the class and chatted with their friends. He had their absolute attention," recalled Steven Hoelscher, a former student who now teaches in the departments of American studies and geography at the University of Texas.
"There was something about him that was distant. Students wouldn't dare interrupt him."
Outside class, Tuan was generous with his time, often sitting in coffeehouses with students, discussing the pianist Glenn Gould or his childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes.
Karen Till, one of his former students, recalled that Tuan often treated students to dinner and some, in turn, took him on outings to places such as Devil's Lake State Park in Baraboo. Students knew, she said, that "Yi-Fu doesn't get out." They felt protective of him.
"I did feel a sadness," said Till, who now teaches geography at the University of Minnesota. "I knew he wasn't married. It seemed to me he kept his personal life very private."
The man who knew and loved landscape was on shakier ground when it came to the landscape of the self.
He once wrote that he must have been quite lonely as a child, for he imagined often what it would be like to be someone else. In at least one sense, it could scarcely have been harder than being himself.
In adolescence, before he knew the word for it, Tuan noticed the first stirrings of attraction. But it was only later as a graduate student that he understood the way his heart leaned and the life it would mean. He knew how disapproving his father could be, had seen the old man's shock when a colleague took them to a play about Oscar Wilde.
To be homosexual, and especially to be labeled as such, "would make life difficult, if not miserable," Tuan thought. He felt love, but to act on it, he decided, "was out of the question." He could not be that person.
Decades passed, and he told no one his secret. He devoted himself to work, setting no boundaries there. Over the years, though, the cost of his choice became clear as one by one, friends settled into family life. No matter how close he felt to these friends, he knew that even in the smallest matters - whether to attend one of his lectures or help a son with homework - they would always choose their families over him.
In his office, Tuan kept a photo gallery of former students and their children.
"Like he'd adopted us," said Tim Cresswell, a former student who now teaches human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.
As the years went by, although attitudes toward homosexuality loosened, Tuan's self-imposed prohibition did not. In middle age, he felt it was too late to act. He would think himself no better than "a dirty old man." Moreover, there loomed the possibility he might fall in love with a student, something he feared would tarnish all he'd accomplished as a teacher.
In the end, he did what he'd always done. Each day he reported to the office decorated with photographs of other people's families. He taught. He wrote his books.
On Dec. 12, 1997, six months before his official retirement, Tuan taught his final class, telling friends that it was time to move aside and make way for younger geographers. Two years later he wrote his autobiography, choosing that moment to reveal his sexuality.
He did not wish to die carrying this secret, he explained. The life of the mind is about disclosure.
In Tuan's field, the disclosure "was commented upon, but didn't raise eyebrows or make people re-evaluate his work," Cosgrove said. Karen Till read her old teacher's book and found it "enormously brave," yet filled with sadness.
Tuan offered no cover stories, as he had years ago when explaining his presence in the desert. Faced with two complex loves, the geographer had chosen one.
"The flesh had its yearnings," he wrote, "but to an extraordinary degree the yearnings were subordinated to the charms and mysteries of the non-human earth."
A study of people and places
Humanist geography takes a broad approach to examining the way we relate to the world around us. The humanist geographer is interested in our cultural, social, psychological and moral behavior. In examining China, for example, a humanist geographer would go well beyond the traditional interest in economic factors to examine architecture, the aesthetic landscape, the love of nature and the moral nature of the Chinese as distinct from other groups.
Based on membership in the Association of American Geographers, it's estimated there are more than 8,000 humanist geographers in the U.S.
With a name that sounds like a couch/bed, you know this is looney-bin material.
read later
The end is nigh!
LOL! That MUST be a man’s brain!
Now that I think of it, it MUST be my husband’s brain!
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