coalesce with place and absorb its real or imagined geographic, geomorphic and
symbolic features, features such as individual and culturally ascribed significance,
temperature, altitude and terrain, since the term ‘concentrated unity’ also implies
absorption of the other. Conversely, an I -I t relationship ensues when the encounter
is understood and perceived as being utilitarian, instrumental, exploitative or
manipulative. Examples of the I -Thou relationship with place have been provided
by all members of the reader, writer and shaman groups in my empirical research
presented in Chapter 4.
There is another way in which this existential aspect might be seen. My
examination of NSW Police charge sheets over many years, when writing
psychosocial assessment reports for sentencing courts, revealed that in many cases
when the offence of break and enter was committed, the accused defecated or
urinated at the place of their crime. Jean Genet records a similar observation when
he describes how a fellow prison inmate told him that whenever he committed a
burglary, he performed a rite; “ ... he took a crap at the scene of his crime” (Genet,
1949:187). My contention, supported by Genet’s reflection, is that we have an
existential need to mark our territory, the way an animal does; to somehow embed
(and be embedded or absorbed) in places of importance to our essence, a gesture,
a token or part of ourselves in a way that changes the surface nature of that place
into something more primal, that somehow brings about a more intense, albeit
private, elemental signification of that place and in so doing, also brings about some
change in us.
David Malouf makes a pertinent observation along these lines about the
importance of first houses in the life of the individual, one that strengthens the
notion of the existential phenomenology of place:
Our grand house ... was a little world of its own, to be mapped,
explored, re-mapped, interpreted and made the repository of its
own powerful mythology ... First houses are the grounds of our
first experience. Crawling about at floor level, room by room, we
discover laws that we will apply later to the world at large; and
who is to say if our notions of space and dimension are not
determined for all time by what we encounter there (Malouf,
1985:8).
Malouf proceeds to describe this “ ... first and deepest education as the
result of a secret machinery that gets to work in us, a hidden industry of the senses
and the spirit whose busy handling and hearing and overhearing is our second birth