The image of you lives in a place you’ve never been.

I recently attended Danny Denton’s lecture entitled “Being Present: how ideas of physical space, place & non-place were used to build the worlds of The Earlie King…and All Along The Echo”. The lecture revolved around a discussion and exploration of a series of “places and non-places”, the way they appear in Denton’s novels, and how they appear in our everyday lives. “Places” can be thought of as spots that have a history attached to them. I believe the example Danny Denton used was a field that he used to play sports on when he was younger. In contrast, “non-places” might be defined as airport terminals, hotel chains, and railway stations. While I somewhat believe that these locations could be defined as “places” as they may possess the ability to attach certain a history or stability to them, I think Denton's point was that what ultimately makes them “non-places” is the fact that they are places of transit; “non-places” are not anyone's final destination.

During this lecture, I was reminded of a book I’d read a while ago during my undergrad years. The book, which is now unfortunately out of print, was called Where They Were Missed. It’s by Belfast writer Lucy Caldwell. While I remember enjoying this novel, the thing about it that most vividly sticks in my mind is the epigraph at the very beginning, a few lines from a poem from which the novel’s title was derived.

"A house can be haunted by those who were never there. If there was where they were missed."

-Louis MacNiece .

The poem, by Louis MacNiece, is entitled “Selva Oscura”, which I believe was taken from Dante’s Inferno, meaning “dark or shadowed wood” (Warner 1). The poem, like Caldwell’s novel, is a bit hard to find on the internet, for some reason. For the most part, the premise of the poem revolves around those lines, focusing on themes of memory, perception, and place. Another poem by MacNiece that deals with similar themes (though it deals more with time rather than place, but it is still worth a read) would be his poem "Meeting Point".

Time was away and somewhere else,

There were two glasses and two chairs

And two people with the one pulse

(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):

Time was away and somewhere else

- Louis MacNiece

Memory and space are themes that really interest me, and as I’m still running through ideas for potential thesis topics, I wonder if I can find a way to incorporate, or even focus on, these specific ideas in my thesis. I’ve toyed with focusing on transhumanism, which was actually the focus of the first paper I wrote here at UCC. I found it really enjoyable to write and an interesting topic to dive into. This video from the channel "Philosophy Tube" nicely breaks down ideas behind transhumanism, and helped to prepare me a bit before we had our class on the topic.

Other topics that interest me, unrelated to Transhumanism, are inheritance and wealth, and memory, place, and perception. I think my ultimate goal is to find a way to incorporate each of these ideas, and work with texts that exhibit all, or most, of these themes. I toyed with the idea of using The Great Gatsby and Breakfast at Tiffany's as texts texts that I could use in my thesis to exemplify these themes, but decided against doing so. In my upcoming blog posts I'll explain why in a bit more detail.

Works Cited:

Rumens, Carol. “The Photophobe.” The Poetry Ireland Review, no. 53, 1997, pp. 90–90. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25578827 . Accessed 2 Feb. 2023.

Warner, Lawrence. “The Dark Wood and the Dark Word in Dante’s ‘Commedia.’” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 32, no. 4, 1995, pp. 449–78. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247023 . Accessed 2 Feb. 2023.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91396/meeting-point