The Blork Blog

As I mentioned in Part 1, I don’t know exactly why I mythologize the places I do. Sometimes it starts with reading or hearing about a place I’ve never been to, causing me to conjure up images and stories. Other times it happens when I visit a place and there is some kind of resonance – a subconcious reckoning that sets the place firmly in that mythological part of my imagination.

It is usually just a small corner of a place that sparks my imagination in that way. For example, while I love all of Paris, there’s something about rue Montparnasse that makes my mythology bells jangle like crazy. This is not a concious choice, it just happens.

Similarly, there’s something about rue Jean Médecin in Nice that makes me feel almost unreal when I am there, as if I am standing in some sort of psychic time channel. I feel the same way about rue St. Urbain in Montreal, and the boggy field outside of Inverness, Scotland, where the battle of Culloden was fought in 1765.

Then there is Brick Lane, in London. I’ve been fascinated with that street ever since Monica Ali published her novel by that name in 2003. I went there briefly last summer, but only read the novel a month ago. My visit, and my reading of the novel, did not serve as a “reality check.” Indeed, my personal mythology about the place persists. Whenever I see a map of London, a voice in my head whispers “Brick Lane” and I am compelled to zero in and find it on the map.

When I finally read Monica Ali’s novel a few weeks ago, I enjoyed it immensely, and completely apart from my mythology. But it has shifted that mythology a bit – now when I think of Brick Lane I have specific characters (from the novel) to populate my thoughts. Oddly, the presence of those fictional characters makes the street seem more real and less mythic. This begs the question of whether or not visiting a place enhances or diminishes one’s mythology of it.

There is no clear answer. It depends on many factors, and when we’re talking about something as ethereal as imaginative mythologies, it can go either way, or in a different direction altogether.

(Of People and Places, Part 1 and Part 3.)