The Land of Allium: an exploration into the magic of place

Abstract

Magical. A common adjective used to describe places. But does the magic of place spring from genius loci? Or could it be that we are the magicians, casting spells to transform places into what we desire (or what we fear)? Our sense of place is not a mirror on reality. We come to know places by inscribing our fantasies atop them, by writing onto the landscape our own imagined geographies. C.S. Lewis provides an intriguing glimpse into sense of place through the Pevensie children and their experience in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: a mere wardrobe becomes a complex fantasy world in which the children play and interact. As adults, and as societies, we take real geographies and treat them as Lewis's wardrobe, creating Narnias in the depths of our most mundane landscapes. In this paper I explore the magic of place through an autobiographical photo essay set in a nature preserve in eastern Kansas. The stories I tell highlight in a literary and artistic way the phenomenological aspects of sense of place and the potential political import of the geographical imagination.

Keywords:

• sense of place
• geographical imagination
• phenomenology
• magic

Notes

1. In the story, the Pevensie children are sent out into the country to escape the Nazi bombings of London during WWII, but Lewis, in response to such analyses of his books, was adamant that Narnia was not to be misconstrued as fantasy play, but a place that the children actually entered through the wardrobe, which has metaphysical/cosmological origin being carved from a magical Narnian tree by Digory Kirke, the professor with whom the children are sent to live, as revealed in The Magician's Nephew (1955), the last book in the Chronicles of Narnia series.