Place as exile

I've been trying to think about place as identity, as I told David (sorry you'll have to read this all over again, Golstein); what is Tulsa? what is there? how do I describe the place? what is place? etc etc

But that is not how I think about place at all. Instead of identity, I, being somewhat of a nomad myself, have always thought about it as wandering at best, exile at worst. Now, the latter association is something I've gotten from my reading of Levinas, which brings me back to the whole bible thing that came to me this morning where place is part-and-parcel with the face (of G/d et al).

In his readings of the Talmudic interpretations of the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai in Exodus (another quasi-face-to-face moment at a place in the Tanahk), Levinas points out that in the Hebrew G/d literally holds the mountain over the Isrealites, threatening that they accept the Law or else. Levinas talks about this as "the doing before the hearing/choosing" that exemplifies all ethical situations, that one is obligated to others before accepting the law and before choosing to "do good."

Secondly, Levinas posits the story of Abraham agaist that of Ulysses as the most emblematic story of (philosophy) and the human condition. Ulysses returns home after years of wandering and detour; Abraham does not. The latter's expenditures are always pure loss, even as he is promised to be father over countless grains of sand.

What does this biblizing have to do with "place"? Well, I'll tells ya. Place is not for me a sense of belonging or tradition or ownership. Instead, it becomes the site of an inescapable bondage (and I don't mean S&M) before the law (more Kafka) that is, in Levinas's terms, "im-memorial." That is, it can't be memorialized because that obligation preconditions and outlasts identity, heroicism, or memory. Secondly, it is something that is always u-topic; that is, a no-place to which one can never return.

OK, enough of the philosophical jargon. What this means is that, in a sense, the dystopic emptiness and horizontalness of downtown Tulsa is a nice canvas on which I can work through some of this redefinition of place as exile, wandering, and infinite ethical obligation.