Great Deeds
In the course of a hectic March, I put two things out into the world: the long-awaited Source Report on the Kounkuey Design Initiative and a review in Landscape Architecture Magazine of the new book Landscape Fascinations and Provocations: Reading Robert B. Riley. Both are defined by the circuit around two poles, one that I am happy to think about and the second that I would rather leave out altogether. That first is the idea of public storytelling, which is a cheery and democratic idea – that everyone has a tale to be told, and that such stories are an important part of our common culture, and that such stories are both illuminating and valuable in of themselves. This is a popular idea when it is carried through, from Studs Terkel to Ask Reddit, and it is always interesting to me that it is so seldom met with. It seems generally easier to start by choosing certain people whose stories can already be assumed to be of value.
This brings us to the second pole, which is that that stories are most valuable when they are about heroes, about special people distinguished from the rest of us by their deeds. The example of these heroes is a meant to lead us to be more than we are, to pull in front of the mass, to do the work of pulling the mass forward. I am thinking of how, at my alma mater, Joseph Campbell’s office was in a little cottage in the middle of the quad; how he was the most set apart, the most useful to the culture he served, the most loathed by the rest of the faculty; the only one of them liable to be remembered in fifty years. To hear his colleagues tell it, Campbell sacrificed the present good of his own community to do great deeds, to tell the gospel of great deeds.
The interest in looking at the archives of those who outlived their own careers is partially flavored by schadenfreude, but also the simple interest in seeing what happens when heroism departs, and a different story is left behind. In Landscape Fascinations and Provocations, M. Elen Deming tells us that in the last ten years of his life, Robert Riley, through most of his career a leading light in the little world of landscape scholarship, was “plagued by health issues, loneliness, regret, and nameless other challenges” (p. 41). In this context, she says, the act of compiling his own best work into The Camaro in the Pasture was its own act of faith in what he had to offer; heroism, maybe but in a very different key.
The Source Report, taken from a series of long interviews, is one kind of attempt to reconcile the two impulses; to spend time on the story of people who act in heroic ways as part of a mission to recognize the common. The stories within the Source Report are of people practicing landscape architecture, but doing so in a mission of public service, and their stories are intended in an act of sharing – that by conveying how they do what they do others can better follow what they have managed to achieve. The idea being that in this case the heroic deed is to help people to tell their own stories.