Some Times of Space

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Some times of space

Doreen Massey

Expectations

The most predictable remark you can make about the weather concerns, of course, its

unpredictability. James Gleick tells a story about the beginnings of understanding

Ð''chaos' in which meteorology is central:

Clouds represented a side of nature that the mainstream of physics had passed by,

a side that was at once fuzzy and detailed, structured and unpredictable Ð'... For as

long as the world has had physicists inquiring into the laws of nature, it has suffered

a special ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere Ð'...

As the revolution in chaos runs its course, the best physicists find themselves

returning without embarrassment to phenomena on a human scale. They study not

just galaxies but clouds.1

And it is indeed odd that in a world where there is instantaneous communication,

journeyings to other planets, genetic manipulation Ð'- in other words the most incredible

technological wizardry and control Ð'- you can still walk out of the house and quite

unexpectedly get totally drenched from head to foot.

There is a house I visit often, in southern France. This region of northern Catalonia,

lying between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, between the Pyrennees and the

Cevennes, is at the mercy of the winds. Each wind has a name: Vent de Alt, Gregal,

Levant, Migjorn, Tramuntana Ð'... The kind of weather the district receives depends on

which of these is blowing through at any given hour. Each brings a distinctive

temperature, rainfall (or lack of it), humidity, even quality of light. The violent storms of

the Tramuntana, the fierce cold in the mountains to the south, the clear dryness of the

Mediterranean: each of these also varies by season. A small shift in the configuration of

the ever-mobile weather system and you have to rethink your plans for the day.

Yet this account of the expectation of variability is founded on its own temperate-zone

assumptions. There are places where you can rely, for days or even weeks on end, on

sunshine, or on freezing cold, or on the fact that it will rain. Even the expectation of

variability, then, might leave you surprised.

And even in these weather-obsessed islands the unpredictability of conditions is

regularly denied in the service of caricature. Lazy journalists evoke dreariness through

reference to wet mornings in Walsall, or Telford. Why these places? They are clearly

not always rainy. The weather is enlisted to heighten an effect; to typify. The

assumption is that Ð''we' are not from such places, or that there are no wet mornings

where Ð''we' are. Rather we are recruited, along with the weather, into collaboration with

the sneering superiority of the writer. This is, perhaps, a vestigal survival of the wider

and persistent phenomenon of Ð''moral climatology'.2

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However, we smile together at the image of dullness. For the caricature of the weather

is used not just to indicate what undoubtedly is the case (that the weather is different

from place to place Ð'- a positive variability) but to establish a mutual characterisation.

All visitors to the house in Catalonia are warned: Ð''DO NOT LEAVE THE HOUSE

WITHOUT SECURING THE SHUTTERS' Ð'- it could be that, unexpectedly, the

Tramuntana will blow.

Encounters

Imagine a journey. It does not have to be an epic one; it could be quite quotidian,

simply from Ð''here' to Ð''there' Ð'- from Manchester to Liverpool let's say. One way to

picture it is as travelling across space. You're moving between two places on a map.

Manchester and Liverpool are given; and you, the active one, travel between them. You

have a trajectory.

Now think of it another way. For this movement of yours is not just spatial; it's also

temporal. So, you're barely out of Manchester, approaching the mosses [?] that stretch

away, flat, on either side, when Manchester itself has moved on. Lives have pushed

ahead, business has been done, the weather has changed. That collection of

trajectories that is Manchester is no longer the same as when you left it. It has lived on

without you. And Liverpool? Likewise it has not just been lying there, static on the map,

awaiting your arrival. It too has been going about its business; moving on. Your arrival

in Lime Street, when you step off the train, begin to get into the things you came here

to do, is a meeting-up of trajectories as you entangle yourself in stories that began

before you arrived. This is not the arrival of an active voyager in an awaiting passive