Locus standi

Christian Century, Oct 15, 1997 by Martin E. Marty

One must have a locus standi, a place to stand from which to view the world. One might even have two of them. Philosopher George Santayana urged that decades ago. His two places to stand were Avila, Spain, and Cambridge, Massachusetts (more precisely Harvard, where he taught). From such a place one has a point of reference in the midst of relativities. This "place to stand" provides perspective; it is a point for measurement, something that can help impart sanity in a world of flux.

I make this recommendation from my study of history, literature and religion. Aspirations to the universal usually begin with the particular. I write in the season of William Faulkner's centennial, and think of his Mississippi. Dostoevsky's Russia gave him a place to stand. For Luther it was Germany.

This locus stand) may be rejected by those who "leave home," though they never stop measuring by it. Or it may lead to provincialism and idolatry of place: "no place like home" becomes "God's country." In the process, it can be an axis mundi, a kind of axle on which the wheel of life turns, its center a fixed point in a turning world.

This year I had two occasions to consider my loci stand). Invited to give the Governor's Lecture in the Humanities in Illinois, my home for 45 years, I showed how Chicago and its environs were my place to stand, my "Harvard," while my "Avila" was Nebraska (West Point and Battle Creek), where I spent 16 years before moving across the river to Sioux City, whence I could look down from the bluff to the Missouri River and Nebraska. I ran through a good deal of Illinois literature to demonstrate its part of this polarity.

Then Governor Ben Nelson of Nebraska invited me to deal with the other pole. Each state's humanities council or committee was host, so I made a big deal of the role of the humanities: history, literature, religion, etc. I used the works of writers like Cather, Sandoz, Morris and Neihardt to paint a portrait of the Nebraska locus.

Well and good. But some Nebraskans of long memory reminded me of a column I'd written about how the West Point house I was born in had been put on wheels and moved close to an Indian reservation near West Point. What, I had asked then, does one do or think when the locus stand) shifts?

Wouldn't you know, it happened again. On the day of the lecture in Omaha, the Sioux City Tribune pictured a two-story brick house, our Marty house from 1944 to 1949, on wheels. (That's two out of three; I assume that the house in Battle Creek, where we lived from 1939 to 1944, still stands.) Like the West Point house, it was sold for $1 to anyone who would move it. Now, the Martys are happy to say, it will be one of six new Habitat for Humanity homes refurbished in Sioux City.

This is unsettling to those who retain lifelong images of the home place as the fixed place. Army brats tell us they never had such places. And every fifth American moves every year. But don't most of us keep in our minds the dimensions of a room of one's own? The view from one's childhood window? The walkways that pointed from this axis mundi toward the edge of the cosmos, or at least toward the next town?

So we deal with the reality that the locus stand) gets moved. Get used to it and grow up, Marty. That's life.