Oct 4

For Stella Flanders, Goat Island is not simply an island. It is the place she grew up and the place she grew old, but also everything that has happened in between and everything that is still happening in her limited time left. The space of Goat Island and the time she has spent on Goat Island are inseparable and interwoven; one cannot be without the other. Stella has lost many of her close friends and family over the years, but they remain with her spiritually and for her, physically. As she is crossing the reach, moving into the unknown, her dead husband gives her his hat, a physical and real object, which is found on her frozen body. This shows that Goat Island is independent of time. Although Stella has have passed, she will remain on Goat Island.

The Reach evolved as Stella’s roots on Goat Island grew. It began as a wide, concrete visualization of the gap between herself and local life. Stella valued the island and the people who had come and gone, so much so that she saw no reason to experience neither Portland, nor Shaw’s supermarket. Her familial ties were strong, and she had a palpable understanding of the lifecycle of an island community. All of this grounded Stella to the land; she rather die on Goat Island than seek care on the mainland. This slow death that both her and her family had experienced was part of the cycle that she came to understand. The Reach began to narrow, for her as it had for many. This new conception of the Reach brought Stella towards spacetime, where memories and dreams meshed into her coming to terms with death. Spacetime was her community, as she saw it, it was the people she had lost on the island. For all of the others lost throughout her life, the Reach and spacetime also became intertwined. The visualization of her husband, of the hat, of the others who she’d seen pass in the community, allowed her to accept life and bridge the Reach. This cycle was not immediate, but rather a development where her dreams and reality became meshed into spacetime throughout the story. Her visualization of ghosts of those she knew both on the Reach and prior to her trip to death, made spacetime real and death calm.

Stella’s stories about the history of the island based on her life experiences and her possible delusions make this fictional space exactly what spacetime is described as. This conclusion can be validated through Stella’s visions of her husband. At “some point” he existed and then ceased to exist in the real word but continued to live through Stella’s hallucinations. Everyone on the island experienced Russell Bowie’s death, but Stella imagines him in the afterlife and the wife he left behind will dream of him.

Spacetime thrives here because on this island, the people are tied to each other in ways that surpass that of a neighbor label. Their experiences are interconnected but each person will remember, dream or even hallucinate some events or people more than others, 

Harvey states that in the relational view of space “an event, process, or thing cannot be understood by appeal to what exists only at some point. It crystallizes out of a field of flows” (Harvey, 14) Goat Island is an example of an event/process/thing crystallized out of a fields of flows. The Reach is a story told by the point of view of Stella Flanders, the oldest resident of Goat Island. She is an embodied of the place because she alone can tell the human narrative of the island, as she has never left. But it is not just own experiences that make the place… but rather the web of communication and stories she tells (and even the stories she doesn’t tell, like those of the death of the child molester or the crib-death of an infant) that make up the fields of flows from which Goat Island is constructed. Without this field of flows, Goat Island is just a space but with it, it is a place. It is a place that cannot “be understood by appeal to what exists only at some point”–a place in spacetime. Stella’s narrative is a good example of how we understand things/events/processes in term of relational spacetime. Her own narrative capture sections of other narratives; her memories and visions include people who she may not fully know (like the man from the mainland who once upon a time played cribbage on the island) but whose own experiences help to crystallize Goat Island out of the field of flows. This woven mesh of experiences, memories, dreams, and visions are what define Goat Island in the relational view of spacetime.