Implaced

The title of this blog is a displacement of the usual word: emplaced. It’s a riff of sorts on "I’m placed." It's also "not placed," the way implacable is "not placable." Yet "implaced," for me, evokes "implanted," which means something both similar and different: the placement not of inert object but living thing -- heart, secret agent behind enemy lines, mole.

There ought to be something active about our placement as human beings. We are not emplaced as an urn is placed in a niche. We are in place as agents. In some sense we place ourselves. In another we create the places we inhabit. In yet another the places we inhabit create us. Our relationship with place and space is thus complex and contradictory: hence, Implaced.
(Photo: Jeff Widener, Associated Press.)