••••
Landscape is not environment — not Umwelt. As one takes part in the characteristics of landscape (temperature, visibility and the like), landscape remains at a distance which may really be insurmountable — but treating landscape as non-environment attempts a direct engagement, if not with the landscape itself, then with the remoteness of it.
••••
Landscape is not nature — it is a negotiation of space where human and non-human may constitute itself. In the presence of matter, landscape is the ultimate locative determinant, an overlap of innumerable agencies almost entirely unaware of one another. This is not an attempt at a definition.
••••
The failure of landscape theory is it raises questions that want to be answered reductively, almost as if converting landscape into interior space, something less uncooperative.
Perhaps, theory could turn poetic. The readership is already in the single digits.
••••
Cozens’s monochrome studies were antinaturalistic: geomorphology doesn’t run on randomized shapes created ex nihilo. But they do suggest a reversal — that landscape, in turn, could be seen as a number of flat stains. Dimensionality matters only in motion. Sight is a stationary projection and doesn’t care.
••••
Occasionally, you get a glimpse into a timeline of regrowth — where after two hundred years, a lava field is only yet occupied by lichen, soil accumulation still insufficient for basic plants. Geologic timelines are tales of pressure — these are the tales of catching dust.
••••
Enter modern aesthetic theory. A Heideggerian landscape would be a promise of fullness — Adornian would warn against it as form of entrapment. Their overlap is engaging the land as medium, and that is precisely our condition: a stepping out, amalgamated with every ethical problematics, benign only when temporary, local, and small.
••••
Gendering the landscape as female is usually interpreted as passivity, but it answered for natural disasters also. The Bacchae illustrates this best — an old fear that once unrestrained, a woman can rip her own son’s head off without even recognizing him. Thus, an earthquake could have been seen as just landscape at her most Dionysian, so to speak.
••••
Ecological all-connectedness lingo is so impotent not for the lack of verity, but by being rooted in economics, quantifiable relations, the exact mode of thinking revolutionary for the moment the environment was conceived of, useless against the paradigm that conceived it. Valuating trees as dollars saved on air conditioning — works in a presentation; leads to a dead end.
••••
PhilPapers survey shows a curious (albeit not a statistically significant) correlation between moral realism and objective aesthetic value — and also a tendency to underestimate how common this opinion is.
Perhaps one should write about trees as the opposite of violence, Bertold.
••••
Modernism has produced both the bleak industry-adjacent housing ghettos and the national park system — an idealistic compartmentalizing of the nature/culture divide. Now, when the two are mixed, they are still mixed in pure form, as green areas on top of waste treatment plants, making one more at ease with overproduction, rather than seeing it as something unsolved.
••••
Everything vernacular speaks of coherence, landscape is no different. Things exist in agreement, be it between soils and seasons, rocks and buildings, paths and their directions — a metaphor of a world one can indeed live in, if not entirely understand it — rapidly decohering into a terra near the outskirts. For the commons, clarity is alignment with daily use.
••••
Sometimes, invasive species look really beautiful — fitting, somehow in tone with the land, such that their removal will take away something precious — all while still choking out the rest of the ecosystem. The feeling doesn’t have to be wrong; perhaps it is simply a byproduct of the inherent goodness of things.
••••
Wherever violence is present on the landscape, it asserts itself against the explorer’s will — which is what makes it violence in the first place. Thus a military radar would have a warning one may not look at it during its operation, so as to not irradiate the irides. A metaphor so stark it hardly needs specifying.
••••
We can not really project ourselves onto the landscape, since being there entails a need to define oneself once again. Projection is, of course, a failure, but it’s a failure to be, not just to separate. Which is another reason anthropomorphizing the land is hardly an issue: the land is much more likely to terramorphize the viewer, as it already does.
••••
Greek φύσις originally meant growth, then being, then composition, and now it’s all material reality and its workings. Cartoon villains struggling for world domination have something to learn from words.
••••
Timothy Morton famously suggested that the whole might as well be smaller than the sum of its parts. One does not need to agree — but if we took landscape to be a composite entity, made up of pushes and pulls of constituent agents — it appears both more and less impoverished at the same time. Perhaps the entire descriptive principle is at fault, but at which stage.
••••
We make nothing entirely on our own. Landscape produces our food, building materials and electricity, we just learned how to tap into it. The reason we think of land as a passive agent is because of the history of land ownership. Ownership is projected passivity.
••••
It’s impressive how even in the most hostile environments, their indifference always on full display, man still manages to think they’re somehow about him. A British expedition was once stranded on the ice during the polar night, yearning for the sun to appear — which it did, two weeks early because of the atmospheric lensing, an event wholly interpreted as divine intervention. God moving sun for an Englishman.
••••
Habitable parts of uninhabitable areas induce an illusion that the world exists for and because of people. Uninhabitable parts dispel that illusion. The same, to a lesser extent, applies to navigable parts of non-navigable areas: we carry the illusion with us on the paved roads and inside air-conditioned vehicles, as if it itself was part of our ecological niche.
••••
Roads and paths are the elements of consensual logistics: it’s the route that a critical number of actors agreed to be of the least distance and effort, and they last only as long as the consent does.
Free roaming is unmediated, strictly between the actor and land itself.
••••
W.J.T. Mitchell called landscape the dreamspace of ideology. Could ideology in turn be subverted through landscape? Walking the land is direct action, and eventually makes one aware they don’t know what they’re stepping on — and you’re always stepping on something.
••••
Landscape is almost entirely absent from cave paintings, and so are maps. The earliest examples come from the Neolithic — on the Çatalhöyük mural, where the top-down view of a village is juxtaposed against a volcano eruption. It’s as if landscape as a concept was a Neolithic technology, something emerged from altering the land.
••••
Wartime detritus is everywhere in the Arctic. In a land that preserves so well that the village floors from thousands of years back are still visible — does the violence of the war still linger? Do places somehow retain it, or are they redeemed by the grass growing thick on the nitrogen where the blood was spilled?
••••
In Europe, the emergence of ‘true’ landscape is concurrent with writings of Descartes, whose primacy of the subject turns everything else into sense data — making a naturalistic landscape the ultimate representation of the world. Thus naturalism is neither natural, nor neutral, unmoored from what it pretends to show. Not really about the world — but the viewer.
••••
The current use of the word ‘space’ also dates to about the end of the XVII century. Space and landscape are contemporaries.
••••
We’re never told exactly why the fruit of the ground was rejected. Could it have been that even late into the Neolithic the agricultural process was seen as an act of impiety towards the earth — or perhaps that a settled life in general was seen as a stepping stone to enslavement?
••••
American nature photography is normally without people. You’ll never find a single person in a Sierra Club calendar. Yet some things, like bridges, lighthouses and railroads, are shown often, openly, as if bereft of human agency and natural in themselves — indirectly suggesting the area is both beautiful and accessible, a place for some prime real estate.
••••
It’s not that we are alienated from natural land, but land in general. People walking the Creek St. may be unaware it refers to an actual creek, presently underground — up until the street collapses into a sinkhole. We are not good at this. Infrastructure is constantly reworked and rebuilt, only to find new unforeseen issues. You can’t A/B test a storm drain.
••••
Petrarca may not have been the first person to ascend a mountain for pleasure — but having been remembered as such (and also as someone immediately ashamed of such nonsense), must he also bear the mark of the first man truly alienated from it, a proto-Romanticist and anti-Jerome?
••••
The proponents of the picturesque claimed to be after the ‘real scenery’ that would be true to nature as opposed to the forcibly harmonized one. Yet, their approach was also theatrical, which even the word ‘scenery’ implies. It focuses on what can be seen from a specific point of view — a window, a path, a summit — thus turning nature into a series of living tableaux.
••••
All land is mid-formation — but sometimes it rises faster than erosion can smooth it out, making a jagged, uneven landscape, still in perpetual flux. Settling such a land is similarly a process of constant change, a history of ecological takeover by introduced and invasive species, rise and fall of new industry, unreliable and stopgap. An indecisive sublime.
••••
Sometimes, a place is lucky: it gets tied with a context of violence, but escapes having violence happen within it — spared the scathing that some receive by strategic consideration, and some by simply being where the violence “took place”. Still, they were chosen: in an act of topological sacrifice, their geography singled them out as the sites where, should violence happen, it will commence. An unerasable choosing.
••••
The American myth of the dark forest is largely an inherited European narrative, formed in a different age, culture, and, most importantly, a different ecosystem. Yet this myth is still projected onto the modern young, often unsustainable monoculture forests that are largely results of reforestation, their histories openly visible in the land: one can identify plow terraces, lack of pillows and deadfall, uneven numbers of older and younger trees — all pointing either to agriculture, pasture land, or clear cuts. What then is a ‘true’ forest?
••••
City is placelessness. Optimized for shipping of goods and people, dedicated zoning, passage and property regulation, cities are measured in units and directions of movement. Dead ends are an oddity, something to be reworked — but until then they are possible places, small halts in the river flow. Few and far, they compose a separate city: reclaimed, peaceful.
••••
It's only true that places carry their history with them — social to geologic, the best and the worst of it. What's unclear is how we're supposed to take it. Places of tragic deaths and daily commutes, sources of freshwater for lands too far away to consider immediately related, historical sites detached from their contexts, local industry bordering with protected animal habitat, unorganized territories under unclear jurisdiction and enduring representation in mythologized past — all mixed together, the only thing one can actually clearly see around still, simply, beauty.
••••
What do we do if a theory of landscape necessitates a theory of everything? Accumulating data breeds new specialties, but adds to the fragmentation — while landscape is something walked, a sense of intimacy mixed up with logistics. In the end, what we carry out is perhaps gratitude, and a sense of non-human.
••••
There always is a degree of uncertainty in the world — yet the things available to us present themselves always so readily, so completely. Trees, poles, colors, signs, crossings and shapes — are the structural populace of the world, ever so prominent at the edges of habitat where human presence is inessential, interdependency showing itself in diffused signs.
••••
The tundric landscape resists those primary modes of interpretation that the West has inherited from XIX century painting — so it's no wonder that during the mid-1800s' the Arctic was deemed indescribable, the primary attempts of representation resorting to meteorological tables and scientific illustration. This not only makes the tundra as close as you can get to the 'landscape as is', devoid of human context and ideology — but also, a place where the rare familiar may seem most foreign and out-of-place.
••••
The language of landscape is usually that of persistence — though often it seems that a lot of young context is being poured into old skins. Within a few decades one and the same site can transition from a salt marsh into an industrial dumping ground, then back into a salt marsh — different parts still showing their old incarnations. And as the people that live nearby continue to come and go, the newcomers are likely to think this is how the place always was.
••••
The lyrical affirms a reality of received experience without subordinating it to explanatory means — a clarity without comprehension, when nothing needs to be done. It is this sense of limits that makes it akin to a sense of place.
••••
Groves, as spaces, are self-made. There is no one to sweep the floor. We discover them in the same way we discover freshwater sources and walkable paths — as anomalies, benevolent, maybe, but mostly just separate from the chaos between. This suggests selfhood, inarbitrariness, something beyond a coordinate grid.
••••
Sometimes a place is continuously occupied for millenia, and then one day it’s a national border, with a “PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK” sign next to the archeological trivia. Borders are real only so far as they are defined by violence. Nothing else makes them real. Even a casual passport check is a temporary surrender.
••••
Volunteering at public parks is a lot of killing — which gets strange, as you are perfectly aware invasive species aren’t doing anything wrong, the whole thing gaining Kurtz’s “without judgment” vibe (sadly, not in the book) — and worse yet if you just, like, really love wormwood. And wish it no harm at all.
••••
Geography is an inheritance of romantic nationalism — a fixation on borders and landmarks making up macroentities, partially or wholly imagined. Uluru is either in Australia the continent, or Australia the country; native accounts are treated as not geography — as if one story topped another on the basis of better maps. And which of them are better?
••••
The making of an altered terrain is not dissimilar to that of a representational image: it is composed, framed-out, it uses displaced materials in low supply, and it eventually sets tone. An altered land is representational of itself. Hence, an overlook, a “living panorama”, is the best chance for a spectator to enjoy the view without suspecting something is deeply off.
••••
Ritter called landscapes aesthetic experiences par excellence, on the basis of viewer’s disinterestedness — but it is not entirely true. People may not work the land like they used to, but try and challenge the popular notions of nature whatever they may be (worst of all, national), and the reaction goes off the rails. In the emotional landscape, everyone is suddenly a landowner.
••••
We keep reconstructing groves — first, by turning them into temples, now by turning them into parks — a recurrent domestication of sacred space that was originally self-made, found, unmitigated by anything social. It’s as if a need of placehood was part of human cognitive modernity, concurrent with language, art, religion, and game.
••••
In “50 Steps to Landscape Thinking”, Thomas Oles proposes we get down on our knees and dig — something that would presumably look comical to our land-unalienated ancestors, a yet another symbolic action as distance. Residual Romanticism’s insistence on non-belonging is in stark contrast to Emersonian ownership in the metaphysical sense — but both, importantly, only obsess over people. The outside is still only a stage.
••••
In Heaney’s “Death of a Naturalist”, it’s once the bounds are overstepped that a seasonal tide feels like a retribution. We know that nature is always changing. If we take the fact seriously, any and all change gets morally neutral, mass extinctions included. Ecology becomes moral through guilt.
••••
At present, the legality of environmental protection still bases itself on people. The biosphere has no standing. The achievement of earlier movements was to refocus ideas of public ownership, which in the West are descended from Roman law.
This is a mostly dead end — as in, cannot be optimized any further. Whether it will suffice is yet to be seen.
••••
Protection is a claim of sovereignty — all the more so since we tend to protect our own niche: woods, meadows and river flows, areas that would otherwise be used up and built over. If we believed they really belonged to nature, it would have to be given a legal standing — something too consequential to actually be considered. When we say we protect — we mean it is ours whole.
••••
The irony of this writing is, of course, its attempt to present landscape theory as explicitly not a wilderness. In truth, it is more of a HAZARD sign at the entrance.
••••
Gated communities often employ a pronounced createdness: guards, walls, pools of sharp geometric figures, a locality based solely on a contractual title. Others attempt to hide it in faux-traditional architecture, posing remoteness minutes away from the downtown, in a private holdout on public land. Both are signaling inefficiency, a refusal to live as the land does.
••••
One of the earliest observations on the effects of anthropogenic deforestation is found in Plato, of all people (“Critias”, iioC—iiiD) — a philosopher, studied throughout in his talking the virtues of man and the ideal objects, all but erased on practical consequences of land use. Only the magnitude is surprising; the fact in itself is not.
••••
Jus soli can be interpreted as a newborn’s right over land, or a land’s right over newborn. We think of legalese as founded on precision — but it turns into ambiguity in the face of uncountable and abrupt, waters that aren’t there and rains that may not come. It may also be an uneasy ally, a way to bypass the archaic treaties without having to abolish them first.
••••
To further the muddying. A belief, common during the Westward expansion — that “rain follows plow”, and somehow also mines, rails and telegraph wires — was narrowly vindicated through study of airborne microbes, capable of forming precipitation. The theory then was mistaken mainly in focusing on people, rather than soil and rain for their own sake.
••••
So, are we, or are we not separate from nature? Differences in kind are modal, which is to say arguable. At particle level, life is an irrelevant quirk of mid-scale organization — but once the differences in kind are introduced, there is no limit to them, differences in kind in differences in kind. As soon as something can have a soul, it can have many.
••••
Binary logic is tied with Platonism, perfect forms that open the world to the strangeness of things, but then limit it to just one kind of strangeness — hence the nature/culture divide. So while Clark’s “things we did not make” does, certainly, ring true — the unending debate whether or not we are nature, is largely missing the point. Nature is not nature.
••••
A poetic theory of landscape would treat its own sentences as something akin to places — uncertainties, hovering at an entity-like level of being, but never quite coming together in a definitive whole. Boundaries are most real when they are half-boundaries. Everything else needs to be propped up by force.
••••
Sustainable production restages the same narrative of man’s gentle stewardship of the world civilizations have talked about since the Neolithic — the implication being that, despite everything, we perceive ourselves in control.
It’s not that solutions derived from guilt are not perfect — it’s that they aren’t innocent either.
••••
Polar explorers spent years in preparations, funding, selecting crew, all to get to the damn place, and then still called it “accursed land” in their field notes. Why? For all the hostility (really, indifference) of the place, it takes wanting to be there to actually go. Or else these most adamant of men really did just want to claim it all for the crown, in which case… what a waste.
••••
It is bizarre to hear a park ranger say the woods at night spook him into perceiving his own humanity. Belonging is a created problem. If the criteria is inseparateness, it is achieved through presence and risk, having to walk the ground, breathe, suffer the elements — none of which is exclusive to marmots and St. Jerome. Putting a high bar on belonging is a fantasy of being apart.
••••
Left alone, the land usually remembers — or lets go on a geological time scale. So there’s a mild irony in that human impact can only be erased by ways of a bigger impact, a very manual task. A nuclear weapons plant can be raised, covered with soil brought over, and grass will grow. But does it really become — a grassfield?
••••
In the context of Prynne’s “Huts” — if landscape and language are not dissimilar, then the impoverished/seasonal/deathcamp refuge is not a fitting parallel for prosody. Sure, the open field is a place to die of exposure, and a fully urban setting is surrender to readyspeak — but the nomadic, for all it can be, can not be illiterate. It necessitates closeness.
••••
Landscape is not a neutral subject — it is a total one. Hence the reason it can be used in pictorial arts for every imaginable agenda, but also why it makes evident a pictorial incompleteness.
Being elusive makes it an inexhaustible counterforce. This is good. If we really were in control, we would probably just die out.
••••
Landscape research often delves into the question whether the term itself is at all coherent or needs to be thrown out. It may seem an overreaction — but the ontological ambiguity is the point, in the same way that being a person persistently carries a haunting of being, conceivably, not a person.
••••
Anthropogenic climate change can be described as decaying history, a dethronement of instrumental systems that should, ideally, use everything and leave nothing behind.
Pollution is the stuff of remainder meanings.
No wonder it often appears beautiful, in the most conventional sense.
••••
In Enūma Eliš, the state is the true creation; the world and everyone in it a mere byproduct. The natural is not just subordinate — it is a legacy of defeated revolt, a guilt-based enslavement. Rivers obey irrigations because they are of a dead god. Opposing development is thus reenacting a cosmological failure — which, on some level, is something we still believe.
••••
Expanding the ironies. The immense popularity of barn, pasture, cornfield and other rustic agricultural imagery — fetishizes the labor of the last class of people that don’t really have a sentimental relationship with the land. It’s not only that non-farmers don’t want to kill the cattle we eat — we’re also just plain glad someone somewhere still does it.
••••
Something is true when it participates in the world — its structure may be semantic, but its basis is ontological. This is how features like form, style and composition are of the things they invoke, making it a vicarious, but persistent connection, an indistinguishable process of presence and absence, a melting and a withdrawal.
••••
Contemporary takes on New Topographics get strangely purist, far more so than the original crowd, outside Jenkins, has ever been. Fields of invasive plants, windbreaks and marked trails are often denied recognition as man-altered, pushed out by the aesthetics of deadpan walls, masquerading as method. Devolving into a genre.
••••
In unintentional rhetoric, botanical literature already speaks of plants as of willful agents. They use toxins and spread seeds.
A further step would probably be to ask if toxins could similarly use plants: glycosides, lectins and alkaloids quietly ruling the world.
••••
Local toponyms are predominantly functional, deriving from use and hazards of given sites. Non-local toponyms — the names of national figures, commemorations and industry terms — all subjugate the local to things explicitly elsewhere. A pretended ownership by distant interests and dead men. Only mountains, occasionally, still belong to the gods.
••••
In Appleton’s concept of prospect/refuge, being seen is only a problem when hiding from other people — as he bizarrely uses Hobbema’s “Alley at Middelharnis” to illustrate the refuge benefits of a ditch, something the painting was really not aiming at. Thus, not just this, but all painting is subverted into geography of human-on-human violence.
••••
Could the language of landscape be non-propositional? Things aren’t structured as statements, the models are. A rock or a tree might as well be a poem — giving itself to a totality of being that is unknown to it. A bearer of itself.
••••
Ironically, most of Altdorfer’s unpeopled landscapes really do feel without subject — a failure that is entirely compositional — so the harmonic powers of sainthood and form are essentially the same. Creation, revolving around a footbridge.
••••
The separateness of cities is already present in the earliest literature: Gilgamesh is said to have built the walls. Should it surprise that the rest of the story is his coming to terms with mortality — with the walls ending up both his eventual consolation, and the medium of his record?
Walls are, after all, archaeologically persistent. Some of Uruk’s still stand.
••••
‘Development’ is, of course, a misnomer. Early industrial era explorers wrote of the wilderness as God-forsaken, accursed, malevolent &c, all on the basis that the place lacked a convenient cow pasture at the moment of their arrival. The implication is not just that development is bound to human needs — it’s that meaning itself can not exist outside them.
••••
Studying landscape is antinaturalistic in the sense that it makes a manual task of what everyone else assumes to be performing casually and without effort. The catch is ubiquitous. John Constable’s “Cornfield” made asses of Salon judges for not knowing shit about agricultural cycles; it now makes asses of the general public buying its reproductions on dinnerware.
••••
There is a sameness to old growth communities, be they tropical, boreal or temperate — a visible balance in the pushes and pulls in the composition of species. Spaces are neither barren, nor choked, having no extraneous input, and no awareness of each other — driven, ironically, by overproduction and a dependency on decay.
••••
Environment emerged as a concept just as the Columbian exchange was destroying the ecological balance across the globe, suggesting that something like the von Humboldt’s “Naturgemälde” is not conceivable in an unconnected, but undisturbed state. It means that only a vanishing world can be captured. Not an exciting thought.
••••
Both climate change science and its denialism grew out of the nuclear war research — sometimes, down to the individual actors. It helps frame the issue. Sure, greed explains the industrial interests, but to the common denialist the unifying theme is apocalyptic, saying that we can poison the world just like we said we can bomb it — and life will go on as it always has.
••••
How places entangle themselves with violence is something one does not necessarily wish to talk about — but the subject forces itself on the speaker regardless, even if in obtuse ways. Violence, by definition, is nonconsensual. It’s only fitting that the theme of violence is as well.
••••
This writing does not unify, propose, or explain. Cautiously poetic, it attempts an emergence from a kind of interior space onto a kind of an outside. If the land is indeed semiotic, writing about land is, in part, a translation, a striving after an in-between language, unmediated by meaning. Turning one’s own language into this hidden one is the terminus of poetic speech.
••••
Visibility loss depictorializes experience. The lay of the land doesn’t change, terrain will be just as steep, directions will still matter — but sight becomes synonymous with touch, which it partially always was: an attempt to grasp onto things unreachable, placing yourself against them. We think of seeing as a visual capability — but they’re all spacial.
••••
Our being inside of a landscape makes our view necessarily incomplete, a definition impossible. A blind spot. Thus, landscape exists in the realm of non-deconstructible terms, up there with God, language, justice, those sort of things. A very strange list to make for something so seemingly geographic.
••••
“We are surrounded with things we have not made and which have a life and structure different from our own.”
Clark isn’t wrong — but then, nothing we make we make wholly and out of nothing; and the nature of bricks is as alien to our own as the trees are. The split is reductive; the attack on the split is also often reductive.
••••
We should consider bringing back the practice of votive gifts — buying one of those ugly Eiffel Tower toys not to take home, but to leave at the base of the actual tower, to never again be seen. Surely the gods will notice.
••••
Walking is common as spiritual practice, a kind of prayer. As one walks, the partiality of land is relinquished, though its silence is also similar to that of a deity. It is not for nothing that the Neolithic religions saw places as both habitats of the gods, and the gods themselves.
••••
Composition is hard when things don't want to move compositionally — until they do, and it suddenly seems the most natural thing in the world. There are two ways to look at it: either the world is chaotic, and composition is a perceptual quirk — or the world is inherently compositional, just less so for the single-point perspective.
••••
Clarity is indebtedness. You know that the places don’t ask of you, and they couldn’t — but they couldn’t give either, and yet they do. Instinctually, you want to reciprocate, and have nothing to offer. The debt could not possibly be repaid. Even this way of putting it is too economical.
••••
That φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ is precisely what puts industrial production at odds with organic growth. Neither a grove, nor a parking lot have complete definitions or an ontological edge — but the latter, being man-made, functionally assumes both.
In the end, the problem with parking lots is not that they aren’t ontologically superior — it’s just that they’re fucking ugly.
••••
Uyobishny is a versatile Russian word for something not only offensively ugly, but also dull.
Golf is the most uyobishny use of land.
••••
That clear-cutting was believed to be beneficial for the soils is all the more nonsensical because it feels explicitly like a mass killing ground.
Its appeal was never morally-neutral — it was always an appeal of industrial power.
••••
Belonging eventually just happens, without you asking, without pictures or rituals or anything other than being, in some indefinable way, with the place. You don’t even notice it until you are on the other side.
How and why this happens is unimportant. Clarity is something you seemingly get from elsewhere, not something you either have or have earned.
••••
When one experiences a small earthquake while sitting outside on the ground, things suddenly cease being merely one’s surroundings. They get vivid, unspeakable — but they were always this way. It’s the ordinariness that is the distortion.
••••
Geoffrey Hill wrote of the moral landscape as just as igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary. It makes sense: morality bursting out, weathering, stratified in the commons and eventually pressurized back into something else over millennia, under the weight of, basically, itself. A change in kind, with fossils still sticking out. Waiting to resubmerge.
••••
There are paintings of dollhouses with landscapes pictured on their walls — four levels of nested estrangement from anything land-like — that is, unless the museum roof leaks. It’s not hard to see why theory blames the obscenity of it all on images — but the distinction is so permeable it may as well not stand. One can tell the real defilement by the violence it entails.
••••
There is a curious lack of overlap between philosophy and theory — the latter quoting the former only in case of clear ideological baggage. So, Emerson is consistently present; Latour is completely absent. For all its prodding, it seems, theory guards against the forms of writing that would be unsound for a social science. A gated community, to put it in landscape terms.
••••
Our insight into the land might as well be special — just as our estrangement. Philosophies of access battle the notion, but it can’t be brushed off just because some of us have finally discovered humility. The worst part of anthropocentrism is that it has ground, and, if true, would be horrifying.
••••
What if we don’t view writing about landscape as either theory or analysis, or any other third word — but as writing, and simultaneously as landscape? It already suggests an inhabitance, a traversal — and the resistance of language is much like that of a steep incline. The problem that has the theory stuck where it is — it a rhetorical problem, a problem of form and style.
••••
In motion, there are no seasons. What looks like a regularity to someone spending a year in one place, and one place alone — gets all over the map when moving all over the map. It muddies the definitions. A mountain summit can be a perpetual blizzard — but it’s not “winter”.
••••
Simplification is the failure of nature writing, how it becomes a genre. Vacuum is nature. Dimensionality, quantum fluctuations and mass are nature. Our using this word to mostly mean bears and eagles — betrays how we are simply very impressed by them, but don’t particularly want to investigate what they’re part of. And nobody’s keen on being a faunal poet.
••••
On history as nature. There is a structural timbre to how things happen, in their localities and directions. A cultural horizon looks epidemic, an achievement of equilibrium, and just as fatal. We know individual specimens are unpredictable, regardless of species. An appearance of an absence of will could simply be that we didn’t find it.
••••
Lyricism has to do with a self-sufficiency of parts. One can write an ode to a flower field, but hardly an epic — and yet, the implication still has to be comparable in scale. A part has to not just speak for the whole, but transcend it. Perhaps that is why a crop of a good painting can result in another good painting: not scalability as much as its indirect refutation.
••••
It’s less surprising that some places were deified, than that others weren’t. A limb was thought to fall sick if the spirits abandoned it — by analogy, that would make a vast number of places non-sites, at least until monotheism claimed them all. Strange. They were made of the same stuff, which suggests a deficiency of arrangement. Unsuitability for devotion.
••••
Most human wants are satisfiable and specific — but there is a pervasive reappearance of a kind of an all-landscape, a multitude happening in one place, be it in the imagination, an artwork, or, often, in reference to an afterlife. Things that resist definitions carry some strange desires — but even stranger is that they carry desires at all.
••••
One has to despise it a bit — the spectacular. An odd happening of geological features that break something off from the mundane so completely it almost calls for itself to be seen — like space necessitating significance simply by being big — and, by implication, making it ironically pedestrian. Some sacred sites really were overlooks. Most were not.
••••
Plants have no need to attract us. We’re not pollinators. In whatever sense of the word, beauty seems to transcend the perception of visible light across at least some species that haven’t had a common ancestor since the deuterostome-protostome split. How far do we carry this? Would pollinators like paintings too? Would they pick Rothko over Vermeer?
••••
There is an ambiguous quality to plant succession, replacing not generations of species, but species themselves: birches to pines to oaks. When we talk about growth being old, it’s not the age of a stand that makes it so, but the maturity of a cycle — another model we are accustomed to, also suspect. Nature is only cyclical temporarily, and in parts.
••••
Disturbance narratives are direct and conclusive, making them entirely unlike land — which, even in a poor state, and if not disturbed any further, will heal, the reciprocity will return, and it will eventually get to old growth, serving a flourishing yet to come. Such recovery tells us little about nature, or us, as we relate to it. Its clarity is unclear. But it would feel like home.
••••
Of course we don’t have any evidence the land loves us. Plants make fruit for themselves — and if we speak of the agency of soil, we might as well introduce the agency of nitrogen, which may or may not appreciate this whole legume fixing. And of course we can’t pick beliefs based on their utilitarian value. But: if the land did love us — how else would it let us know?
••••
Everything that places accessibility below something else — will, at least to a certain degree, appear incoherent. It is true of language; it is also true of the mountain patterns, their remoteness matched perfectly by the unpredictability of conditions: sun to hail and back within half an hour. A chaos at work, speaking of the inadequacy of coherence.
••••
Landscape writing should also, perhaps, be eigentlich nur dichten — but that doesn’t solve the question of style. Style is a language metagame, a byway of unsaid meanings. Can they be untrue? Do they also require courage? We know we can’t build clouds, and yet there’s a duty to still be at home with what they entail.
••••
Landscape is not a feeling about a landscape. A shift in a measurably small feature, like an overlap of two elements at a distance, can alter the whole composition — and “composition” is what we would say has changed.
Feelings themselves are simple; one has them indoors all the time.
••••
Turns out, Enkidu did mourn over Humbaba’s forest. This was always a missing piece, in a text already full of environmental reflections: deforestation leading to floods, groves being replaced by temples, and the epic itself transcribed on the defensive walls. All this was described as our fall already in the earliest texts to be written — and we just kept going.
••••
Pound's take on Paradiso in Canto XVII is that it's mostly a place of overgrowth, surfaces, and complete stillness. The gods show up in the background, but in no greater way than their statues, and “the light not of the sun”.
One might ask how is this a salvation, and how is exactly the reason by which it is.
••••
We don’t just get used to places — we love them like we do other people: we give them names, miss them, mourn their loss. It cheapens the sense of what people are, so it can be redistributed further — upon which one can discover the only reason we ourselves are people is because everything always was. Lending peoplehood to the non-human — is coming home.
••••
Being somewhere is already a coexistence. All this inquiry ties with ethics in a sense of being separate from everything else, but also imbued with everything else — and attempting to reach out to this condition in others. The opposite of deep personhood is deep personhood; the opposite of deep totality is a deep totality.
••••
How foolishly graceful that Knecht was, in the end, killed by landscape — a saintly withdrawal denied by a mountain lake. Still, an innocent slip of judgment compared to that of the author’s. One does not bring dialectics to a totality fight.
••••
Good poems don’t tell you what they are doing, they’re just doing it — being a certain way without announcing the principles of their being — and which is extremely unusual for means of communication, but fully akin to things we did not make. All is, first and foremost, its own. If a rock made itself intelligible for you, nothing would be encountered.
••••
Understanding is not something you do or do not have (since it is not an object) — it is a vague sense that you can, to a strange degree, play along with whatever is happening here. You can look at dead languages or obscure data, and think of them in a poetic way. What’s required is not knowing things, but letting them in on their own terms.
••••
Description calls for a certain responsibility, some limits on what can and can not be said — be it about a thing, a place or a being. Meaning can only exist within such limits, mediated by them. One who thinks they can say anything whatsoever — ultimately has nothing at all to say.
••••
One can find beauty in the unlikely places — clear cuts, polluted grounds, war ruins, unending parking lots — without in any way wishing the world at large looked anything like them. Matter is fleeting, which also means it is all redeemable, elevated through means almost entirely unlike those that defiled it. Beautiful by the same way anything else can be.
••••
Every site needs to be visited at least twice; best of all, day after day, often and in different seasons — giving a sense of its pace, its inherent vacancy and inconsistent resolve. Places are slow, it helps to slow down with them.
••••
Adam Smith, suspicious of industrialists and merchants, believed monetary value came from agriculture alone — historical context being not just colonialism and the slave trade, but also the mass displacement of Scottish peasants. Land makes everything that we have, yes — but economies don’t need to prove themselves right. They need to prove themselves non-despotic.
••••
Industrialization was always a pyramid scheme, dependent on a disproportionate host of groups, nations and continents left holding the bag — a process that is still going. Fraud is unfixable; no act of legitimation will make it proper — which makes it a daunting thing to confront. But unlike fraud, responsibility is participatory and modal. If nobody is coerced, nobody is left out.
••••
One doesn’t choose to see something as landscape: it already looks like one, regardless of what it contains (it could contain nothing; Joan Mitchell is a landscape painter). Landscape has a something of landscape — though trained to identify things by what can be pointed at, we call it a construct. The pointing is the error. Seeing something as landscape is a sense of already being there.
••••
The only error of dualism is the rule of excluded middle. Matter is not fallen if it can not be clearly demarcated — and for what purpose? Hierarchies collapse at the basest of imprecisions, the natural order being disordered nature. Immanence vs transcendence fight is attempting to limit strangeness, to stand victorious in a barren. A strange wish.
••••
Land has to center, all of its parts pressed together in interdependent coherence by reason of being in the same place — their composition producing ever more complex life through series of errors, forgetfulness and delay. It is essentially anarchistic.
••••
There is a sense in which all of Monet’s Rouen cathedral paintings are a singular work, picturing the façade in all of its possible states of light — reflexive also of their method, entirely antithetical to an idea of frozen time, and about as far removed from photography as was pre-Renaissance painting, albeit in a different way. Taking time, often in its entirety.
••••
Whatever it is we can say about landscape seems to have already been said by it. What is a speaker to do? As when an understanding between two parties has already been achieved — one speaks mostly in reveries, hints, banalities mixed with code. And why yes, it really is spring, and it really does come after winter, or mostly does.
••••
Too much of the environmentalist rhetoric is in the key of apocalypse cults: there will be floods and heat waves and crop failures, and the sinners are going to be so sorry — and what is an extinction of one species against the proverbial greater good? One of the lessons of the physical world is its finitude can not be expunged. The persistent retelling of the same myth may just be a part of it.
••••
James C. Scott describes the correlation between inhospitable terrain and statelessness, when a river can have upwards of fifty names, while most of the peaks surrounding it will have none. Names are half-natural; given, but tied to clarity — and, in the most general terms, while force needs clarity to apply itself, clarity does not need force.
••••
One might feel guilty walking the fresh snow, in full reminder you can not be in the world without disrupting it — just as one hides from the shot the means by which it was captured. Still, the traction of walking, the pressure against the ground — ring also of certain verity, a state of assured being. Every thing communes of the same space.
••••
Things have very few qualities — so it is necessary to not overdescribe them, to not project onto them qualities that the things can not bear. It is a question of being careful.
Though if you do, and the description holds, what then, if anything, does it say?
••••
Virtual landscapes are interior spaces disguised as exterior ones — which, to some degree, is something we always wanted: a cooperative world in a box. In the end, it is not the scale that betrays it, but dependence on units, bits. The progression runs dry far earlier than the land.
••••
Clouds make beautiful abstract shapes at an unimaginable scale and that will never repeat again — yet artists never really obsess over them as a sole subject, neither those who chase the extraordinary, nor those picturing the mundane. It’s as if the miraculous negated itself by being consistently miraculous all the time.
••••
State-infected pictorial traditions equate the grandeur of natural and man-made, canyons in concord with hydroelectric dams. It accommodates a social mythology — in this case, that of the destined Eden, or a good state. Idealizing the land is, in this case, prerequisite.
••••
One has to wonder how the inerrable constancy of the world is paired with the debasement of social being. At times, it feels almost purposeful: a theodicy, something to learn from rocks. Everything everywhere in the same predicament of exposure.
••••
At the extremes, the subjective thinking can not distinguish self-benefit from self-harm. Thus, one too skeptical of all judgements — shuts out the world completely, showing themselves as preoccupied with themselves — nevertheless not neglecting to look out the window, checking to see if it rains.
••••
Colloquial language does not allow us to completely assert the object. Best it can do is “I think the object is more important than my perception of it”, thus wrapping it in the speaker in its entirety. One can remove oneself from the contents, make the pointers indiscernible, but it will be taken as a contrivance. Nature, colloquially, is unnatural.
••••
Plant intelligence is controversial only because of our long history of misusing intelligence to discriminate against other humans. Conceptual widening is always novel; narrowing is always the same. For some, thinking your lawn is alive calls for respect and a coexistence; for others, it’s merely satisfying to know that a conscious being depends on them for its life.
••••
One may get a sense that all we lack is description — but the state of being in place leads to feelings that could not be described. It’s not that we lack words (because we could just invent new words), but that describing a feeling is non-description. Similarly, the point of being in place is not the feelings you get, since you could always get them without being in place.
••••
Maybe there is no landscape tradition in Western culture. The peaks are disparate; their placement into a more than just chronological linearity would be of extreme conservatism, a need for a continuity calling for its invention.
Every eye, then, is a period eye. Maybe wild animals really did help the Benedictine monks build their monasteries. Who are we to judge.