••••

Landscape is not environment. Encountered as temperature, visibility, elevation — landscape remains at a distance, possibly insurmountable. Treating landscape as non-environment attempts a direct engagement — with its remoteness, if not its own being. One can not always tell what they meet.

••••

Landscape is not nature. It allows for a negotiation of space where living and non-living may constitute themselves, an overlap of innumerable agencies almost entirely unaware of one another. A locative determinant of its own being. This is not an attempt at a definition.

••••

The questions raised by landscape theory approximate it into an interior space, something less uncooperative. Prohibitively man-made, as is the habit of explanations. 

••••

What if we don’t view writing about landscape as either theory or analysis, or any other third thing — 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.

••••

A poetic theory of landscape would treat its own sentences as something akin to places — uncertainties at an entity-like level of being, 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.

••••

Landscape has no requirements. An image may lack horizon, discernible perspective, shadows. A sense of space can emerge without anything to suggest it: meaning that space is uncanny, something we think a necessary condition of presence — itself a presence. Still there, when the sun goes down.

••••

Enter aesthetic theory. A Heideggerian landscape would be a promise of homecoming; an Adornian — a warning against entrapment. One enters the land as medium, a difficulty no care could mitigate. An underexamined ground.

••••

Composition is hard when things don't want to move compositionally — until they do, and it looks so effortlessly innate of them. One could suggest the world inherently compositional, just less so from the single-point perspective. A soft theodicy of limits we all endure.

••••

Natural objects are in a common condition with sacred ones — naked in their essence enduring a finite world — and as such, cannot entirely be debased, letting places emerge as their quidditas, the individuations of place. And the day goes on.

••••

Landscape theory often delves into the question of 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 carries a haunting of being, conceivably, not a person.

••••

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.

••••

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?

••••

Closeness occurs through closeups, proximities — rocks and grasses innumerable, a circuitousness of the near. Being with them, if not as they are.

Landscape could remain simple, a non-sum, things existing as things and yet also as qualities. A strangeness does not wish to be solved, except strangely.

••••

Landscape is not a neutral subject, it is a total one — which makes it both a suitable vehicle for ideological picturing, and an inexhaustible counterforce to it. One knows the real through elusivity and friction. This is good. If we really were in control, we would probably just die out.

••••

Museums are collections of objects inherently out of place, in the sense that art is inherently out of place. A statue may not belong in a foreign museum — but neither does it belong in a landscape where it was made. Belonging is something it is conceived outside of — or else it could not entrance.

••••

Towards a landscape theory of self. One could not project themselves onto a landscape since being there entails defining oneself once more. Projection is, by all means, a failure, but it’s a failure to be, not to separate. It has hard limits; the land is much more likely to terramorphize the viewer, and often does.

••••

The picturesque strove after the ‘real scenery’, theatrics of authenticity against the theatrics of manufacture, but ultimately containing the same promise: that one can observe the whole of reality by looking at it from the right point — a window, a path, a summit. An experience found to be irreplicable, and they were the last to try.

••••

One does not choose to see something as landscape: it always already looks like one — 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.

••••

American nature photography is normally without people — yet some things, like bridges, lighthouses and railroads often are present, as if bereft of human agency, natural in themselves — beauty propped up by accessibility, the ghost of Bierstadt still pushing the real estate. O'Sullivan may also have captured a myth, but his was at least not quiescent.

••••

Disturbance narratives are direct and conclusive, making them entirely unlike land — which, even from devastation, can heal, the reciprocity can return, 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.

••••

It’s not that we are alienated from natural land, but land in general — people walking the Creek St., unaware there was a creek, presently underground — until the street collapses into a sinkhole. We are not good at this. A common life is limited by apparencies, common only as far as the seasons go.

••••

Cozens’s monochrome studies were antinaturalistic: geomorphology doesn’t work as randomized shapes created ex nihilo. Instead, they suggest a reversal — a landscape seen as a number of flat stains. Dimensionality matters only in motion. Sight is a projection and does not care.

••••

Apocalypse cult rhetoric, both climate science and its denialism stemming from nuclear war research — stating a cataclysm as simultaneously inevitable, necessary and inconsequential — and what is an extinction of one species against the ostensibly greater good? Resolution and irresolution of a culture built on a contradiction.

••••

We don’t just get used to places — we love them like we do other people. We give them names, mourn their loss. It cheapens the sense of what people are, so it can be redistributed further — suggesting the only reason we ourselves are people is because everything always was. Lending peoplehood to the non-human — is coming home.

••••

There are paintings of dollhouses with landscapes pictured on their walls — four levels of nested estrangement from anything land-like — unless the museum roof leaks. It’s easy to blame 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.

••••

Habitable parts of uninhabitable areas induce an illusion that the world exists for and because of people. Uninhabitable parts tend to dispel it. Thus we construct navigable parts in non-navigable areas, carrying the illusion with us on paved roads and inside air-conditioned vehicles — illusion itself a part of our ecological niche.

••••

One has to despise it a bit — the spectacular. An odd arrangement of geological features that break something off from the mundane so completely it almost calls to be seen. Disproportion breeds disproportion. Some sacred sites really were overlooks. Most were not.

••••

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 way 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?

••••

Belonging is a created problem. If the criterion 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.

••••

There is a necessity in the ruins — not just in something to look back on, but to recognize them also as graceful, and just as giving. Breaking is an attempt to dissipate energy, multiply surfaces, all of which simultaneously divide and connect. It lets the air touch the insides of rocks, marking their equivalent of old age. Being, equivalent to exposure.

••••

Ecological all-connectedness lingo is impotent not for the lack of verity, but by being rooted in economics, a pioneering attitude at the time the environment was conceived of, useless against the paradigm that conceived it. Valuating trees as assets works in a presentation, leads to a dead end.

••••

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.

••••

A photographic landscape does not mean a landscape of fact. All realism is, at best, Ersatz-realism, mostly about the document, not the real. We confuse the shared ground of whatever could be behind all this with a vernacular sense of the present. We make it smaller. The real is how things exist in their strangeness, not their accessibility.

••••

Volunteering at public parks is a lot of killing — and yet worse if you really love wormwood, and wish it no harm at all. Not guiltless — rather, a voluntary acceptance of the inevitability of guilt. Oedipus at Colonus really is a late play.

••••

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.

••••

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 individuals are unpredictable, regardless of species. An appearance of an absence of will could simply be that we didn’t find it.

••••

The longing for landscape does, probably, exceed any given landscape — which is to say that movement is not a failure to stay in one place. Even the hermits traveled.

Still, it is hard not to see this condition as restlessness, chasing a deity across the surface that it embodies.

••••

Miracles happen on the periphery, but urbanization has changed what periphery even is. An abandoned factory is a pocket of semi-structure, where the uncanny is more likely to take place — the place already taken, the miracle downplayed. Much of this comes down to legibility. Seeing the indistinguishable still relies on distinction.

••••

The making of an altered terrain is not dissimilar to that of a representational image: it is composed, framed-out, using materials displaced and refined, and it eventually sets tone. An altered land is representational of itself — so an overlook, a “living panorama”, lets one enjoy the view without suspecting something is deeply off.

••••

Most nature writing is ultimately no more than a compromise, a book purportedly on trees, but really the author’s parents — best suited for readership that paid the trees no more than a curiosity to begin with. The untainted attention is prayer, yes. The divided one is a loss.

••••

So, are we, or are we not separate from nature? Differences in kind are modal, which is to say unruly. Life lives in matter, mid-scale — but conceive of something, anything, as its own being, and the conceivable has no limits, differences in kind within differences in kind. As soon as something can have a soul, it can have many.

••••

Things have very few qualities — so one must not overdescribe them. Against the inexhaustible richness of everything stands its poverty, necessitating restraint. 

••••

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 — which, by analogy, makes 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.

••••

Binary logic is tied with Platonism, tying the world to the strangeness of things, but then limiting 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 target. Nature is not nature.

••••

Landscape is almost entirely absent from cave paintings, and so are maps. The earliest examples come from the Çatalhöyük mural — as if the whole concept of landscape was a Neolithic technology, something emerged from altering the land.

••••

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 grace, inherent and inalienable in all things.

••••

The modern use of the word ‘space’ also dates to the late XVII century. ‘Landscape’ and ‘space’ are contemporaries; whether or not this is meaningful is uncertain. If concepts are invented, it makes them tools; if discovered, it makes them nature. Walking the land gets at least partly defined by our sense of measurement and abstraction.

••••

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 sense of guilt.

••••

A case has been made that travelling does not really change us — which does not misrepresent travel, but does misrepresent change. A place, when it keeps coming back in one’s memory, is intrusive. It’s also slow. Only the breaking experiences are apparent. The entire promise of change is it won’t really change us — if it did, we would never travel.

••••

Good art accomplishes being a certain way without announcing the principles of its 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.

••••

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 social terms. 

••••

In Europe, the emergence of ‘true’ landscape is concurrent with the writings of Descartes, the primacy of the subject turning everything into sense data — and a naturalistic landscape the ultimate representation of the world. Thus naturalism is neither natural, nor neutral, unmoored from what it pretends to show. Not of the world — but the viewer.

••••

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, speaking of the inadequacy of coherence.

••••

The separateness of cities is already present in the earliest literature: Gilgamesh is said to have built the walls — which, upon his coming to terms with mortality serve his eventual consolation, and the medium of his record. Should it surprise us we haven’t changed? Walls are, after all, archaeologically persistent. Some of Uruk’s still stand.

••••

Landscape may be a sufficient cause for a subjective experience without being sufficient ground of it. An undisabused perception will sooner latch onto a phantasm, prefabricated from fears, myths and misconstrued images, a false home.

Feelings themselves are simple; one has them indoors all the time.

••••

Geography is an inheritance of romantic nationalism — a fixation on borders and landmarks making up macroentities, partially or wholly imagined. Native accounts are treated as not geography — as if superseded on the basis of better maps, exempt from interpretation. Telling entire peoples they don’t even know where they are.

••••

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 ascertain an unreachable, placing yourself against it. We think of seeing as a visual capability — but they’re all spatial.

••••

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 discovered humility. The worst part of anthropocentrism is that it has ground, and, if true, would be horrifying.

••••

There’s something explicit about a self-made place. It resolves the urge to keep moving. We discover them as we discover freshwater sources and mountain paths — of themselves, somehow, suggesting not everywhere is the same. Treating places as souls, or mistreating them.

••••

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.

••••

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.

••••

Of course we don’t have any evidence the land loves us — and if we speak of the agency of soil, we might as well consider that 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?

••••

Modernism has produced both the industry-adjacent housing ghettos and the national park system — compartmentalizing of the nature/culture divide, idealistic even at their most interlaced, green areas on top of waste treatment plants — making one at ease with overproduction, rather than seeing it as something unsolved.

••••

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.

••••

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.

••••

Something is true when it participates in the world — a structure may be semantic, but a 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.

••••

Thomas Oles proposes we get on our knees and dig — something that would presumably look comical to our land-unalienated ancestors, a symbolic action as distance. Residual Romanticism simultaneously insists on non-belonging and a metaphysical ownership — obsessing, as always it has, over people. The outside is only a stage.

••••

When one experiences a small earthquake while sitting outside on the ground, things suddenly cease being merely one’s surroundings. For a moment, they get vivid, unspeakable — but they were always this way. It’s the ordinariness that is the distortion.

••••

The error of dualism is excluded middle. Matter is not fallen just because it can not be clearly demarcated — and for what purpose? Hierarchies collapse at the least imprecisions, the natural order being disordered nature. Immanence vs transcendence fight is attempting to remove strangeness, to stand victorious in a barren. A strange wish.

••••

Description calls for a certain responsibility, some limits on what can and can not be said — whether it is 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.

••••

State-infected pictorial traditions equate the grandeur of natural and man-made, canyons in concord with hydroelectric dams. It accommodates a social mythology — that of the destined Eden, or a good state. Idealizing the land is, in this case, prerequisite.

••••

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 cosmic failure — something we still believe.

••••

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 you aware you don’t know what you’re stepping on — and you’re always stepping on something.

••••

Sometimes a place is continuously occupied for millennia, 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. Even a casual passport check is a temporary surrender.

••••

Roads and paths are consensual logistics: deemed of least distance to effort by a critical number of actors, lasting only as long as the consent does. Free roaming is unmediated, strictly between the actor and land itself. It involves some strange calls, the origins of which one could not determine, and heeding which results in, usually, just more land.

••••

Studying landscape is antinaturalistic: 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 fools of Salon judges ignorant of agricultural work; it now makes fools of the general public buying its reproductions on dinnerware.

••••

Environment emerged as a concept just as the Columbian exchange obliterated the ecological balance across the globe, saying von Humboldt’s “Naturgemälde” is not conceivable in an unconnected, but undisturbed state. Saying that only a vanishing world can be captured. Not an exciting thought.

••••

Everything vernacular speaks of coherence, landscape is no different. Things exist in agreement — 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.

••••

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 make nothing entirely on our own. Landscape produces our food, building materials, energy, habitable terrain — natural meaning birthed. We think land a non-agent having convinced ourselves of it through names on titles, the whole concept of ownership a projected passivity.

••••

Being lost is a direct glimpse into the otherness of land. Interpreting it as indifference is misguided, since the otherness also implies we could not tell if the land was caring. Unreadability goes both ways — so far, it prevents us from witnessing land as land. Being lost is the closest to being nowhere.

••••

One has to wonder how the inerrable constancy of the world coincides with the debasement of social being. At times, it appears purposeful: a deliverance, something to learn from rocks. Everything everywhere in the same predicament of exposure.

••••

Lyricism has to do with a self-sufficiency of parts. One can write an ode to a flower field, but hardly an epic — 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.

••••

An appreciation of space, when pushed, is trans-national, at the very least — or rather, whatever about space is national, reads like a deeply confused attachment, a ghost of whichever entity haunting the site in its small ghosthood. Everything is already the one and the many. A pledge to an imitation is being afraid of the world.

••••

Parks are, of course, restitutional — but the trees sway as willingly, and the water remains as thin. This is the closest we get to defining a miracle: a capacity to override limitations, detachment from past faults — and the miracle of the natural has itself been given a miracle of its own: everpresence.

••••

J. Ritter declared landscapes aesthetic experiences par excellence by virtue of the viewer’s disinterestedness. What of projection? Impartiality requires a blank seeing, something to be achieved, in lieu of which an attitude percieves itself natural. Emerson gave it away: in the emotional landscape, everyone is a landowner.

••••

Beauty resides even in the unlikeliest — clear cuts, polluted grounds, war ruins, unending parking lots. One can see it without wishing for more of 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 anywhere can be.

••••

Anthropogenic climate change can be described as decaying history, a dethronement of instrumental systems that should, in their ideal form, leave nothing upon completion. Pollution is the stuff of remainder meanings, significant as anything that refuses to go away.

••••

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?

••••

Local toponyms are predominantly functional — here you pass, here you drown — until they are renamed non-locally, after some national figures, events, industry terms — a pretended ownership by things explicitly elsewhere. Names are half-natural. A valley stream can have dozens. Only the mountains occasionally still belong to the gods.

••••

In the context of Prynne’s “Huts” — if landscape and language are not dissimilar, the impoverished/seasonal/deathcamp refuge is not a fitting parallel for prosody. True, the open field is a place to die of exposure, and an urban setting is surrender to readyspeak — but the nomadic, for all it can be, could not be illiterate. It necessitates closeness.

••••

Being somewhere is already a coexistence. There is an immanent ethics to it: everything separate from everything else, imbued with everything else. Mortality was never determinant, subjectivity only a consequence of exposure. Each and all commune of the same space.

••••

Protection is a claim of sovereignty — all the more so since we tend to protect our own niche: woods, meadows and river basins, areas at high risk of being built over, our capacity for destruction the measure of our claim. Saint Christopher shaking his canine head.

••••

Simplification is the failure of nature writing, how it becomes a genre. Vacuum is nature. Dimensionality, quantum fluctuation and mass are nature. Using this word to mostly mean bears and eagles — betrays how we are simply very impressed by them, though not enough to investigate what they’re part of. And nobody’s keen on being a faunal poet.

••••

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 — and a settled life a stepping stone to enslavement?

Then again, myths should be allowed to be meaningless, something we just do.

••••

Whatever it is we can say about landscape seems to have already been said by it. What is a speaker to do? As when understanding between two parties has already been established — 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.

••••

Belonging eventually just happens, without one asking, without pictures or rituals or anything other than being, in some indefinable way, with the place. Unnoticed until on the other side. How and why this happens is unimportant. Clarity seems as though it arrives from elsewhere, not something one either has or has earned.

••••

This writing does not unify, propose, or explain. Cautiously poetic, it attempts an emergence into some form of an outside. If land is indeed semiotic, writing about land is, in part, a translation, seeking an in-between language, unmediated by meaning. Turning one’s own language into this hidden one is the terminus of poetic speech.