Selected Sentences on Landscape

From a series of fragmented writing.

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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.

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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.

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Landscape may be a sufficient cause for a subjective experience without being sufficient ground of it. Even a bad image can stir emotions — just as it can be replaced by another bad image, or by no image at all. An undisabused perception will sooner latch onto a phantasm, a projection of fears, myths and misconstrued images, and be confident it enjoys the real thing.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Natural objects are in a common condition with sacred ones — naked in their essence enduring a finite world — and as such, can not entirely be debased. A park may replace sacred groves through the obscenity of power, but the trees will still bear fruit, and the waters glimmer — thus letting places emerge as the quidditas, the individuations of place. And the day goes on.

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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.

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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.

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Miracles happen on the periphery, but urbanization has changed what periphery even is. An abandoned factory is a pocket of semi-structured, where the uncanny is more likely to take place — the place being already taken, the miracle downplayed.

Much of this comes down to legibility. Seeing the indistinguishable still relies on a hypothesis of distinction.

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Parks are debasements of sacred groves, compensatory for their destruction — yet 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: omnipresence.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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‘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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.