Open Country

Reading over old journals.  This is from the summer of 2009 when I was working in the thick woods around Seeley Lake, Montana, escaping over the front range to the prairie of Eastern Montana on all my days off.  The dichotomy is simplified, but I think it captures some good ideas, and marks the beginning of a period of intense thinking on the epistemologies inherent to landscapes, which is ongoing for me.

IN THE DENSITY OF THE WOODS OBSCURITY IS A GIVEN.  TREES ARE TALL, BRUSH IS THICK AND SIGHT LINES ARE SHORT.  SO WE BEGIN WITH THE NOTION THAT MANY THINGS GO UNSEEN, EVEN THINGS VERY NEARBY. THIS LANDSCAPE EMPHASIZES HIDING IN SPACE.  (AS AN ANIMAL MOVING SILENTLY THROUGH THE SHRUBS OF A STREAM BED, OR A RARE PLANT GROWING BENEATH THE COVER OF OTHERS). FORESTED LANDSCAPES ENCOURAGE ACTIVE SEARCHING AS A MODE OF DISCOVERY.  IN THIS WAY, THE FOREST BECOMES A HALL OF MEMORY, WITH CLEAR ANALOGIES TO OUR EXPERIENCE OF ARCHITECTURE.  SURVIVAL IN THE FOREST REQUIRES HUNTING, IN WHICH WE ACTIVELY SEARCH THE LAND FOR ANIMALS, AND GATHERING IN WHICH WE SEARCH IT FOR PLANTS.

THE OPENNESS OF THE PRAIRIE IMPLIES REVELATION. YOU CAN SEE FOR MILES.  THE GRASS HUGS THE GROUND.  SO WE BEGIN FROM THE ASSUMPTION THAT ALL IS REVEALED AND WORK BACKWARDS TOWARD A MORE OBLIQUE SORT OF OBSCURITY.  THIS APPARENT STATE OF REVELATION EMPHASIZES HIDING IN TIME, RATHER THAN SPACE.  SURELY THINGS IN THE PRAIRIE ARE HIDDEN IN SPACE AS WELL, BUT THE VOLUME OF SPACE ACCESSIBLE IN A GLANCE IS SO GREAT THAT IT IS TRAVERSED MORE READILY BY THE EYE THAN THE BODY.  (A LOW FLYING HAWK APPEARING ABOVE A HILL OR THE GRADUAL APPROACH OF A STORM OR A VEHICLE IN THE DISTANCE.)  OPEN LANDSCAPES ENCOURAGE PATIENT WAITING AS A MEANS OF DISCOVERY – ON THE SCALE OF THE MOMENT, THE SEASON, THE YEAR.  AGRICULTURE, THE PRIMARY MEANS OF SURVIVAL IN THE CONTEMPORARY PRAIRIE ENTAILS A PASSIVITY AND PATIENCE IN THE FACE OF THE WEATHER.  IN WIDE OPEN LANDSCAPES THE ONLY ANALOGIES TO ARCHITECTURE ARE THE DOME OF THE SKY AND THE HOUSE OF THE BODY ITSELF.

Two River Litanies

Via the wonderful Matt Frito:

  John Ashberry reads "Into the Dusk Charged Air" by zwallace

  Townes Van Zandt plays "Texas River Song" by zwallace

the people and the stones

A Sort of a Song

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

--through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

-William Carlos Williams

Language of Landscape of Language

Visiting friends ask the difference between a butte and a mesa, a bluff and a rim, a wash and a creek, a dune and a blowout, a canyon, a gulch, a coulee and a draw - the vernacular that braids people and places.  Thinking about the reciprocity between landscape and language brings some favorite quotations to mind:

Gretel Ehrlich: “The poet Seamus Heaney said that landscape is sacramental, to be read as text.  Earth is instinct: perfect, irrational, semiotic.”

Robert Smithson: "All language is an alphabet of sites."

White mountain site

"Birthing stone" at the White Mountain petroglyph site in the Red Desert region of Wyoming.

Deep time

“He burst the boundaries of time, thereby establishing geology’s most distinctive and transforming contribution to human thought – Deep Time.”

- Stephen Jay Gould, on James Hutton, father of geology

Gifts of circumstance

From the 1977 essay "Healing" by Wendell Berry, from the collection "What are People For?", via Sally Oviatt:

           

IV

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health.  It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hand of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

V

And by it we enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.

Only discord can come of the attempt to share solitude.

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.

One’s inner voices become audible.  One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.

In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.  The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

One returns from solitude laden with the gifts of circumstance.

VI

And there is no escaping that return.

From the order of nature we return to the order – and the disorder – of humanity.

From the larger circle we must go back to the smaller, the smaller within the larger and dependent on it.

One enters the larger circle by willingness to be a creature, the smaller by choosing to be a human.

And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness.  For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.

In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest.

In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.