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But none of them own the landscape
Emerson
Landscape is the ingenious instrument and the very mechanism that acts like a spring to enable us to decipher a place. It exists in that uncertain frontier where what we discover and intuit merges blurrily with what we project and imagine, in that tangle of not knowing what to do with our gaze. This is why it slips away from us like a daydream. This is why, as they say, we are absent within it, because we are always standing before it, and yet we are also inside it, as if we were its heart, its very heartbeat, the thought that springs from it and unfurls. In this sense, landscapes are a way of breathing in the world, the form that places take as they flow and coalesce into a litany of vistas—an intelligible, soluble and resistant mosaic. And in their grafted nature, we feel them as a skin onto which our experiences are tattooed, like a shifting bark wrapped around the sap of immemorial time that allows them to embody the fickle restlessness of the fragile and singular history that shapes them. Because they are like a delta that hoards sediments, remains and debris, finding the soul in the remnant. That is why we are always faced with their promise of being provisional, a mixture of myth and unstable scaffolding in a tangle of complexities that must be preserved, without making a museum of it, in this ferment of being both imprint and source, trace and foundation, scraps and cuttings, vestiges and gaps, remains and rubble. Above all, we must understand their high sensitivity to aggression and how they decompose and yield to the assaults of homogenisation through the very discontinuity of being particular and ultra-local, whilst still managing to spit out the varnish of simple local pride.
I have occasionally thought that landscape, in all its plasticity, is what they would find in the marrow of our bones. It is there, deep within the body, in the most animal folds of our humanity. Or it is like that hand with which you feel, as the poet Gabriel Ferrater sang. Stendhal said the landscape is like a kind of little bow that knows how to play upon his soul. But I have the impression that they are the violin and we are the bow and the horsehair that draws out a thinking music. This is especially so when what John Giorno describes happens: when space forgets us. And what is released by places then streams into us, overwhelming us, gathering momentum and breaking us upon the string of things that form them in strata, without ever ceasing to be flesh of the horizon, where you will never be able to set foot, because it is at once a dimension and a fine line drawn on the most delicate skin of the eye—yours and mine. And with all this, they are there without us. Like an incision. Like a geocritical incision right in the middle of our ruminations, which suddenly anchor themselves in the most concrete of things. It is when you believe you are touching this reality that you never quite manage to cry out. And we learn what Schoentjes asserts in his essay on geopoetics, that the most natural is only accessible—simply observable—through what is most artificial.
Poised between its way of being scenography and a view of what the sparrowhawk sees, between vision and geography, vista and territory, panorama, scaffold and window, door and fertile mirror for our drifting or the firmament that serves us as a frame, and the depth that opens behind the Mona Lisa, which Rilke evoked—it is also time and seed, a map of the invisible, layers within which we are lost. And a spirit that always endures at the edges, forever on the boundary of the names that seek to speak it—there, in that map of many senses where everything seems heat-hazy, where everything has yet to be said. A place grafted with questions, which interrogates the limits it nibbles away between culture and nature, and dares us to shake off the laziness of finding out just where in the hell the essence lies—of what places truly are and what sense they hold in relation to how we inhabit the world. Because it is always looking for our fleas, right from the pulse of life itself. And what Proust said is true: that as we race maniacally through the world, it is not new landscapes that count, but new eyes.
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