Landmarks

“Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes grained into our words”

(Macfarlane, 2016:10)

I have cherished Macfarlane’s books but have had a copy of this for a while without reading it, I think because at first glance it was about developing landscape glossaries which seemed less immediately relevant to my work. Picking it up again for my essay, I realise how wrong I was and I should have trusted in Macfarlane!

So the overall theme is how language is used to describe the landscape, approached via the work of several great writers on the topic – most of whom luckily I have read. Words such as Forest can have several meanings – for example as an area of land set aside for deer-hunting, such as where I live on Ashdown Forest. Language updates gradually but continuously e.g. from immigration or disuse. In particularly Macfarlane champions the specificity of words, often in dialects little used now, to describe details – a “literacy of the land” (Macfarlane, 2016:23). Furthermore beyond this precision he highlights writing that escapes the usual construct to find ways of describing land that chime with the soul, such as in Baker’s The Peregrine, or humorous digressions such as Douglas Adams’ and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff – British place names used as nouns for common feelings. I learn that Toponomy is the study of place names.

From Rackham’s History of the Countryside (1986), landscape is lost due to

• Loss of beauty
• Loss of freedom
• Loss of wildlife/vegetation
• Loss of meaning

Hence the importance of language. Furthermore language that represents the land as more than a commodity with a use value since quoting Wendell Berry “people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love” (Macfarlane, 2016:10) since, quoting Tim Dee “without a name made in our mouths, an animal or a place struggles to find purchase in our minds or our hearts” (Macfarlane, 2016:1024)

Max Weber attributes this loss to “disenchantment as the distinct injury of modernism” (Macfarlane, 2016:24) – a result of rationalism, an apparent ability to “master all things by calculation” Macfarlane, 2016:24), a general impulse to control nature.

Williams also investigates the transactional use of nature. Noted is the double meaning of tender – to make an offer, but Macfarlane suggests that to treat with tenderness is the more enlightened approach. Barry Lopez says in Arctic Dreams “it is possible to live wisely on the land, and to live well” (Macfarlane, 2016:211) (Lopez p xxviii). Later we learn how John Muir differentiated further: “most people are on the world, not in it” – goes on to detail how he is in the woods and the woods are in him – a symbiotic relationship recognised, after which you don’t destroy a part of yourself…

However, Macfarlane suggests we do not need to go as far as animism (Macfarlane, 2016:25) which is something I have discussed before, not as a belief but as a strategy that seems to have been more sustainable than our current scientific? efforts (despite its obvious issues).   Notes that Nan Shepherd writes Mountain Literature not Mountaineering Literature and is happy to reject the list for summit with its God-like views for a more detailed knowledge of the surroundings.

Digging further we have “precision of language was crucial … precision here should not be taken as cognate with scientific language” explaining this is not an undertaking of rational understanding. Hence we arrive, importantly at how a “middle voice” – “between the active and the passive – can infuse inanimate objects with sentience and so evoke a sense of reciprocal perception between human and non-human” (Macfarlane, 2016:34). This is perhaps a route between the scientific discipline of Carlson and the the all-senses aesthetic of Berleant, since the detailed language discussed creates a kind of aesthetic understanding. “Precision as a form of lyricism, attention as devotion” (Macfarlane, 2016:61). This can perhaps be extended to photography – the ability to describe in great detail fused with the aesthetic, which (for me at least) are both important qualities that when combined make great photographic art. Work that can celebrate the land in an enlightened approach (appropriate word for photography).

“Wonder is now, more than ever, an essential survival kit” p238. Macfarlane discusses the importance of childish delight and imagination when exploring the land, and how this was picked up by writers such as Stephen Graham and John Muir by using the vehicle of a door to another dimension (p315). Photography has been described in terms of windows and mirror and we can probably extend this to doors, or perhaps portals (a concept I used in my series Time Travels with My Father). We can perhaps ponder the ability of an image, in itself hopelessly two-dimensional, to allow the viewer to place themselves, if only momentarily , in the landscape.  And perhaps to encourage them to do so actually and more frequently. Topophilia = place love.

The author describes J.A. Baker’s struggle with illness and very poor eyesight and his binocular vision of the world.  Ten years of observations are condensed into one in his classic book The Peregrine, “an extreme density of verbs, qualifiers and images ” (Macfarlane, 2016:153) rewritten 5 times after intense analysis by Baker. He studied RAF aerial photographs to help his descriptions. A falcon sees “like a cubist painter gazing from the cockpit of a jet aircraft … short sight led to binocular-sight led to hawk-sight” (Macfarlane, 2016:154-5). Or as Macfarlane puts it later “details anchor perception in a context of vastness” (Macfarlane, 2016:212) – which reminds me in some ways of how a photographer can invoke small details within an image to somehow manage to convey realism and involve the viewer, despite their specificity.

 While nature as a feeling can be alluded to in photographs but must be experienced to be fully comprehended. Macfarlane discussed “the inadvertent acts of land art authored by nature” (Macfarlane, 2016:66) and I have talked of National Parks as large pieces of environmental art. We get to the idea of physical cognisance – for example by walking and according to Nan Shepherd “the body may be said to think” in the mountains – (Macfarlane, 2016:71). Mountain Sculpture was the title of John Muir’s first article on the Sierra Nevada .The idea keeps recurring that the difference between the natural and flat representation is the obvious dimensionality – to be able to pass through the land, and of course the fourth factor, as Shepherd put it: “time is a mode of experiencing” (Macfarlane, 2016:75). Time can, however, be referenced in photography – in fact is already since by capturing a fleeting moment it implies everything that happens before and since. But also by using slower shutter speeds, images in series, rephotography, and more.

Going further than this we perhaps reach a state of immanence, or being present as a natural and permanent part of something. This, it could be argued, is the goal of a sustainable approach to the planet. To get there we may need to look at things differently, or experience them differently – not as if we are moving through a series of views, for example. Again quoting Shepherd “our habitual vision of things is not necessarily right: it is only one of an infinite number” (Macfarlane, 2016:68)

Speaking of Barry Lopez’s work Arctic Dreams, Macfarlane says “while writing about landscape often begins in the aesthetic, it must always tend to the ethical … a form of moral gaze, born of (his) belief that if we attend more closely to something then we are less likely to act selfishly towards it … the real achievement of place-writing might be to help incorporate nature into the moral realm of human community” (Macfarlane, 2016:211). Speaking of Roosevelt: “his conviction that wild landscapes should be estimated in terms of not only what they might do for us, but what they might do to us” p301

We must come to see “landscape not as a static diorama against which human action plays itself out, but rather as an active and shaping force in our imagination, our ethics, and our relations with each other and the world.(Macfarlane, 2016:220) or as Richard Jeffries described it in 1883 “a method of knowing” (p239). Macfarlane talks about edgelands and how Richard Jeffries 1883 Nature near London was one of the first writers to discuss this. He also mentions The Unofficial Countryside (1973, Richard Mabey).

FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION

• Borges’ Ireneo Funes – might be worth further investigation into Borges. This fantastical story deals with a man who, after hitting his head, can remember every single detail including their temporal occurrence – i.e. not just an encyclopaedic memory but one also indexed through time. Borges relates it to insomnia.
• The duct – an atmospheric structure born of thermal inversion.  A channel that traps light rays within a few minutes of the arc of the astronomical horizon.  Allowing you in theory to see your own back all the way round the earth.
• Chitling of logo on pebbles on the beach
• The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Macfarlane, R. (2016) Landmarks. UK: Penguin
  • first published in 2015 but quickly republished with an additional glossary