The Circumflex

It is the sense of the spatial and the temporal which photography fails to capture.  No matter how artful the practitioner or how wide the lens, that spatial sense – the bending of the picture plane – and the depth of time and rock, the connectedness of natural colour – its dread – evades the mechanism.

My references are immediate and deep. 

A walk today, after a summer thunderstorm, in the forest around my house in Glenmuick – the tangible solidity of birches, the rasping texture of Scots Pine and the happy coincidence of vivid moist forest greens with the (complementary) pink granite hue of the track.  An immediate and vivid immersion in life.

And the sensed reality of Assynt, my magic place, and a deep knowing of the age of landscape, its process and stratigraphy, the violent presence of time.

I am fond of the work of  Peter Goodfellow, an artist who paints and curates not far from here in Strathdon.  What has long impressed me about Goodfellow’s work is  his evocation , almost kinaesthetic, of the rawness of rock – of the Scottish landscape.  This is landscape which is only ground – no figures.  Nor is it airy (though it involves skyscapes) nor watery (though it involves burns).  It is not pastoral like Constable, incendiary like Turner nor shimmering like Cezanne.  Perhaps it is as raw as Van Gogh but Vincent should have gone and found himself some proper mountains.

I write poems…no…as my friend Mandy Haggith points out, poems are discovered, like precious nuggets, in the landscape of a walk, a climb, a trek…they may require some setting but the matter is chthonic, immanent.   The walking meditation and the sublime sense of space, of being alone and high up, most especially when the temperature is well below zero, evokes poetry intended to invoke (using Don Paterson’s distinction) the rapture (no other word) of space, freedom, time, vertigo…dread.  I struggle to photograph.  Greed seizes me.  I click the shutter.   How can I not want to ‘say’?…which is to share.  And yet, depth is lost, space is loss, the image cannot be dizzy.

A similar experience surprises me in forests.  A sense of intimate moist enclosure. The play of light..it is the evanescence of light which makes one feel this moment is precious, this moment must be captured and shared with those one loves.  My son, who photographs, opines that all landscapes are clichés – Pound’s ‘enormous correlation of particulars’ overwhelms and inflates the value of the landscape image to worthlessness.  He is young.  He hasn’t yet realised that this light will never return, he will never pass this way again.  The momentary light on Suilven, the Pass Roland, Lewis, Tillyfourie.

Landscape, however, has no form – cannot be posed.  Landscape can only be commented upon and edited to taste.  The problems of likeness (what does it ‘look’ like) and scrutiny (how does it feel) are central to the form.  In the presence of photography – or even sound recording – art must evoke how a landscape feels – its spatial and temporal immensity not available to the mechanical picture plane.

This is as true in literature as in painting.

You’ll never guess what happened.  This is what it was like.

Travel writing is, I think, a great vice in modern writing- the novel of the ephemeral place.  It is true that we experience new places most vividly in the first 48 hours.  We notice things the ‘natives’ have grown blind to – but we do not see it, no matter how deeply we have researched out itinerary.  And even when we do linger longer than the average tourist everywhere is already commodified through photography – we all know what the Taj Mahal looks like.  Perhaps we can all guess what the backstreets of Luanda look like (at least from the back seat of an SUV).

But how does it feel?  How does landscape feel?  And to the depth of 3 billion years, the dreadful elevator descent of the imagination…oddly I do not press the buttons for the upper stories.

When I was (once upon a time) a project manager in the offshore oil industry I had a salutary lesson from an offshore construction superintendent.  We were ‘discussing’ the constructability of a modification and were brought up short by his insistence that a column, not documented in drawings or 3D computer models, obstructed the ‘design corridor’.  I insisted that the design was feasible…his was response was “I don’t ******* care what your computer model says, I’ve got a reality model in front of me!”

Why landscape?  The mountain stands before us! 

But that, my friend, is a moment from now…and you are not me.