haptalaon | The invention of Landscape (Reply)

On my walk, i was reminded of a book. it discussed the 'invention' of landscape. Rather like the invention of the clock preceding the invention of time, so the invention of Landscape Painting as a genre preceded our cultural concept of A Landscape

I get the persistent feedback in what I do that Disconnection is the one that make people sideye-to-refusal - which is fine, in the sense that I'm just sharing what works for me, and it is for you to try them and reject them if they're not viable; but less fine in the sense of, I think a lot of people reject it out of hand (which is also fine!) before considering what its purpose is.

My husband once went to a Christening and came back, joking 'who is this god that claims dominion over all things and yet prefers to be worshipped indoors?'. I think about that a lot. We are in nature based religions, but often aren't sure what to 'do' with nature - we've been primed by Landscape Painting to think of Landscapes as things you either look at or describe, hence the standard Pagan rite which is going to a forest and having someone say 'i call the spirit of the east wind, i am struggling to off-the-cuff this even though i thought it would convey authenticity, the east wind of Air that is the spirit of New Life and Knowledge, uhh'. And this process is only getting worse with television, photography, the internet, and the retreat of nature away from modern lives so that it's a thing we have to Go To See, rather than dwell within.

How could we retrain ourselves to experience the land differently? I am reminded of many moments in my Reading in which people go inside a picture or inside the television (Sapphire and Steel: Assignment 2; Escape into Night; Look and Read: Through the Dragon's Eye; many examples in toddler television, and others I've forgotten.) it's a creepy trope. That could be our metaphor for re-experiencing the land - knowing we look at it as if it were flat, a 'view', a picture postcard of beauty - but then having the magic to step inside

Some of the lessons of Disconnection, then, are about relating to the place we are differently. I use so much wood nowadays - I've built towel-rails and a window-box to dry clothes and some little fairy-scale furniture just from twigs and sticks in the garden - to help with the survival challenge of a winter without heating. I experience differently. The weather is not a thing I look at, they are things I am inside, because drying clothes and planning safe dog walks and pre-planning to prevent clothes getting wet takes up so much of my time. Similarly, because I'm reducing my consumption of Bought Objects so much and trying to DIY more from the things naturally around me, I am very awake and inside the landscape on my walks - I'm cultivating a new way of looking, with one eye out for the correctly shaped branch to complete tasks.

I don't think these are the only ways to go inside landscape paintings. I'm reminded of Rewild Yourself, which I hated and slammed because it was so non-tactile. I think there are plenty of non-survivalist ways to do this: building a temporary shelter in the woods from branches, say, or finding somewhere safe to wild swim, or learning to build a fire, are playful leisure activities which nevertheless force you to engage with the Thingness of nature, rather than its Lookingatness. Even gardening - or the wild gardening I do, i spend much of my year taking on invasive species - is an interactivity.

One has to be a little careful not to bring the logic of capitalism into the wild - looking at it only as things which are Useful, or bringing destruction into these places by disturbing them or taking too much. But all the pagan aesthetics we crave surround people who had to know their land intimately: shepherds, hunters, farmers, vikings in sailing ships - and somewhat like how, in postmodernism, we learn that our way of conceptualising gender - say - is culturally specific and we can learn to see it differently, so i think experimentation with different ways of looking at landscape is essential.

What ought one do, then, to resist experiencing the outdoors as 'a pretty landscape painting'?