We’d driven for some miles through nondescript farmland to arrive, suddenly, at this vivid, vertiginous scene. And now before us the mass of the sea in particular was a previously unseen and unthinkable electric blue, in response to which all the other colours of the spectrum – and all of the other visible blues, too – shone bright and true. (..) The overall impression of the scene, though, transcended all particulars. The outlines and shadowed depths of the cliffs seemed archetypal: in all the transience of things, somehow this moment revealed the true and original textures of the landscape. It was as if I’d been granted for a minute an untarnished perception of things.
(..)
But – but these sorts of moments can never last. Or more truthfully, they never really come to pass. An instant of unreflective presence and directly given phenomenality: it beckons and falters in the selfsame gesture. It’s an illusion, really, like all enchantments, and maybe too like all attempts to understand materiality and perception themselves as indubitably enchanting and enchanted (see Bennett 2001; Davies and Dwyer 2007). Something always takes their place, displaces and alienates them; in fact, we can argue, something is always already displacing the moment from both without and within. For a minute I thought I could see the sea-in-itself, unhued by any perception of mine or anyone else. But I was wrong.
Because the hillside we were looking from was already covered with eyes. Dotted here, and there, and there again, by the sides of the coast path as it switchbacked down the slope to the cove below, were a series of seats, benches – lots of them – offering up a whole succession of perspectives on the landscape. There were yet more of these benches at points set off from the path by a few paces, cupped in little hollows of their own or placed on outcrops and minor promontories. Places to rest, for a minute, and take in the view. Collectively they stood, together and apart; different angles on the same encircling scene.
And I knew from experience that most if not all of them would come with names attached, letters burnt into the wood, or etched onto small brass plates. That is, they would be benches dedicated to somebody, in memoriam. They would be sites set aside for looking and remembering, and in so being they would vex together in complex fashion landscape and gaze, visible and invisible, presence and absence, blindness and flight, love and loss.
So the whole scene was already a watching. Nothing simply visible-in-itself. Without realising it we had been looking at – or, better, looking-with – a host of ghosts and memories. These benches: eyes without bodies, or rather shapes and frames that embodied eyes anew, giving new sites for seeing, re-placing here and prospecting out there too eyes now closed and buried elsewhere. Like a dense net of searchlights sweeping through the dark, sweeping over the waters.
//John Wylie, Landscape, absence and the geographies of love
(es gan domāju, ka arī bez beņķīšiem jebkura vieta jau ir piesātināta ar visādiem citu skatieniem, kas to redzējuši, vai varētu būt redzējuši, bet tik jauki par viņiem uzrakstīts, nevarēju noraut)
(..)
But – but these sorts of moments can never last. Or more truthfully, they never really come to pass. An instant of unreflective presence and directly given phenomenality: it beckons and falters in the selfsame gesture. It’s an illusion, really, like all enchantments, and maybe too like all attempts to understand materiality and perception themselves as indubitably enchanting and enchanted (see Bennett 2001; Davies and Dwyer 2007). Something always takes their place, displaces and alienates them; in fact, we can argue, something is always already displacing the moment from both without and within. For a minute I thought I could see the sea-in-itself, unhued by any perception of mine or anyone else. But I was wrong.
Because the hillside we were looking from was already covered with eyes. Dotted here, and there, and there again, by the sides of the coast path as it switchbacked down the slope to the cove below, were a series of seats, benches – lots of them – offering up a whole succession of perspectives on the landscape. There were yet more of these benches at points set off from the path by a few paces, cupped in little hollows of their own or placed on outcrops and minor promontories. Places to rest, for a minute, and take in the view. Collectively they stood, together and apart; different angles on the same encircling scene.
And I knew from experience that most if not all of them would come with names attached, letters burnt into the wood, or etched onto small brass plates. That is, they would be benches dedicated to somebody, in memoriam. They would be sites set aside for looking and remembering, and in so being they would vex together in complex fashion landscape and gaze, visible and invisible, presence and absence, blindness and flight, love and loss.
So the whole scene was already a watching. Nothing simply visible-in-itself. Without realising it we had been looking at – or, better, looking-with – a host of ghosts and memories. These benches: eyes without bodies, or rather shapes and frames that embodied eyes anew, giving new sites for seeing, re-placing here and prospecting out there too eyes now closed and buried elsewhere. Like a dense net of searchlights sweeping through the dark, sweeping over the waters.
//John Wylie, Landscape, absence and the geographies of love
(es gan domāju, ka arī bez beņķīšiem jebkura vieta jau ir piesātināta ar visādiem citu skatieniem, kas to redzējuši, vai varētu būt redzējuši, bet tik jauki par viņiem uzrakstīts, nevarēju noraut)
nošķaudīties