Landscape and Memory

What if perception really is reality, though?  Research increasingly suggests that, to a certain extent, how we perceive reality really is inescapably different from person to person and even from moment to moment for a single person, affected by innumerable factors that we don’t fully understand.  Our memories are mutable, so that what we remember may not be reflective of anything close to a “true recording�� of what we actually experienced and is likely to change with each recollection.  How we interact with the world in the first place is influenced by our backgrounds, our experiences, even our languages, as we began to ponder in our post about linguistic reference frames.  It may not be the case that there is a reality which our senses record objectively and is then biased into our perception through our mental processing, but rather that our senses are incapable of measuring “reality” objectively in the first place.

In that case, the landscapes and environments we witness and with which we interact are equally constructions of our subconsciouses as they are physical locales.  When we look upon a breathtaking vista, we will each approach that vista differently, rooted in our backgrounds, our experiences, and our cultures.  Culture, then, will shape what we see as much as the physical trees, rocks, and water that are present.  This is what I was expecting when my wife and I picked up Schama's Landscape and Memory from a used book store; it’s only kind of what I got.

Landscape and Memory is more of an art criticism book than it is a philosophical reflection on the role of culture in our perception of landscapes, yet it almost can’t help itself but address, tangentially, the idea that our culture inevitably shapes how we perceive the natural places we encounter.  When you walk through a dense forest, do you see a fertile shelter or a claustrophobic maze?  When you look upon mountains, do you see gorgeous, adventurous terrain, or jagged, dangerous barriers?  It will depend on you, your context, your past experiences, and your culture, and, if you happen to be an artist, those perceptions are liable to manifest in your output.  Schama goes so far as to posit that our diverse perceptions of nature arise from an evolving cultural mythos that consists of two dueling interpretations of paradise, and how we humans ought to relate to it.

At least in Western mythologies, we tend to see two interpretations of “arcadia,” the unspoiled, paradisal wilderness.  In one view, arcadia is a wild place, lush, primal, fecund, and untamable, ruled by passions and the “law of the jungle.”  It is a place where humans become closer to their animal roots, with the original mythologies of Pan and similar figures presaging the close relationship between animals and humans described by the modern theory of evolution (yet another example of the Greeks knowing everything two thousand years ago that we think we’re so smart for figuring out in the past two hundred years?), and in that sense it is both freeing, and dangerous.

The other arcadia is tamer, more like a garden; in fact, the Abrahamic faiths’ biblical Garden of Eden is representative of this second type of arcadia.  It is a kind of tamed nature, still rural, but more pastoral and agrarian than wild.  This is the arcadia of the country retreat rather than the cross-country epic backpacking expedition, a place in which we can find shelter from both the stresses and immoralities of the metropolitan confinement, and the dangers and unpredictability of “true” wilderness.  Regardless of which arcadia you happen to most relate to, Schama's thesis is that the myths which generate them remain relevant, influential, and potent, and that those myths underly both how we depict, and how we interact with, nature in our lives and our art, and the modern environmental debates.

Before I started this site, for a little while I ran an outdoors blog.  I’m an avid hiker and backpacker, and I would document my trips, gear recommendations, and valuable outdoorsmanship techniques and skills.  In one of my alternative careers, I build that site into a business providing guided backpacking expeditions.  When I began this site, I retired the outdoors one because I did not think I’d have to bandwidth to support both, but I still hike and backpack just as much or more as I did when I wrote about it.  Having access to places to engage in those activities, where I can travel miles without encountering another human being, is a wonderful thing…yet I don’t agree with the extreme environmentalists who advocate for newly trendy “degrowth” policies.

Fortunately, Schama resists transforming his book into a radical climate “crisis” environmentalist rant.  Indeed, it is beautifully written and equally beautifully illustrated (befitting a book of art criticism), although the placement of the illustrations could be somewhat improved so that they are better tied to the paragraphs and passages in which they are referenced.  The first section in particular engaged me, teaching me about parts of European terrain and history with which I was quite unfamiliar, but I did find that the book began to drag towards the end.  By the time I approached the conclusion of the segment on rocks, the arguments were beginning to feel redundant and overstated.  Not bad, and the quality was undiminished, it just could have been a little shorter and still adequately conveyed its point.

Art criticism is hardly my usual field of interest, but it was not art that Landscape and Memory prompted me to consider.  Instead, it was nature itself, my relationship to it, and humanity’s relationship to it.  We are, I believe, a part of nature, and yet we also contrive to separate ourselves from nature.  Our ecological role is unique, as is our ability to contemplate that role.  A dolphin does not wonder whether or not it should eat fish, or if stirring up sand from the seafloor to confuse and trap those fish for more efficient consumption will disrupt the local environment, but humans question these matters all the time.  When I go backpacking, am I a foreign intruder, a visitor from afar come to a place where I do not quite belong, or am I a prodigal son returning home?  Have we so displaced ourselves from nature that we can no longer truly return, or is our continued reverence for the gorgeous places we devotedly preserve evidence that our best efforts to isolate ourselves from the natural world are only ever temporary and incomplete?

To return to epistemology, and to a lesser extent this discussion we had about abstractions and language, I contend that there is an objective reality in which we exist.  We can measure it, define it, describe it quantitatively and qualitatively with standardized practices, and thereby achieve an objective understanding of it (reality).  Without those tools, however, and without deliberate effort and reliance upon measurements and inputs from external sources, what we perceive will not match that objective reality.  It will be a product of our experiences, our memories, our language and culture.  Landscape and Memory doesn’t set out to consider these ideas with its focus on myth and art criticism…but it still manages it.  Or maybe that’s just my perception.