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PART ONE
READING THE LANDSCAPE
In his poem, “A Lost Tradition,” the Irish poet, John Montague, writes: “All around, shards of a lost tradition/…The whole landscape a manuscript/We had lost the skill to read/ A part of our past disinherited;” In those lines, the search for an identity connected to the territory, traditions, and language of Ireland is very specific, yet the imaginations of many writers today from all over the world will resonate to those words: “The whole landscape is a manuscript we have lost the skill to read.” Montague’s central trope, the metaphor equating landscape with text, invites us to turn our eyes upon the landscapes, real or imaginary, we inhabit, to interpret the signs scattered upon them and unravel the stories woven into them across time.
Architects, land artists, garden designers and literary critics sometimes speak of “landscape narratives” to describe story-telling patterns and strategies present in both natural and artificial landscapes. Theme parks, ruins, and monumental cemeteries are obvious examples of landscapes where we find stories embedded, but narratives are also to be found in any landscape or cityscape unrolling before our eyes if we know how to look and what to look for.
Learning to read our environment and translate it into writing involves heightening our attention, honing our powers of observation, training ourselves to see patterns and to make connections between features of the landscape, human activities, ourselves and our inner ecologies which may appear at first glance unrelated. We need to get the bigger picture and then to see ourselves in it, as the Romantic poets did. To see that we, too, are a sign upon it.
WRITING EXERCISE: READING THE LANDSCAPE
The following ideas are suggestions on how to approach looking at landscapes from a new perspective in order to seek out the soul of place. You might do this exercise while out on a walk or hike, or simply while gazing out your bedroom window, with a notebook handy. Your goal is to gather together a body of impressions to use as the basis for a piece of descriptive writing.
Start by observing your surroundings: the land, the sky, the clouds. Note the presence of specific features ( mountains, bodies of water, plant life , buildings). Observe the qualities of the light and of the climate, How do roads, buildings and other forms of human intervention upon the environment harmonize (or disharmonize) with the climate and the lie of the land? How do local building materials ( bricks, stones, wood, concrete, steel) reflect the natural setting? How might the natural resources and climatic conditions you note ( timber, water, stone, earth, sunlight, rain) affect the livelihood of the place, from what you can see? How might natural features have been an asset or an obstacle to the first human beings who settled in this place? Locate north, south, east, west. Where do you stand on the compass? Where are you physically and metaphorically in this place?
Look closer: Can you detect any recent or older damage done by fire, flooding, erosion, extreme weather conditions, or by acts of human negligence or violence? What scars or stories leap to your eye? Are there predominant sounds, natural or artificial; or smells? If you are standing outdoors, how does the air feel around your body, your head, and on your face? How might the sum of all these things be reflected in the character of the place and, if it is inhabited, of the people who live there? Can you feel its influence on yourself in the moment you are observing it? If it is a place where you have lived for a while, can you feel its influence on your personal or family history? Just where and who are you amid all this? Is there a road leading to you or away from you? Is there a body of water or thoroughfare serving as barrier or link? In what way are you part of this landscape? In what way are you separate from it? Jot down impressions randomly in a notebook as you observe the panorama.
Patterns and Textures
Study the landscape or cityscape before you as if it were an abstract design that you wish to paint. Do any visual patterns emerge? Were those patterns determined by nature, by human intervention, or by the interaction of the two? Do specific geometrical shapes dominate the landscape or cityscape you are observing? Do you find a grid of city blocks, a checkerboard of fields, a cubist clutter of rectangles and domes, as Rome appears from the Janiculum Hill? Do contours of hills or dunes, winding streambeds, networks of hedgerows, or gashes of ravines plot out more organic divisions of space? Do you note examples of symmetry or repetition in the layout of buildings, roads, parks, or other spaces or features? The regular placement of telephone poles or streetlamps along an urban street or trees along a country road give a sense of rhythm to the landscape. Can you see spiraling mountain roads, meandering rivers, labyrinthine streets? Or does a wide esplanade or avenue sweep your attention towards a central monument, square, natural feature, or building? How do elements of color contribute to the patterns you see? If you have had the opportunity to view the place at another time of day or year, how do the diurnal or seasonal cycles affect the patterns you see? What is the largest thing you can see? The smallest? How are they connected? What looks dead? What looks most alive?
Now attune your eye to the textures which may overlay the patterns, emerging through the effect of shadow, sunlight, artificial light, mist, fog, or wind upon vegetation, ground, water and on walls and streets. You may also note patterns created by the movement of traffic or other vehicles, people, lights, birds, vegetation, smoke, or shadows. Sounds and smells may be layered upon the landscape to form patterns and rich textures of their own.
Cultures around the world make distinctions between the temporal and the timeless, private and public, between sacred and profane, although it may be argued that there are some cultures in which these concepts cannot be neatly disentangled. In the landscape or cityscape you are examining, are there specific localities, areas, or structures set aside for these concerns? Where are they located in the overall pattern? What is their relationship to the whole?What is your place in all this? Sketch or draw the patterns you have noted. It isn’t necessary to be artistic or skilled at drawing. Later these simple sketches will come in handy when you gather your ideas before writing.
Are there people in the landscape? What are they doing? Focus on faces, clothing, movement.
Story Seeds
Something you didn’t expect to notice will surely have seized your curiosity: a road you never knew existed; construction going on; a lower water level in a lake you used to swim in, a church or building you never noticed before, an abandoned farmhouse. Something will show signs of conflict, decay or transformation. Every house or building encloses multiple stories. Every road or pathway is a narrative in which you may be participant or observer. Note down anything that attracts your interest as the seeds of future stories or as a subject for further investigation. Perhaps a memory has been stirred.
WRITING EXERCISE: WRITING FROM THE SENSES
What color is the light? Yellow, grey, purplish? Is it filtered through leaves, does it refract off asphalt, standing water, steel or glass? What are the houses, roofs, walls, and roads actually made of? How does the air smell and feel? How does the water taste? A fisherman can tell the direction of the wind by feeling its effect on his skin, tasting it, and by the sensation it produces in his ears. Have you ever tried to taste the air, the sunshine, the rain, the wind, or the darkness? How does the ground feel under your foot? The air or water around your body? How does your body register heat or cold? How do you feel in your clothes in this particular place? Take as many notes as you can dedicated to all the senses. Visual detail will probably dominate, so make a special effort to include taste, touch, and smell. Make a list or catalogue of all the impressions you have gathered, either while actually observing a place or evoking it in memory. Fill your notebook with these sensory details conveying what it feels like to be immersed in that particular environment.
WORKING WITH IMAGES
Now when you sit down to your writing desk or laptop, translate this data into images. Writers create imaginary worlds through the use of concrete language: descriptions grounded in imagery drawn from all the senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. An image is a small unit of descriptive language which encodes a piece of sensory information. Although the word “image” also means “picture,” when speaking of images or imagery in literature, we refer to all the senses. Images may be visual as well as olfactory (smell), auditory (hearing), tactile (touch), gustatory (taste). Well-crafted descriptions rich with sense detail allow us to convey an impression directly rather than only telling about it. Through concrete images we may transmit to the reader the sensations and feelings. We can construct a world and bring it to life in the reader’s mind.
Stripped to their essentials, images are generally composed of at least two elements:
• A noun and an adjective or other modifier. Example: punishing wind, frost-baked field
• A noun and a verb Example: the moon dwindled
Two nouns connected by an analogy Example: legs like scissors
Images can be both descriptive or symbolic. In the first case, their primary function is to provide a description of something existing in the world directly perceptible to our five senses. In the latter case, they may also serve to create a link between the world of our senses and the inner realm of thoughts and feelings.
Try to transform the impressions you have noted down into the compact form of images. Experiment with all three forms given above. You will have a rich collection to work with.
WRITING EXERCISE: BECOME AN EYEBALL
Landscapes have inspired some of the greatest descriptive writing in English, from William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley to Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Gary Snyder and Charles Wright. As you review the notes you have taken for the previous exercise, also consider the interchange between yourself and the landscape. “All landscapes ask the same question,” writes Durrell, “’I am watching you --- are you watching yourself in me?” “I am not alone and unacknowledged,” claimed Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaking of fields and woods where he liked to wander, “They nod to me and I to them.”
Using all material gathered in the previous exercises, write a 200-300 word description in which you are a mere neutral, invisible observer, or, as Emerson once suggested, a transparent eyeball, viewing the scene. Follow this with another 200 word passage in which you are a character or participant in the landscape.
FOLLOW UP: A LITTLE RESEARCH
From your primary observations of the landscape, next consider the cultural markers stratified upon it: history, myth, architecture, art. Later, research, or simply reflect on, the names of localities, roads, bodies of water, streets, other place names. Do any seem to entwine history and myth? Investigate any old maps, postcards, photographs, magazine illustrations, songs, written descriptions of the place you have observed. Compare them with your findings about the place. What changes have occurred over the years?
Place Names
Name, though it seem a superficial and outward matter, yet it carrieth much impression and enchantment Francis Bacon
Place names are a gift from the past which have come down to us from previous generations. The poetry and history of places is often in their names. They are clues to the Genius Loci.
Names are not merely words, but “social practices that attempt to fix identity within a system of values.”
Place names allow us to differentiate and mark out what would be otherwise blank, undetermined, an unknowable space. The Native American writer William Least Heat Moon writes “many tribal Americans believe that a person turns into his name, partakes of its nature in such a way that it is a mold the possessor comes to fill... I think places also take on aspects of their names, at least if they touch something genuine to begin with.” That something genuine is none other than the Genius Loci: both words “genuine” and “genius” have a common origin in the Latin “genuinus.”
So what’s in a name and who are the namers? By what means do places acquire names? Names encapsulate the namers’ experience and their organizing of the world. Names may be descriptive, metaphorical, commemorative; they may encode features of landscape, warnings, seductions, ideologies, desires, superstitions, fragments of remote history. Here are some I have collected over the years, not far from my home in Italy. From the translations, it is easy to see that each name is the germ of multiple stories.
Piazza della Morte Death Plaza seat of executions
Pizza delle Erbe Herb Plaza site of major vegetable market
Vicolo del Macel Gattesco Cat Butcher
Soriano from Soranus, werewolf
Vicolo Stretto Narrow Lane
Vicolo Baciadonne Kiss Woman Lane
Vicolo dei Coltelli Street of the Knives
La Porta della Vergogna The Door of Shame
Via di Femmina Morta Street of the Dead Female
Via di Avio Secco Dry Ancestor Road
Via della Banditella Bandit Girl Road
Camera dei Ladri Thieves’Chamber
Castiglion che Dio Sol Sa Castle that Only God Knows About
WRITING EXERCISE: Choose a place near your home, school, workplace or university to study over an extended unit of time: twenty-four hours, a week, a month, a season, a year. It may be abusy square, a lonely road, an expanse of countryside, an urban neighborhood, a street café, a tree, the view from your window, even a parking lot. Anything will do. Notice how rhythms of change, hourly, diurnal, nocturnal, seasonal, affect the place. What specific details signal change? Keep a detailed journal of your impressions and of the events taking place there. You will notice how your capacity to see and sense the place will deepen over time.
SUGGESTED READING: Henry David Thoreau, Walden. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature. Gary Snyder, Mountains and Rivers Without End. Charles Wright, Appalachia.
SEE ALSO Making a Deep Map in this book
