Response to Mountains of The Mind Part II
In the previous post, I focused on a quote I got from Robert Macfarlane's book 'Mountains of The Mind'. It was about old ideas surrounding mountains and I would here like to add another quote from the book. It takes us back to views of around 1790 where, Macfarlane explains, people not only thought that mountains where ugly but also dangerous, and righty so. However this wasnt just based on the chance of avalanches or falling down crevasses but because of the chance you "might encounter a god, demi-god or monster angry at having their territory trespassed upon- for the mountains were conventional the habitat of the supernatural and the hostile."
Here are other quotes that have impacted me in some way from the book:
Towards the aesthetics of ice, sunlight, rock, height, angles and air, John Ruskin called them "endless perspicuity of space; the unfatigued veracity of eternal light".
"The vertical, the ferocious, the icy- all these are now automatically venerated forms of landscape, images of which permeate an urbanized Western culture increasingly hungry for even second-hand experiences of wildness and wilderness." The use of language here makes this feel ominous. It makes me think of the negative impact this has on our natural habitat. The fact that through this need to experience nature or wilderness, people sometimes forget that what they do to or in these spaces can have a lasting impact, such as wearing down of rocks or leaving litter behind.
"A truth about landscapes: that our responses to them are for the most part culturally devised."
"For centuries they where regarded as useless obstructions- 'considerable protuberances' as Dr Johnson dismissively dubbed them. Now they are among the natural world's most exquisite forms, and people are willing to die for the love of them.
What we call a mountain is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imaginations of humans- a mountain of the mind. And the way people behave towards mountains has little or nothing to do with the actual objects of rock and ice themselves."
This second part resonates with some of the imagery I have been seeing. I find that a lot of illustration, graphic design, those cheesy quotes on a mountain backdrop, are a response to what the mountain may represent such as adventure, the wild, accomplishment, etc. rather than the raw ferocity of the mountain itself. This paragraph in the book goes on to say, "any emotional properties which they posses are vested in them by human imagination. [...] we have romanticized into being."
"Their physical structures [...] continuing to exist over and beyond human perceptions of them." They have been "imagines into existence down the centuries."
"Mountains of the earth have turned out to be more resistant, more fatally real, than the mountains of the mind".(p.19)
Mallory to his wife Ruth, writing about Everest, "I can't tell you how it possesses me."
CHAPTER 2- The Great Stone Book
"'These sonic mountain parts', amid the gargantuan rubble of the Alps, which to Burnet is infinitely more suggestive and overwhelming than Rome's ruins."
Another quote from Burnet quoted by Macfarlane: "There is something agust and stately in the Air of these things, [...] that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions... as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and imagination."
A section written by Humphry Davey in 1805: "The mind is lost in admiration of the designs of the great power who has established order which at first view appears as confusion." (p. 35).
In regards to time, which as I read, I am thinking more about. "Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. [...] hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body." (p.43). I like the comparison of the mountain to the human body. It remind me of the way anthropomorphic characters can create a more comfortable setting to understand certain traits about humanity that would be hard to digest if the character where directly human. I am reminded here of the graphic novel Maus. Could the mountain be used in this way to represent the human body's fragility or even humanities fragility as a whole.
A great quote that made a few ideas come to me regarding time, "mountains provide a venue where it was possible to brows the archives of the earth- the 'great stone book', as it became called." (p. 49). A book made of stone! My current sketchbook is actually made from stone rather than traditional paper, 100% tree free. Could it be possible to use this technique to make my own book? I will look into this further if I consider it relevant at a later date. If not made from stone paper, than combining stone in another way? Representing stone? A large scale book that looks like stone?
"The 'symphony of earth'- the repeating pattern of uplift and erosion which produced mountains and seas, basins and ranges." Much like macro/micro it might be interesting to compare the lowest point of the seas to the highest point of the mountains. Blue Planet II having just come out, this is something I have been thinking about, there is life in the deepest of oceans but not, as far as I know, at the top of Everest. Macfarlane goes on to say that Charles Dickens wrote in 1851 "the wind and rain have written illustrated book for this generation, from which it may learn how showers fell, tides ebbed and flowed, and great animals, long extinct, walked up the craggy sides of cliffs, in remote ages. The more we know of Nature, in any of her aspects, the more profound is the interest she offers to us." (p.53)
"The slow motion drama of mountain scenery." Ruskin pronounced, "Mountains are the begging and the end of all natural scenery." (p. 54).
This interested me in regards to art, this quote in regards to art made around mountain by American landscape artists: "their giant pictures emphasized the puniness and transience of man." Macfarlane goes on to point out the immense detail in these painting saying that it was a "reminder of how intertwined were geology and representations of mountains."
Also in regards to artwork, "oil paints have landscapes immanent within them: they are made of minerals." (p.55). I had previously thought about materials I could use that would relate to the mountains. I had thought about using clay to represent the material on the mountain, perhaps card or paper for the trees, maybe go into using ice to both represent the glaciers but also their fragility towards global warming, etc. I hadn't until now thought about the use of oil pints, this could be the ideal time to try out this material as it is something I have always wanted to try but haven't yet had the opportunity.
Macfarane quotes Kuo Hsi "the locked-in-ness of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors; while on the contrary, haze, mist and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what human nature seeks." (p.56) I find a lot of truth in this and also reflect on the way that even though this could well be the case, humans still build more and more in cities, making it more locked in than ever.
"To understand that mountains decayed and fell was inevitably to sense the precariousness and mortality of human endeavors."
Macfarlane quotes Tennyson in In Memoriam, "The hills are shadows, and they flow / From form to form, and nothing stands; / The melt like mist, the solid lands, / Like clouds they shape themselves and go." Macfarlane then points out that philology was demonstrating that language was subject to the same sort of shift and change as the rest of the world. "Nothing endures any longer except change." (p.57).
Macfarlane writes that Ruskin pointed out the Matterhorn to be "a sculpture: gouged, chiseled and pared from a single block by the furious energies of the earth." (p.58). I find this quite beautiful. Sculpture, as well as oil painting is something I am interested in perusing.
Rather than a quote, this is just something interesting: Ruskin has concluded that "the apparently arbitrary jaggedness of mountain ridges was an illusion." He was explaining that it was in fact a curve and compared them to waves- "They were waves of rock- 'the silent wave of the blue mountain'- and not waves of water." He goes on to explain that "they where not static, but fluid" demonstrating that rocks fell, rainwater flowed down their sides.
"The desolate and threatening ranges of dark mountain, which, in nearly all ages of the world, men have looked upon with aversion or terror and shrunk back from as if they where haunted by perpetual images of death are, in reality, sources of life and happiness far fuller and more beneficial than all the bright fruitfulness of the plain..." (p.59). is another quote form Ruskin that bring a lightness to the more imposing idea of the mountain. How beautiful to think of them as sources of life and happiness, which is what they are to me.
One last quote from this chapter that I think has a great comparison in regards to ranges, "the Himalaya are adolescents, with sharp, punkish ridges instead of the bald and worn-down pates of older ranges." (p.65).
Here are other quotes that have impacted me in some way from the book:
Towards the aesthetics of ice, sunlight, rock, height, angles and air, John Ruskin called them "endless perspicuity of space; the unfatigued veracity of eternal light".
"The vertical, the ferocious, the icy- all these are now automatically venerated forms of landscape, images of which permeate an urbanized Western culture increasingly hungry for even second-hand experiences of wildness and wilderness." The use of language here makes this feel ominous. It makes me think of the negative impact this has on our natural habitat. The fact that through this need to experience nature or wilderness, people sometimes forget that what they do to or in these spaces can have a lasting impact, such as wearing down of rocks or leaving litter behind.
"A truth about landscapes: that our responses to them are for the most part culturally devised."
"For centuries they where regarded as useless obstructions- 'considerable protuberances' as Dr Johnson dismissively dubbed them. Now they are among the natural world's most exquisite forms, and people are willing to die for the love of them.
What we call a mountain is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imaginations of humans- a mountain of the mind. And the way people behave towards mountains has little or nothing to do with the actual objects of rock and ice themselves."
This second part resonates with some of the imagery I have been seeing. I find that a lot of illustration, graphic design, those cheesy quotes on a mountain backdrop, are a response to what the mountain may represent such as adventure, the wild, accomplishment, etc. rather than the raw ferocity of the mountain itself. This paragraph in the book goes on to say, "any emotional properties which they posses are vested in them by human imagination. [...] we have romanticized into being."
"Their physical structures [...] continuing to exist over and beyond human perceptions of them." They have been "imagines into existence down the centuries."
"Mountains of the earth have turned out to be more resistant, more fatally real, than the mountains of the mind".(p.19)
Mallory to his wife Ruth, writing about Everest, "I can't tell you how it possesses me."
CHAPTER 2- The Great Stone Book
"'These sonic mountain parts', amid the gargantuan rubble of the Alps, which to Burnet is infinitely more suggestive and overwhelming than Rome's ruins."
Another quote from Burnet quoted by Macfarlane: "There is something agust and stately in the Air of these things, [...] that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions... as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and imagination."
A section written by Humphry Davey in 1805: "The mind is lost in admiration of the designs of the great power who has established order which at first view appears as confusion." (p. 35).
In regards to time, which as I read, I am thinking more about. "Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. [...] hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body." (p.43). I like the comparison of the mountain to the human body. It remind me of the way anthropomorphic characters can create a more comfortable setting to understand certain traits about humanity that would be hard to digest if the character where directly human. I am reminded here of the graphic novel Maus. Could the mountain be used in this way to represent the human body's fragility or even humanities fragility as a whole.
A great quote that made a few ideas come to me regarding time, "mountains provide a venue where it was possible to brows the archives of the earth- the 'great stone book', as it became called." (p. 49). A book made of stone! My current sketchbook is actually made from stone rather than traditional paper, 100% tree free. Could it be possible to use this technique to make my own book? I will look into this further if I consider it relevant at a later date. If not made from stone paper, than combining stone in another way? Representing stone? A large scale book that looks like stone?
Some ideas on possible instillation or book.
"The 'symphony of earth'- the repeating pattern of uplift and erosion which produced mountains and seas, basins and ranges." Much like macro/micro it might be interesting to compare the lowest point of the seas to the highest point of the mountains. Blue Planet II having just come out, this is something I have been thinking about, there is life in the deepest of oceans but not, as far as I know, at the top of Everest. Macfarlane goes on to say that Charles Dickens wrote in 1851 "the wind and rain have written illustrated book for this generation, from which it may learn how showers fell, tides ebbed and flowed, and great animals, long extinct, walked up the craggy sides of cliffs, in remote ages. The more we know of Nature, in any of her aspects, the more profound is the interest she offers to us." (p.53)
"The slow motion drama of mountain scenery." Ruskin pronounced, "Mountains are the begging and the end of all natural scenery." (p. 54).
This interested me in regards to art, this quote in regards to art made around mountain by American landscape artists: "their giant pictures emphasized the puniness and transience of man." Macfarlane goes on to point out the immense detail in these painting saying that it was a "reminder of how intertwined were geology and representations of mountains."
Also in regards to artwork, "oil paints have landscapes immanent within them: they are made of minerals." (p.55). I had previously thought about materials I could use that would relate to the mountains. I had thought about using clay to represent the material on the mountain, perhaps card or paper for the trees, maybe go into using ice to both represent the glaciers but also their fragility towards global warming, etc. I hadn't until now thought about the use of oil pints, this could be the ideal time to try out this material as it is something I have always wanted to try but haven't yet had the opportunity.
Macfarane quotes Kuo Hsi "the locked-in-ness of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors; while on the contrary, haze, mist and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what human nature seeks." (p.56) I find a lot of truth in this and also reflect on the way that even though this could well be the case, humans still build more and more in cities, making it more locked in than ever.
"To understand that mountains decayed and fell was inevitably to sense the precariousness and mortality of human endeavors."
Macfarlane quotes Tennyson in In Memoriam, "The hills are shadows, and they flow / From form to form, and nothing stands; / The melt like mist, the solid lands, / Like clouds they shape themselves and go." Macfarlane then points out that philology was demonstrating that language was subject to the same sort of shift and change as the rest of the world. "Nothing endures any longer except change." (p.57).
Macfarlane writes that Ruskin pointed out the Matterhorn to be "a sculpture: gouged, chiseled and pared from a single block by the furious energies of the earth." (p.58). I find this quite beautiful. Sculpture, as well as oil painting is something I am interested in perusing.
Rather than a quote, this is just something interesting: Ruskin has concluded that "the apparently arbitrary jaggedness of mountain ridges was an illusion." He was explaining that it was in fact a curve and compared them to waves- "They were waves of rock- 'the silent wave of the blue mountain'- and not waves of water." He goes on to explain that "they where not static, but fluid" demonstrating that rocks fell, rainwater flowed down their sides.
"The desolate and threatening ranges of dark mountain, which, in nearly all ages of the world, men have looked upon with aversion or terror and shrunk back from as if they where haunted by perpetual images of death are, in reality, sources of life and happiness far fuller and more beneficial than all the bright fruitfulness of the plain..." (p.59). is another quote form Ruskin that bring a lightness to the more imposing idea of the mountain. How beautiful to think of them as sources of life and happiness, which is what they are to me.
One last quote from this chapter that I think has a great comparison in regards to ranges, "the Himalaya are adolescents, with sharp, punkish ridges instead of the bald and worn-down pates of older ranges." (p.65).
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