Day 19

Blood Meridian, by Cormac Macarthy was a wonderful read. It must have been at least 20 years since I have read it, but this passage has always stayed with me. I can almost smell the fire around which the characters are circled as the judge shares his thoughts;

 There are rumors and ghosts in this land, and they are much revered. The tools, the art, the building--these things stand in judgment on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and savages wander these canyons to the sound of an ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in the darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and ubiquity. For whoever has made a shelter from reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works seem to us. 

Old notes found in a tattered journal;

early 1800s – Robert Fulton develops with Louis Daguerre a 360 degree diorama which soon leads to a theater devoted to landscapes. Humans, if present were so only to provide perspective of scale. This new theater void of actors brings a new perspective of landscape; natural scenery which man should not contaminate with his presence.

mid 1800s – the fantasy of a straight line becomes real with the speed and directness of the railroad. No longer is motion conforming with the contours of the land, the direction of the winds, or the abyss that opens up underfoot with a silver trail of a river far, far below. A mountain or desert are no longer 'verbs', that is, events with which the traveller interacts. They become nouns, the mountain a thing to blast holes in for the laying of tracks that because of cost, travel becomes limited to the shortest distance between two points. All space becomes colonial space.

 
21^st Century – The world we live in is shaped far less by what we celebrate than the painful events we try to forget.

I think of spaces and landscapes that are freed from use. For me so many post apocalyptic films are seen as a promise. Empty cities are the playgrounds of the protagonists, a chance to start over. Lands are no longer burdened with the need to produce. What was an economy of accumulation (weapons, wealth) becomes again an economy of The Gift.