Landscape and Language
Aug. 16th, 2007 09:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
susanstinsonI'm going to be one of the speakers at a conference in October on Jonathan Edwards and the environment. In thinking about my proposal for that event -- I'll mostly be reading work from the new novel -- I've been looking again at landscape historian JB Jackson.
Jonathan Edwards wrote: I expect by very ridicule and contempt to be called a man of a very fruitful brain and copious fancy, but they are welcome to it. I am not ashamed to own that I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words...
In the final essay of Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, JB Jackson wrote:
Like a language, a landscape will have obscure and undecipherable origins, like a language it is the slow creation of all elements in society. It grows according to its own laws, rejecting or accepting neologisms as it sees fit, clinging to obsolescent forms, inventing new ones. A landscape, like a language, is the field of perpetual conflict and compromise between what is established by authority and what the vernacular insists upon preferring. Like the grammarian or the lexicographer, the planner, the reformer has to take a stand, and it is usually on the side of what is rational and correct, on the side of the intellectual establishment. That is as it should be. We are familiar enough with the tyranny a too highly structured language or landscape too carefully planned can exert, but there is something to be said for rules, however arbitrary. Just as a language without established standards of elegance and clarity and respect for tradition can thwart the best of minds, a landscape left to itself without long-range goals, without structure, without law, though it may call itself a paradise, ends by frustrating any search for social or moral order.
The comparison can be carried just so far, but in the case of both language and landscape, growth and preservation and beauty is finally, I think, a matter of history and how we deal with it. Whatever definition of landscape we finally reach, to be serviceable it will have to take into account the ceaseless interaction between the ephemeral, the mobile, the vernacular on the one hand, and the authority of legally established, premediated permanent forms on the other.
It may be that I am here on the track of that elusive landscape concept: the ideal landscape defined not as a static utopia dedicated to ecological or social or religious principles, but as an environment where permanence and change have struck a balance.
Jonathan Edwards wrote: I expect by very ridicule and contempt to be called a man of a very fruitful brain and copious fancy, but they are welcome to it. I am not ashamed to own that I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words...
In the final essay of Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, JB Jackson wrote:
Like a language, a landscape will have obscure and undecipherable origins, like a language it is the slow creation of all elements in society. It grows according to its own laws, rejecting or accepting neologisms as it sees fit, clinging to obsolescent forms, inventing new ones. A landscape, like a language, is the field of perpetual conflict and compromise between what is established by authority and what the vernacular insists upon preferring. Like the grammarian or the lexicographer, the planner, the reformer has to take a stand, and it is usually on the side of what is rational and correct, on the side of the intellectual establishment. That is as it should be. We are familiar enough with the tyranny a too highly structured language or landscape too carefully planned can exert, but there is something to be said for rules, however arbitrary. Just as a language without established standards of elegance and clarity and respect for tradition can thwart the best of minds, a landscape left to itself without long-range goals, without structure, without law, though it may call itself a paradise, ends by frustrating any search for social or moral order.
The comparison can be carried just so far, but in the case of both language and landscape, growth and preservation and beauty is finally, I think, a matter of history and how we deal with it. Whatever definition of landscape we finally reach, to be serviceable it will have to take into account the ceaseless interaction between the ephemeral, the mobile, the vernacular on the one hand, and the authority of legally established, premediated permanent forms on the other.
It may be that I am here on the track of that elusive landscape concept: the ideal landscape defined not as a static utopia dedicated to ecological or social or religious principles, but as an environment where permanence and change have struck a balance.