words and stuff

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Landscapes (a response to Dalí).

"Then the American insect, the phyloxera, came and devastated them, contributing by its ravages to make the structure of the soil emerge again even more clearly, with the lines formed by the retaining walls that terraced the vines accentuating and shading it, having esthetically the function of geodetic lines marking, giving emphasis and architectonic compass to the splendor of that shore, which seems to descend in multiple and irregular stairways adapted to the soil; serpentine or rectilinear tiers, hard and structural reflections of the splendor of the soul of the earth itself; tiers of civilisation encrusted on the back of the landscape; tiers now smiling, now taciturn, now excited by Dionysian sentiments on the bruised summits of divine nostalgias; raphael-esque or chivalric tiers which, descending from the warm and silvery Olympuses of slate, burst into bloom on the water's fringe in the svelte and classic song of stone, of every kind of stone down to the granite of the last retaining walls of that unfertilized and solitary earth (its teeming vines have long since disappeared) and on whose dry and elegiac roughness, even today, rest the two bare colossal feet of that grandiose phantom, silent, serene, vertical and pungent, which incarnates and personifies all the different bloods and all the absent wines of antiquity."
-      Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 1942 [p. 128].

This is one of my favourite sentences, not merely because of its proudly absurd length, but because of its richness and lyrical completeness. It is poetry that allows for only one deep breath at the beginning because, semicolons or not, there is no time to be distracted by breathing whilst reading it. Here, Dalí is describing the landscape of the beloved holiday destination of his childhood, Cadaqués. 

Landscapes grow from our minds. We colour them and chip away at their bedrock . A landscape is not a physical place, but our experience of it. The one place becomes a different landscape each time we return, literally or metaphorically, in memory or in dreams.

That empty schoolroom we broke into as kids sprouts into a hulking old boarding house, haunted by the ghosts of tortured children, the demonic writing of the murderous headmaster still scribbled across the chalkboards. When we walked past the old mines and felt the dank air coming out, it was like a spectre breathing down our necks. The terror seeps out of it and leaks into the forest around it, turning that fallen tree we climbed across into a gnarled and lonely escape across the creek - or was it a steep ravine? 

And when we stayed in that very same place years later on a school camp, we had almost forgotten the time we nearly shit ourselves when the door slammed shut and the wind screamed through the pines. We didn't even realise that we were giggling and talking about cute boys on the same bunk beds that we had decided the ghost children had been strapped to. The pines made us sneeze and the wind made us cold. We threw mud at each other and washed it off in the boring little creek (it was really just a creek). We ran up to the old cemetery and laughed at the funny old names, and we jumped over the cursed grave knowing (hoping?) we wouldn't really fall to our deaths. We sang around a campfire and when the door slammed shut it was because we were locking out the boys that kept throwing fake spiders at us. I wanted to go home. The echoes of our laughter in the hills made me feel strange and lonely.

When I returned years later again, I climbed into the creek and waded the vein of mother earth. I was at peace ofter the clamour of the city and I meditated next to the trickling waterfall. The pines, growing back after the last bushfire, were grand sentinels lining the slopes. I was stilled by the beauty and the smell of smoking campfire. The silence bound me up and slowed me down, and when I walked along the tracks, past the old mine entrances, it made me sad to see the hills so full of holes. 

 The busy hands of memory edit and rewrite the landscape; change the hue of even the most vivid colour; build mountains out of hillocks; shift things around, splice and dice and meld many places into one. Every revisiting is a tale retold.


Salvador Dalí, Olive Trees. Landscape at Cadaqués, ca.1922. Private collection.


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