With the tree in the centre of the frame, the vision might be both contemplative and also a little confrontory. The camera draws us into the picture, towards the tree, but the tree also appears to lean towards us, perhaps with the branches outstretched for an impending embrace. The misty silver tones and the light background lend an aura of mystery. We don’t know what the tree, or any of the trees around it, might be thinking. We don’t know what might lie just beyond the hedgerows, possibly picking its long, sharp teeth while recumbent in the grass.
At the edges of human habitation, groomed fields give way to the encroachment of tussled margins, and signs of human activity lessen. The forest is different from human dwelling places, and it has long been used as a kind of archetype of wilderness. Woods filter daylight often leaving those who venture within immersed in strange shadows. The forest may hold anything, death or triumph, and sometimes it holds a strange mix of both, which is why we find it so compelling. Sara Maitland reminds us that “forests, like fairy stories, need to be chaotic — beautiful and savage, useful and wasteful, dangerous and free.”** The boundary between civilisation and the wild is notoriously inexact, and perhaps Thoreau was correct:
It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is in the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigour of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord, i.e. than I import into it.
Henry David Thoreau, Journal ***
In one sense, we carry a mythical landscape ever along with us and this secretive, unknown landscape may hint not only of death, but also of something beyond it. Simon Schama cites “David Friedrich’s explicit association between the evergreen fir and the architecture of resurrection”, noting that the painting speaks “to the heart of one of our most powerful yearnings: the craving to find in nature a consolation for our mortality.”****
Friedrich’s image is marked by the feeling of ascension, with cathedral, cross, and fir trees unified in indicating an apparently singular heaven above. In contrast, Brown’s photographic image asks more questions, suggesting a multitude of vectors with different weights and directions. Friedrich imposes the idea of Christian faith on nature, while Brown seems to take nature itself more at face value, allowing the natural light and tone to enhance the scene’s mysterious atmosphere.
In the painting, the human idea of cosmic order projects its centrality. The photographic image, in spite of being deliberately rendered in black and white, offers a less human-centric perspective, lending an almost equal weight to the tree as it appears to regard the viewer. If the painted image makes a human idea of universal order its centre, the photgraph appears to regard the human from another place, from the consciousness of the tree or of nature itself. While the painting urges our attention upward, the universe, or perhaps Nietzsche’s void, informed by an infinite generative natural potential, seems to regard us quietly from the photograph.
In Shakespeare’s plays, the mythical geographies are multitudinous. Timon’s cave, Ninus’ tomb, Juliet’s crypt, Ophelia’s grave, are all places of death, reflecting movement away from human life and towards some conception of eternity, even if that eternity remains simply being at rest in a “fine and private place”.***** In As You Like It, The Tempest, Hamlet, and other plays, geographical perspectives may shift. The usurped court, under a veneer of order, becomes a place where order is merely painted over the emotional and spiritual upheaval that lie beneath them. Usurpers like Frederick, Antonio, and Claudius constantly struggle to hold onto their power and authority against a kind of ever present moral threat from those from whom the rightful place has been withheld. In As You Like It, the Forest of Arden not only replaces the court, but also supplants its potentially benevolent authority. In The Tempest, the Dukedom’s authority is transported, albeit perhaps somewhat awkwardly (if we think of Caliban and Ariel’s subjection) to the desert island, where issues of authority and continuance are ultimately resolved. In Hamlet, not only is prince Hamlet’s political authority usurped by his uncle, but also his place within his own family, and even his affections for Ophelia fall prey to micro managed engineering attempts.
Yet, these literal, political, and psychological geographies only scratch the surface., because the empty air marking the absence at Cleopatra’s passing, and the crossgartered containment of Malvolio’s uncharacteristically riotous and lusty stockings are geographies as well, albeit more abstract ones, defining absence or suppression in the wake of human desire. Oberon proclaims his grove as haunted while simultaneously haunting it himself, his night-rule becoming a reciprocal wilderness of mutual participation. Even “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” is a kind of landscape, where the speaker is left “all alone” to “beweep my outcast state”******
It seems that there may be a little more to this than merely what we carry. Perhaps the boundaries between ourselves and our mythologies lie between our individual and our collective experiences. In the realms of mythical landscape, potential differences between what we carry and what might already be there, must become part of the definition, a hazy demarcation of the demarcation itself. For although black bears inhabited, and still may be found, in Massachusettes, the grizzly bears of Wyoming remain terrifyingly different. Wyoming grizzlies can tear open a cabin or a car as though they had been made of foil, but these more ferocious bears are no longer to be found in Thoreau’s wilderness recesses of Concord.
Landscapes may also differ by experience. So, they may be different for different people or characters, depending on what we might bring with us. In The Tempest, Prospero’s island is not the same as Caliban’s, neither is Antonio’s the same as Ferdinand or Miranda’s. In popular media often used for example in these blog posts, Harry Potter’s forbidden forest is not identical ro his friend, Ron Weasley’s:
Thoreau and so many others are right. We carry our own mythogy with us, configuring the interface so that any landscape we encounter becomes our own. Myth and landscape constantly participate fundamentally in our ongoing stories, which weave all of our experiential elements together into mythical tapestries that define the landscapes of our lives:
Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried.*******
Story is where it all comes together. This story, that story. Your story and mine.
In the end, there is so much more to say and more to research about story, landscape, and myth, that it cannot be said here today. One door merely opens onto the next hallway. Instead, we must bow to the limitations of a blog post where there simply is neither space nor time to develop things as we might do. Yet, someday, perhaps I shall write this book as well. Or one of them. In the meantime, please think of these posts as glimpses into different landscapes, variant aspects of mythologies, and alternate perspectives on functions within the philosophiæ naturalis of Shakespeare, literature, art, and life. Please have a good week.
*As always, more of Karin Brown’s moving and thought provoking tree, landscape, and light images may be found on her website: https://brownkcd.wixsite.com/imbolc , and also (as previously stated) on Instagram @imbolcphotographic.
**Maitland, Sara. Gossip from the Forest the Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairytales. London: Granta Publ., 2012, p. 10. Sara Maitland has a profound knowledge of the wilderness, having lived in the wilderness of the ancient Scottish forest of Glen Affric, and currently living a solitary life on a moor in Galloway.
***Thoreau, Henry David, and Damion Searls. The Journals of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861. Edited by John Stilgoe. New York: New York Review, 2009.
****Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage Books, 1996, p. 15. A great book, by the way.
*****From Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”, which may be read here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress
******William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
*******O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. NY: Mariner Books, 2009, p. 34.