Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered 9781350099449, 9781350099463, 9781350099432

Table of contents :
Cover
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Illustrations
Editors
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Wild. Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered Solveig Bøe, Hege Charlotte Faber and Eivind Kasa
The aesthetic way of relating to the wild
Wild and domesticated land
The human wild
Reconciliation?
The chapters
1 Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding1 Jonathan Prior and Emily Brady
Introduction
On the meaning of ‘rewilding’
Temporality, imagination and the unmanaged aesthetic qualities of rewilding
The unscenic and terrible beauty of rewilding
Conclusion
Notes
Literature
2 ‘Wild Thing’: The Aesthetic Prospects of Wildness Arto Haapala
The naturally wild
Home – dwelling
From homey to strange
Urban wildness
Wildness as an aesthetic feature
The role of wildness in urban existence
Notes
Literature
3 A Shelter in the Wilderness Eivind Kasa
The meaning of shelters according to James Gibson
The body as the wild within
Architects building in the wild
Upholding buildings against the wild
From wild meanings to concepts
Affordances established by crafts and industrial production
The world as wild
The dream of being at home in the wilderness: gardens
Notes
Literature
4 Of Wolves and Walls: Architecture and the Wild Andrew Ballantyne
Notes
Literature
5 Wild Being: On Human Animality Solveig Bøe
Merleau-Ponty’s wild being among the things
Clarice Lispector’s wild open heart
Notes
Literature
6 Into the Wild: Aesthetics of the Monstrous Brit Strandhagen
Introduction
Trolls in Nordic folk belief
Aesthetic appearance
On the sublime tradition
Dynamic ambivalence: Kant
Sublime terror: Burke
Sublime trolls
Notes
Literature
7 Compulsions of Wildness: On Grieg’s Trolls in Lang’s M Magnar Breivik
Notes
Literature
8 The Kalevala and Finnish Rune Songs – Wild Impressions in the Music of Sibelius Reidar Bakke
Notes
Literature
9 Dangerous and Endangered Nature: Art as a Way of Seeing Hege Charlotte Faber
Introduction: Four works of art
Shark-Cow-Bathtub (1993)
In-between-ness
The mythological monster Medusa
Opus for Heaven and Earth (1993)
Short on beauty, ugliness and the sublime
A group of monsters – or a group of damaged trees? Salamander Night (1989)
A foreshadowed catastrophe? Fabrice Monteiro and The Prophecy
A few closing remarks
Notes
Literature
10 Wild Weather: Modes of Being at the Mercy in Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, Turner’s Snowstorm and the Fiji House of the Spirits Sigurd Bergmann
The wild ‘bog in our brain and bowels’
Wild West Wind – Wild Spirit
Wild-running machines in steam and storm
From natural to anthropogenic wild in the House of the Spirits
Wild weather wisdom
Notes
Literature
11 Watery Wilds: Pond Swimming and Protest on Hampstead Heath Jessica J. Lee
History, aesthetics and the context of conservation battles on the Heath
The Ponds Project
Wild waters
Conclusion
Notes
Literature
12 The Fallow Land. A Farewell Jan Brockmann
Thrush Nightingales and the Underground
Notes
Literature
Index
Plates

Citation preview

Wild

i

Also Available from Bloomsbury Deleuze and Ethology: A Philosophy of Entangled Life, Jason Cullen Adorning Bodies: Meaning, Evolution, and Beauty in Humans and Animals, Marilynn Johnson

ii

Wild Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered Edited by Solveig Bøe, Hege Charlotte Faber and Eivind Kasa

iii

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Solveig Bøe, Hege Charlotte Faber, Eivind Kasa and Contributors, 2023 Solveig Bøe, Hege Charlotte Faber and Eivind Kasa have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Alex Booker Series design by Charlotte Daniels All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-9944-9 ePDF: 978-1-3500-9943-2 eBook: 978-1-3500-9945-6 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

iv

Contents List of Illustrations About the Editors About the Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Wild. Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered Solveig Bøe, Hege Charlotte Faber and Eivind Kasa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding Jonathan Prior and Emily Brady ‘Wild Thing’: The Aesthetic Prospects of Wildness Arto Haapala A Shelter in the Wilderness Eivind Kasa Of Wolves and Walls: Architecture and the Wild Andrew Ballantyne Wild Being: On Human Animality Solveig Bøe Into the Wild: Aesthetics of the Monstrous Brit Strandhagen Compulsions of Wildness: On Grieg’s Trolls in Lang’s M Magnar Breivik The Kalevala and Finnish Rune Songs – Wild Impressions in the Music of Sibelius Reidar Bakke 9 Dangerous and Endangered Nature. Art as a Way of Seeing Hege Charlotte Faber 10 Wild Weather: Modes of Being at the Mercy in Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, Turner’s Snowstorm and the Fiji House of the Spirits Sigurd Bergmann 11 Watery Wilds: Pond Swimming and Protest on Hampstead Heath Jessica J. Lee 12 The Fallow Land: A Farewell Jan Brockmann Index

vi x xi xiii

1 11 31 45 65 81 91 109 131 141

163 181 197 217

v

Illustrations The editor(s) and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book.

Colour plates 1

Carrifran Wildwood; planted trees are visible on both sides of the valley. Photograph taken by Jonathan Prior, August 2009 2 Movie poster M – Il Mostro di Düsseldorf (1931?), artist unknown, by permission from the Everett Collection 3 Th. Kittelsen (1857–1914): Peer Gynt in the Hall of the Dovre King. 1913. Water colour (900 × 1200 mm), private collection. Public domain. https://no.wikipedia. org/wiki/Fil:Per_gynt_i_dovregubbens_hall.jpg 4 Dorothy Cross: Shark-Cow-Bathtub (1993), Sømna, Nordland, commissioned by Artscape Nordland / Nordland County. Photo: Ernst Furuhatt. Granite (cow’s udder), bronze (shark), cast iron (bathtub). Cow’s udder 75 × 75 cm, length of shark 250 cm, bathtub 60 × 110 × 57 cm. 5 Dorothy Cross: Shark-Cow-Bathtub (1993), Sømna, Nordland, commissioned by Artscape Nordland / Nordland County. Photo: Vegar Moen. 6 Dorothy Cross: Shark-Cow-Bathtub (1993), Sømna, Nordland, commissioned by Artscape Nordland / Nordland County. Photo: Vegar Moen. 7 Oddvar I. N.: Opus for Heaven and Earth (1993), Vevelstad, Nordland, commissioned by Artscape Nordland / Nordland County. Photo: Vegar Moen. Engraved into the mountain. Diameter of the circle 980 cm, area 75 m². 8 Fabrice Monteiro: Untitled #1, 2013 from The Prophecy, 2013–2015. Photograph © Fabrice Monteiro / BONO 2021/ Adagp, Paris, 2021 – Photo: Adagp images 2021 9 Fabrice Monteiro: Untitled #6, 2014 from The Prophecy, 2013–2015. Photograph © Fabrice Monteiro / BONO 2021/ Adagp, Paris, 2021 – Photo: Adagp images 2021 10 Fabrice Monteiro: Untitled #8, 2015, from The Prophecy, 2013–2015. Photograph © Fabrice Monteiro / BONO 2021/ Adagp, Paris, 2021 – Photo: Adagp images 2021 11 J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), Snowstorm – Steam-boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead, c. 1842, oil on canvas, 91 × 122 cm, Tate Britain, London, © Wikimedia commons: http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/File:Joseph_Mallord_William_Turner_-_Snow_Storm_-_Steam-Boat_ off_a_Harbour%27s_Mouth_-_WGA23178.jpg, 26 April 2019

vi

Illustrations

vii

12 Ladies’ Pond. © Photo: Jessica J. Lee 13 Adolph Menzel (1815–1905): Railway between Berlin and Potsdam [Die BerlinPotsdamer Bahn], 1847, oil on canvas, 42 × 52 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin. © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / Jörg P. Anders 14 Carl Blechen (1798–1840): View of Roofs and Gardens [Blick auf Dächer und Gärten], 1835, oil on canvas, 20 × 26 cm, Nationalgalerie Berlin. © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / Jörg P. Anders 15 Adolph Menzel (1815–1905): View of the Backyard Houses [Blick auf Hinterhäuser], 1847, oil on paper, 27 × 53 cm, Nationalgalerie Berlin. © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / S. R. Gnamm

Figures 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 1.1 1.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 5.1 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

Photo: Eivind Kasa Photo: Eivind Kasa Photo: Eivind Kasa Photo: Hege Charlotte Faber Photo: Eivind Kasa Photo: Eivind Kasa A visually unobtrusive tree guard in use at Carrifran Wildwood Carrifran Burn flowing through Carrifran Wildwood A Norwegian barn wall during winter Sheep taking refuge under a tree Wild weather Choosing a site in the wild Acqua alta in Venice eroding its foundations A magnificient rhododendron in the gardens at Stourhead The sea Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914), The Forest Troll (Skovtroldet) (before 1892), 318 × 431 mm Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914), Sea Monster (Sjøtroll) (1887), illustration, 320 × 480 mm Johannes Flintoe (1787–1870), Jutlamannen i Lærdal (The Jutul Man in Lærdal) (1822), drawing Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914), Nu skal jeg sætte Knaphul i Bukserne dine til Jul (before 1891), drawing 401 × 275 mm Fritz Lang: Mörder unter uns, pre-announcement, Licht. Bild. Bühne, 27 September 1930 Advertisement from Film-Kurier, 14 August 1924 Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) in M Erik Werenskiold (1855–1938): ‘Ugh! Ugh! Here I smell the Blood of a Christian Man!’ roared the Troll. 1884 The stigmatized child murderer (Peter Lorre) in Fritz Lang’s M

1 2 4 5 6 7 15 18 46 49 50 52 55 61 87 92 93 94 96 110 112 114 121 124

viii

Illustrations

9.1 Archaic Medusa. Around 580 BC. West pediment of the temple of Artemis, Corfu 9.2 Caravaggio: Medusa 1597–1598 (60 × 55 cm, oil on canvas) 9.3 Oddvar I. N.: Opus for Heaven and Earth. 1993, Vevelstad, Nordland 9.4 Oddvar I. N.: Opus for Heaven and Earth. 1993, Vevelstad, Nordland 9.5 Oddvar I. N.: Measuring the Depth of the Snow. 1981, photograph. Height c. 2 metres 9.6 Kjell Erik Killi Olsen: Salamander Night [Salamandernatten], 1989. Group of 72 sculptures, permanently placed in the basement of SpareBank 1, Trondheim 10.1 Bure of Na Ututu, a sketch done in the early 1800s 10.2 Reconstructed Mesolithic round-house. Replica of a 10,000-year-old round-house which was excavated from a cliff-top site near to Howick, Northumberland, UK 11.1 Ponds on Hampstead Heath 11.2 Manor of Hampstead c. 1829 (solid line) with present-day Hampstead Heath borders (dotted lines) 11.3 Areas of the Heath most impacted by the Ponds Project (marked with lines) 11.4 The slice of oak, 2015. © Photo: Jessica J. Lee 12.1 Heinrich Zille (1858–1929): Untitled. Wood Gatherers [Ohne Titel (Zwei Frauen ziehen und schieben gemeinsam den Handkarren durch den Sand)] Knobelsdorff Bridge, Berlin-Charlottenburg around c. 1900 12.2 Tiergarten 1946. Two policemen standing in front of the destroyed Tiergarten 12.3 Bundeskanzleramt (Federal Chancellor’s Office), architects Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank 12.4 Bundeskanzleramt (detail), architects Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank 12.5 Schöneberger Südgelände 12.6 Poster near Anhalter Bahnhof 12.7 The sky of crows over Berlin [Krähenhimmel über Berlin]

145 146 147 148 149

151 173

174 182 184 188 190

201 203 204 205 206 208 210

Tables 7.1 ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, musical structure and extra-musical connotations 7.2 Whistling ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’: occurrences in Fritz Lang’s M 7.3 People in M and trolls in Peer Gynt

116 118 125

Illustrations

ix

Music examples 7.1 Edvard Grieg, ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, op. 46/4, piano reduction, mm. 1–5 7.2 Edvard Grieg, ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, op. 46/4, piano reduction, mm. 86–88 8.1 The Kalevala metre in two-time and five-time metre

115 116 132

Editors Solveig Bøe is Professor of philosophy at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. Her research interests include philosophy of nature, philosophy of art, aesthetics, Continental philosophy. Most of her publications are in the field of aesthetics and Continental philosophy. She was co-editor of Raw. Architectural Engagements with Nature (2014). Hege Charlotte Faber is Senior Research Librarian at NTNU University Library, The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Her research interests include aesthetics, contemporary art, and history of art. Her most recent book is I dialog med maleriet (In Dialogue with Painting), a monograph on the work of the Norwegian artist Jon Arne Mogstad (2016). She was co-editor of Raw. Architectural Engagements with Nature (2014). Eivind Kasa is an architect and Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture and Technology, The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He is former president of The Nordic Association of Architectural Research. He has also been Editor-in-Chief of the Nordic Journal for Architectural Research. His research interests include theory in architecture, art and design with a focus on architectural aesthetics. In 2002 he published the book Forms of Knowledge and Sensibility. Ernst Cassirer and the Human Sciences, co-edited with Gunnar Foss.

x

Contributors Reidar Bakke was Associate Professor at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in the Department of Music. His research interests focus on Nordic vocal traditions and Nordic composers like Grieg, Sibelius and Rautavaara, on which he has published books and articles. His most recent book is Ei sole sorrakieli (2018). Andrew Ballantyne is Professor of Architecture at Newcastle University UK. He has published extensively on architectural history and theory, including Architecture: A Very Short Introduction (2002), Key Buildings from Prehistory to the Present (2012), Architecture Theory (2005), Tudoresque: In Pursuit of the Ideal Home (2012) and John Ruskin: A Critical Life (2015). Sigurd Bergmann is Emeritus Professor in Religious Studies at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, and secretary of the European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment. His previous studies have investigated the relationship between the image of God and the view of nature in late antiquity, the methodology of contextual theology, visual arts in the indigenous Arctic and Australia, as well as visual arts, architecture and religion, and religion in climate change. His recent books are Weather, Religion and Climate Change (2021), and Religion, Space and the Environment (2014). Emily Brady is Professor at Texas A&M University in the Department of Philosophy. Her research interests span aesthetics and philosophy of art, environmental ethics, and eighteenth-century philosophy. Her most recent book, co-authored with Isis Brook and Jonathan Prior, is Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments (2018). Magnar Breivik is Emeritus Professor of musicology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His research interests focus on music and aesthetics in the first half of the twentieth century, the interplay between music and other arts, cultural life in the Weimar Republik, and music in early film. Breivik is the author of Musical Functionalism: The Musical Thoughts of Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith (2011), and he has published articles on the aesthetic ideas and musical works of several composers, including composers for film. Jan Brockmann is former Director of Norway’s National Museum of Contemporary Art, former Professor of visual aesthetics at Department of Architectural Design, Form and Colour Studies, The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), xi

xii

Contributors

and former Professor of cultural studies at Nordeuropa-Institut, Humboldt University Berlin. He has published on literature, visual aesthetics, fine arts and architecture. Arto Haapala is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Helsinki. He has been a visiting Professor and researcher at several universities in Germany, United Kingdom, Spain and the United States. He has done research on different problems in aesthetics, particularly in ontology and interpretation, as well as on environmental aesthetics and Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. His most recent interests are in the aesthetics of everyday environments and urban aesthetics. He has authored and co-authored several books, and about a hundred articles, and in 2014 he launched together with Gerald Cipriani a journal entitled Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology. Jessica J. Lee is an author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of two books of nature writing: Turning (2017) and Two Trees Make a Forest (2019), which was shortlisted for Canada Reads 2021. Jessica is currently a researcher in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. Jonathan Prior is a lecturer in Human Geography at Cardiff University. His research and publications take an interdisciplinary approach, spanning environmental philosophy, sound studies, and landscape research. His first book, Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments, co-authored with Emily Brady and Isis Brook, was published in 2018. Brit Strandhagen is Associate Professor of philosophy at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. Her research interests include aesthetics and philosophy of art, aesthetics and ethics, environmental aesthetics, phenomenology and existentialism, and history of philosophy. Most of her publications are in the field of aesthetics. She was co-editor of Raw. Architectural Engagements with Nature (2014).

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the chapter authors for contributing to this volume. Our editors at Bloomsbury, Liza Thompson and Lucy Russell, have both been very patient and helpful, and we are grateful for their kind assistance and advice. We also thank the Arts Council Norway, the Faculty of Architecture and Design, the Faculty of Humanities, and NTNU University Library at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) for financial support.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. The third-party copyrighted material displayed in the pages of this book is done so on the basis of ‘fair dealing for the purposes of criticism and review’ or ‘fair use for the purposes of teaching, criticism, scholarship or research’ only in accordance with international copyright laws, and is not intended to infringe upon the ownership rights of the original owners. Chapter 1 has previously been published in the journal Environmental Values 17, no 1 (2017), 31–51. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327117X14809634978519. The chapter is reproduced in Wild. The Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered by permission from White Horse Press.

xiii

xiv

Introduction: Wild. Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered Solveig Bøe, Hege Charlotte Faber and Eivind Kasa

Wild. Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered explores the aesthetic experience of nature, focusing on the untamed, the boundless, the unwieldy, and the unpredictable sides. The wild is seen as something outside the realm of what is subjugated to human will and shaped in the image of human beings. Nature as wild is hereby often experienced as heteronomous, as The Other. Humans have always tried to conquer and tame wild nature. One can even claim that humans became human when they began doing this. Through modern science and, in particular, through the Industrial Revolution, the human impact on nature has increased greatly, resulting in nature being more and more forced into retreat. Today, in the Anthropocene, it seems not merely tamed, but hurt and endangered. The change of landscapes, environments and the climate has accelerated during the last century. We

Figure 0.1 Photo: Eivind Kasa.

1

2

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

have seen a dramatic loss of wild places, as well as a rapid and increasing disappearance of a number of wild species. It may be almost impossible to talk about wilderness anymore, understood as something untouched by humans. Wilderness seems to have become an unreachable utopia. Yet, the ecological crisis that we now experience can be seen to represent the return of the wild as a dangerous and life-threatening force. The ambiguous character of this ‘new’ wild is seen in the concept of ‘the anthropogenic wild’ – the wild caused by humans. Even our own persistence as a species is threatened. The wild has often been used to describe geographical areas, plants, animals, and even human beings. With wild geographical areas we think of landscapes like the rainforest of the Amazonas, the Himalayas or the Gobi Desert, Tierra del Fuego, the Pacific, Arctic and Antarctica. These are areas which are scantily inhabited or difficult to inhabit by humans and may give us an impression of being overwhelming or desolate. Wild plants and animals are seen to exist in a natural state, undomesticated. Humans may also exhibit behaviour of unpolished, violent, or unbounded wildness. In some of these cases, biological forces breaking through are blamed. This behaviour can be seen as undomesticated, and thereby inhuman. In the present anthology, the perspective on the wild becomes extremely differentiated or even dismantled on closer scrutiny. On the one hand, the wild can be a modest, quiet, or even shy phenomenon, like the shyness of wild animals. The wild may also be extremely vulnerable. On the other hand, its power can be expansive and

Figure 0.2 Photo: Evind Kasa.

Introduction

3

brutally overwhelming. The double character of the wild as dangerous and endangered indicates that human existence through our continuous involvement with the wild is not merely ambiguous, but unstable, volatile and continually changing. A theme that is pursued throughout the book is the wild in connection with the experience of nature as both a constructive and destructive force. Sometimes, the relation to the wild is experienced as an agonistical play of forces. Yet, on other occasions, our relation to the wild is rather ambiguous, multifaceted. This gives human relations to nature a powerful dynamic.

The aesthetic way of relating to the wild The aesthetic approach is distinguished from other ways of approaching the wild, like the practical, industrial or scientific ones. The German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s (1714–1762) influential definition of philosophical aesthetics as the science of sensual knowledge opens up an understanding of the particular role of aesthetic perception in shaping the concept of the wild. Our senses are situated at the intersection between our bodies and the world. As such, the aesthetic approach conveys information not only about the world but also about how we find ourselves in it. It catches our existential situation in the world in a particular way, by emphasizing the importance of the immediate aesthetic experience of our environment. This includes the wild as an experience that is unmediated by art. No wonder, then, that the category of the wild as untamed, boundless, unwieldy, unpredictable, or even radically threatening so often acquires an aesthetic character. The wild is also related to the category of the sublime. It is often repeated that the sublime aesthetic experience is impossible when one is overwhelmed by the threats of the wild, because of the immediate presence of fear, and the possibility of pain and death. The aesthetic experience needs safe distance. Aesthetic shaping of the wild into definite figures may function as a distancing technique. The wild is unbound, unwieldly, and difficult to ascertain. It may be experienced as a present, yet unknown, threat. By shaping it into definite figures, it becomes delimited, easier to ascertain and manageable. The wild gets tamed. The taming of the wild through shapes becomes even stronger when they develop into mythological figures. In Nordic and other mythologies, figures like trolls take care of the fundamental ambiguous or even multi-faceted character of the wild. Trolls may remind us of, and thereby preserve, the strange, scary and uncontrollable character of the wild. Such figures may give us a glimpse into the mysterious aspects of the world. It may even become an aesthetic access to a hidden realm, which in our daily lives might be impossible to reach. However, we can only get a glimpse. In distinction from this, our technological-scientific world view represents a kind of alienation from nature as wild. The notion of trolls as a way of dealing with the unmanageable taps into the formation of myths relating to the wild. One example is the myth of the forest god Pan that struck people with senseless fear or ‘panic’. When people are struck with ‘panic’, orientation, reason, and logical thinking are suspended, and they may be physically paralysed. The creation of myths makes the scary aspect of the wild understandable

4

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 0.3 Photo: Eivind Kasa.

and to a certain extent manageable and tamed. Another example is the Finnish epic poem, the Kalevala, in which the song of the hero Väinämöinen – a kind of Orpheusfigure – very concretely demonstrates the force of an aesthetic expression to spellbind wild nature. Aesthetic reactions to and articulations of the wild often form the basis for cultural practices like architecture, literature, visual arts, and music. The arts may establish a reflective practice; they may raise fundamental questions about our being in the world, in particular related to the current challenges of the climate and indicate ways to proceed to change the situation. We will argue that aesthetic perception and art can have concrete consequences in moral attitudes towards nature and for political action, like in the ecological restoration and rewilding of vulnerable environments that takes place in different parts of the world. By rewilding we refer to different projects which are aiming to reintroduce lost species in their former natural environments, and thereby help nature to restore. Rewilding processes demonstrate at how low a degree aesthetic perception of the wild is fixed once and for all, and how it may fluctuate through history.

Wild and domesticated land Wild natural regions can be seen in opposition to regions that have become transformed by humans and domesticated in the sense that humans have made them their homes. Human transformation of land aims to serve human presence and needs. Domestication, in the sense of cultivation of land, is the original meaning of the Latin term cultura. In culture, thus, there is an element of control, transformation and domination. This leads to an understanding of the human sphere as one separated from nature and establishes the well-known dichotomy between nature and culture. This dichotomy is reified in architecture through the creation of the wall that separates the human and tamed land, from the natural and wild. Building, from the simplest wall to the most elaborate forms of architecture, creates this distance concretely. This is the background for the concept of ‘home’ as a place which is tamed, one where we feel safe.

Introduction

5

Figure 0.4 Photo: Hege Charlotte Faber.

The dichotomy, nevertheless, is not absolute or even clear cut. On one side, human presence has become so prevalent that it is less meaningful to talk about areas untouched by humans, wilderness. On the other side, the wild also exists intra muros. Within the administered world of the city, untamed land may reappear. From these areas the wilderness may emerge within the city and offer ground to unregulated flora and a fascinating plethora of undomesticated wildlife. In the city and its immediate environments, one can encounter pristine nature which may be experienced as exciting and thrilling.

The human wild Wild is a quality that may apply to the human sphere, and ourselves as human beings. First, the wild inside the human domain pertains to our embodied being as biological, ecological, and evolutionary organisms, originated in nature. The human wild is rooted in our embodiedness as something that structures our being in the world. It may express itself in excessive bodily pleasures. In addition to this more positive view of the wild in human nature, there is a more negative one. The wild in our embodiedness shows itself in discomfort, fear, illness and death. Further, it may express itself in behaviour that is raw, uncultivated, criminal or pathological. In those cases, the

6

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 0.5 Photo: Eivind Kasa.

wild manifests itself within the human sphere, retaining the character of an intrusion of something strange and inhuman. Aesthetics and art may teach us to recognize the wild in ourselves and to accommodate the wild in ourselves.

Reconciliation? Humans seem to have dreamt of a reconciled, harmonious relation to the wild since the beginning of historical times. This is the content of a plethora of myths. Important examples are the Garden of Eden as Paradise and the myth of Arcadia. Arcadia, the archaic unspoiled harmonious wilderness of Peloponnese was seen as the home of the god Pan. Pan was not only the god that struck people with senseless panic. He was also the god of peaceful woods, pastures and shepherds. We find this dream of reconciliation repeated in the arts, for instance in idylls and pastorals from Theocritus on, via Virgil, Petrarch and Tasso until the nineteenth century. In architecture, this dream is perhaps foremost articulated in the garden. The walled-off gardens gave rise to the notion of Paradise, a word first found in old Persian language. Yet, exterior elements of buildings like capitals of columns and ornaments

Introduction

7

like the acanthus may also imitate nature to articulate and seemingly realize the dream of reconciliation. The same may be the case with interior architectural elements like wall-paintings of trees, flowers, birds and wildlife that we find in ancient buildings. This dream may be seen as an expression of the wish to escape the danger or volatility of the wild and its influence on human existence. Sometimes, the reconciliation may seem to be brought about in buildings. Architecture demonstrates, in particular in the modern, industrial society, how the power of humans over nature, through art or technology, may contribute to the illusion of peace and reconciliation. And yet, this reconciliation remains a dream. It is eminently exemplified by Nicolas Poussin’s famous painting Et in Arcadia Ego (1637–1638). At least one interpretation sees this as a memento mori, the reminder of death in the midst of paradise. In the middle of Arcadia, panic may rise. This is an indication that our relation to the wild is never settled once and for all. It is intensely volatile. So is its aesthetic recognition. The anthology indicates how the wild, far from being a marginal phenomenon, is a fundamental aspect of human life. It forms part of our very existence on earth. The chapters explore different aspects of the aesthetics of the wild, together forming a manifold of stories that cannot be neatly summed up. The authors are in many ways identifying and discussing the wild in different domains of life, as well as different areas of artistic activity and research (film, art, architecture, music, philosophical aesthetics). Nordic and Northern European perspectives are explored in some of the chapters.

Figure 0.6 Photo: Eivind Kasa.

8

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

The chapters In Chapter 1, Jonathan Prior and Emily Brady explore the practice of rewilding and its implications for environmental aesthetic values, qualities and experiences. First, they consider the temporal dimensions of rewilding in regards to the emergence of particular aesthetic qualities over time, and our aesthetic appreciation of these. Second, they discuss how rewilding potentially brings about difficult aesthetic experiences, such as the unscenic and the ugly. Finally, they make progress in critically understanding how rewilding may be understood as a distinctive form of ecological restoration, while resisting the assimilation of rewilding into wilderness discourses. Arto Haapala (Chapter 2) considers the concept of wildness as an existential notion which singles out phenomena – both natural and man-made – that are somehow beyond our control and, in varying degrees, surprising, thrilling, strange, and, in extreme cases, threatening. There are degrees of wildness, and there are varieties of wildness, in the sense that emotions besides sheer fear, for instance of, something threatening, have a leading role to play. He will argue that it is exactly when we move away from the simply threatening that wildness becomes aesthetically interesting. In wildness, it is the element of the unknown, being beyond our control, as well as the excitement there involved that creates the kind of atmosphere which can well be included under the notion of the aesthetic. What is characteristic to wild things is an element of the unexpected, and something being somehow beyond our control without posing a direct threat or danger. Since antiquity, architecture has been understood as a shelter against the wild. Nevertheless, how the bodily experience of being sheltered has contributed to the formation of the concept of architecture, or in a more general sense, what buildings mean, has been inadequately understood. In Chapter 3, Eivind Kasa discusses this from the point of view of James Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception. The discussion leads to an understanding of what works of architecture mean based on natural meaning which is established in relation to the body, unmediated by concepts or culture. In turn, this leads to a corresponding understanding of the wild against which the work of architecture shelters us. Andrew Ballantyne’s Chapter (4) examines buildings and their inhabitants as a way of thinking about the idea of the wild in cultural history, taking in a broad historical sweep across the Holocene – the geological era that has turned out to be the Anthropocene. Buildings are important instruments in establishing a sense of the wild. Without the sense of enclosure that they bring, and the illusion that we can be separated from our surroundings, we can only see ourselves as part of the world, immersed in it, and the categories of wild and natural versus tamed and domestic cannot arise. There were nomadic shelters during the Ice Age, but the first permanent settlements go back no further than about 10,000 years. Humans evolved over millions of years and our instincts are bred into us from a time before there were the walled and urbane environments in our dwellings and cities, where most of us now live. We (as a species) were once inseparably part of the wild, which could not be conceptualized as such. Then we made safe spaces for ourselves, and we framed a view of the wild as dangerous. Now that we once again understand something of our interdependence, the wild seems

Introduction

9

to be endangered. However, it is always with us and in us. The wild reasserts itself in depression and criminality, when the codes of polite domesticity start to feel like a trap. In Chapter 5, Solveig Bøe looks at human animality and how to approach and understand it, mainly through a close reading of the phenomenological descriptions of sensations and thoughts, and entwinements with the physical environment, that we find in Clarice Lispector’s novel Close to the Wild Heart. It is argued that to understand human animality we must try to conceptualize it from below, from the wild, untamed and dark parts of ourselves that are connected with force and life. In this connection the concept of Wild Being, partly inspired by Merleau-Ponty´s last notes, is introduced. It is also argued that poetry and literature can be a better way to explore the wild ways of thinking originating in the body, than through works of discursive philosophy. Brit Strandhagen examines the aesthetics of the monstrous in Chapter 6: A mix of strong and ambivalent feelings of attraction and repulsion form the core of sublime experiences, which makes the sublime particularly relevant for an aesthetics of the wild. Nordic trolls are symbols of the wild, mysterious, unwieldy and uncontrollable aspects of nature, as well as the wildness within each of us, of our own nature. The chapter discusses the aesthetic tradition of the sublime in relation to wild nature in general, and Nordic trolls in particular. Interpreted as an aestheticization of the threatening wild, the troll is a mechanism for dealing with the absorbing, paralysing feeling of fear, which may occur when one is faced with overwhelming, uncontrollable and terrifying nature, and thus creates the necessary distance to experience the wild as something other and more than horror – as sublime. In Chapter 7, Magnar Breivik points out that innocent people’s struggle against the wildness of dangerous forces is an issue frequently described in art. In Fritz Lang’s film M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931), a whole city society is chasing a paedophile serial killer by the name of Hans Beckert. In the murderer’s persona, destructive cruelty is hidden behind a common appearance, allowing him to easily melt into the crowd. Lang constructs his plot on the deeds and fate of the killer by presenting him as a person with a mental disorder commanding him to perform his dreadful acts. The focus of this chapter is upon Beckert’s habit of whistling a few bars from Edvard Grieg’s piece ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, originally written for Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Lang’s use of this particular tune epitomizes a tight knot of ruthless compulsion and relentless remorse in which the murderer is both a cause and a victim. Reidar Bakke writes about the Kalevala and wild impressions in the music of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (Chapter 8). Sibelius loved wild nature. He composed his music inspired not only from real nature but also from experiences of nature and wildlife as given in the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, and the Finnish rune singing tradition. To learn as much as possible of the special vocal tradition the epic is built on, he visited performers and listened to their singing. One of his pieces inspired by this is The Swan of Tuonela. This chapter aims to see his music in the light of the Kalevala and the rune singing tradition. The aim of Chapter 9 (Hege Charlotte Faber) is to explore four highly different contemporary works of art in light of a notion of wild nature as both dangerous and endangered. The artworks are Irish artist Dorothy Cross’s site-specific Shark-CowBathtub (1993), the Norwegian artist Oddvar I. N.’s site-integrated Opus for Heaven

10

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

and Earth (1993), the Norwegian artist Kjell Erik Killi Olsen’s huge sculpture group Salamander Night (1989) and the Belgian-Beninese artist Fabrice Monteiro’s series of photographs The Prophecy (2013–2015). The discussion is done through the lenses of the liminal, that highlight the concepts of transformation, of being on a threshold, and of an in-between-ness. These concepts elucidate the poetic qualities of the works, even if in some cases they may express a kind of terrifying beauty. In Chapter 10, Sigurd Bergmann deals with wild weather. Coping with both the natural and anthropogenic wild appears to be one of the most challenging demands in a future characterized by climatic change, unpredictable wild weather and states of disaster. Poetizing, painting and building in synergy with the wild appear hereby as a significantly promising mode of creative adaptation. Religious and spiritual support to accept the wild forces of altering weather in the atmosphere might catalyse such a strategy in fruitful ways. The chapter explores three examples of poetic, visual and sacred architectural expressions of adapting to wild weather: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ode to the West Wind, J. M. W. Turner’s painting Snowstorm and the traditional House of the Spirits on the Fijis. Reflecting on the wild as an open Suchraum and a place of selfexperience, it discusses how especially wild weather as a gift might turn into a forceful method of culturally encountering the demands of our common future and Earth. Jessica J. Lee deals with wild swimming in Chapter 11. On Hampstead Heath, pond swimming has taken place for over a century and has often been at the centre of efforts to preserve access to the site amidst increasing privatization across London. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research and fieldwork carried out with Kenwood Ladies’ Pond swimmers in 2015, this chapter explores both the role of swimming in shaping locals’ perceptions of the Heath’s landscape qualities, as well as the site’s central role in both nineteenth-century and present efforts to conserve and manage public open spaces in Britain. She argues that recent dam works and the opposition to them crystallized local visions for the Heath, contributing to the centuries-long negotiation over how the Heath ought to look, and how its users and caretakers ought to manage its perceived ‘wildness’. In the final chapter (12), Jan Brockmann describes Berlin as fallow land. Fallow land is a land that is delayed, situated between that which is no more and that which has yet to be. More than any other metropolis, Berlin can be seen as the land of fallowness, surrounded by Mark Brandenburg, a sparsely populated county where the landscape in many places appears empty. Since the Thirty Years’ War, urbanization and renaturation have alternated like tide and ebb. The artist Adolph Menzel’s (1815–1905) paintings from the middle of the nineteenth century visualize how urbanization and disparate nature, both untamed, fight each other in a struggle with uncertain results. The devastation of the war, the isolation of the divided city, and the raising of the Berlin Wall after World War II have caused a lot of almost incurable wounds in the body of the city. In many places, nature itself reversed the process of the nineteenth century, and took the terrain back. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the recovering of the city made visible how much empty space over the years was given the chance to ‘settle into lovely places’. Today, the city once again is rebuilt and filled with people, many of the small areas of fallow land have disappeared, and with them a manifold of biotopes.

1

Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding1 Jonathan Prior and Emily Brady

Introduction Bound up with shifting environmental policy agendas and priorities, rewilding has emerged as a distinctive form of ecological restoration. This emergence has been reflected upon within the environmental conservation literature,2 and, as we shall later detail, the social sciences and humanities, though to a lesser extent.3 Across all of these disciplines, much of this work at least tangentially touches upon questions pertinent to the concerns of environmental philosophy; nonetheless, we believe that this emergence has interesting and significant implications that have not yet been directly addressed by environmental philosophers. In this chapter, we focus in on just one of these: the implications of rewilding practices for environmental aesthetic values, qualities and experiences, from both a theoretical and practical perspective. Environmental philosophers have previously investigated ecological restoration values, though this has been in relation to restoration strategies broader than the specifics of rewilding. Notably, the majority have focused their efforts on considering the types of social and ecological values that are either gained or lost when ecological restoration is undertaken.4 Those studies that have reflected specifically upon the relationship between aesthetic values and ecological restoration have done so firstly by analysing people’s (visual) aesthetic preferences for different post-restoration landscapes;5 secondly, by examining the role of artistic representations of ecosystems on restoration practices;6 and thirdly, by exploring the potential for conflict between aesthetic values and other types of value, such as ecological values,7 social justice values8 and environmental preservationist values.9 Furthermore, there has been some commentary on how practices of ecological restoration can be conceptualized as an artistic practice – as something akin to land art or performance art.10 Such a direct projection of aesthetic values has been interpreted by some as a positive or even necessary constituent of ‘good’ ecological restoration practice,11 while others are disparaging of ecological restoration that is apparently more ‘art’ than ‘science’ and is therefore not carried out ‘in a proper scientific way’.12 These reflections have, so far, not accounted for how different types of aesthetic values may inform ecological restoration projects, nor for the types of aesthetic qualities and characters that in turn arise from restoration practices, let alone in the 11

12

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

specific context of rewilding. We do not wish to suggest here that aesthetic values have been disregarded altogether, but that they are most often only invoked in an unreflective manner. Given the significance attributed to aesthetic values in environmental decision-making,13 we think it is important to address this gap. In this chapter, then, we explore rewilding as a specific form of ecological restoration, and its particular aesthetic features. First, we consider the temporal dimensions of rewilding in regard to the emergence of particular aesthetic qualities over time, and our aesthetic experience and appreciation of such qualities. For instance, we address questions rewilding raises about what we call ‘future aesthetics’, and the role of imagination in the unfolding aesthetic narrative of rewilded places. Second, we discuss how rewilding potentially brings about difficult aesthetic experiences – such as the unscenic and the ugly – that tend not to be found in other kinds of ecological restoration projects. Finally, and more generally in the chapter, we hope to make progress in critically understanding how rewilding may be understood as a distinctive form of ecological restoration, while resisting the assimilation of rewilding into wilderness discourses. We do so not from a perspective of supporting rewilding, but from one that acknowledges that rewilding is increasingly finding purchase within academic and environmental policy circles, and is now being widely discussed in the popular press. Indeed, throughout the chapter we are not attempting to argue in favour of rewilding, nor are we attempting to argue against it; our interest lies instead in exploring the likely aesthetic implications of this emerging ecological restoration strategy. Before we turn to address these questions, we will first explore how rewilding has been defined and conceptually treated within the literature, which will in turn allow us to point to the particularity of rewilded aesthetics.

On the meaning of ‘rewilding’ There is no agreed-upon definition of rewilding, yet we can detect a few trends in how the term has been applied. Within the environmental conservation literature, by far the predominant focus of rewilding has been on the reintroduction of wild mammalian species, including wolves, lynx and bison, or the restoration-via-reintroduction of charismatic Pleistocene megafauna in North America (or at least extant species descended from such animals, including elephants and camels).14 While it appears that Pleistocene rewilding has remained on the relative margins of actual conservation strategies, it has nevertheless caused considerable debate across journal articles and letters in regard to both its feasibility and desirability.15, 16 Much of this literature uses Soulé and Noss’ landmark paper from 1998 as a starting point for discussions of rewilding practices. In their paper, the authors focus on making a scientific case for the need to reintroduce top carnivores into North America: ‘Our principal premise is that rewilding is a critical step in restoring self-regulating land communities. . . . Once large predators are restored, many if not most of the other keystone and ‘habitat-creating’ species (e.g., beavers, prairie dogs) . . . and natural regimes of disturbance and other processes will recover on their own.’17 Thus, this

Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding

13

formulation of rewilding emphasizes the top-down role of predator species in precipitating wider ecological changes, or so-called ecological cascading effects.18 Other formulations of rewilding have not solely focused on the reintroduction of wild mammalian species, but also the ‘de-domestication’ of domesticated animals, particularly ungulates,19 and also the restoration or reintroduction of wild floral species. While it is assumed that such flora will serve as habitat for other species, value is often directly placed on the wild qualities of the plants themselves; we shall provide a detailed example of one such rewilding project later in this chapter. Some proponents of rewilding have also focused upon the importance of restoring certain abiotic factors to ecosystems, rather than assuming that the reintroduction of top carnivores, herbivores or ecosystem engineers, such as beavers, will lead to the recovery of ecological processes. So, for example, the reintroduction of fire regimes in grasslands, and the removal of dams and other ‘hard engineering’ river-management practices, have been subsumed under rewilding.20 By extension, we think that managed retreat, whereby coastal flood defences are removed, qualifies as this type of rewilding action. As a result of the broad scope of what constitutes ‘rewilding’, throughout this chapter we understand it to be a process of (re)introducing or restoring wild organisms and/or ecological processes to ecosystems where such organisms and processes are either missing or are ‘dysfunctional’.21 For the sake of clarity, a few caveats are necessary to refine this definition. Firstly, in some of the literature concerning rewilding practices, we see the unfortunate conflation of ‘wilderness’ with ‘wildness’.22 This means that many of the familiar criticisms of wilderness can be levelled at rewilding, and indeed have been.23 In this chapter, however, we want to make it explicit from the outset that, while there are many instances where ‘wildness’ can be identified as a component of ‘wilderness’ objectives,24 we do not equate the former with the latter. Instead, we follow Robert Chapman’s rejection of the interchangeability of these two terms.25 Whereas ‘wilderness’ is a quantitative spatial dimension that ‘can be reduced acre-by-acre’,26 in which human bodies and their material traces are (often made) absent, ‘wildness’ can be understood ‘as the autonomy of the more-than-human world where events such as animals moving about, plants growing, and rocks falling occur largely because of their own internal self-expression’.27 Leaving aside rocks, the ability to self-direct and self-sustain – and so not to rely on direct human control for flourishing – are key qualities of this autonomy.28 It follows, then, that we understand that wildness is to be found in humanly populated and cultural landscapes, and experienced at a range of spatial scales ‘from gazing at a starry night sky to watching spiders and ants at work in a suburban back yard’.29 Thus rewilding as a specific form of ecological restoration does not require human abandonment or erasure of cultural landscapes, unlike wilderness management. It therefore seems appropriate to think of ‘rewilding’ as a relational – rather than binary – category, which can be implemented at a range of scales and at different intensities, and so not always and only homogeneously across the totality of a given landscape. One of the most prominent examples of rewilding in Western Europe makes this point for us: the Oostvaardersplassen reserve in the Netherlands, where the dedomestication of cattle and ponies is taking place. This landscape, initially reclaimed from

14

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

the sea in 1968 for the purposes of industrial development, ‘offers a space for wildness without the impossible geography of wilderness’.30 The targeted reintroduction of shorthaired bumblebees (Bombus subterraneus) in tandem with the creation of new flowerrich habitats at Dungeness in Kent31 – a place that effortlessly and endlessly undermines any attempts at parsing the ‘natural’ from the ‘cultural’32 – is just one recent example of rewilding in a nature–culture landscape from the United Kingdom. While some may find the reintroduction of a single non-mammalian species as too piecemeal to be understood as ‘rewilding’, we cannot see any justifiable reason to discount such projects: a wild organism has been reintroduced to an ecosystem where it had previously gone extinct. We also consider rewilding to encompass projects in which certain direct human actions occur, as for example when humans intentionally reintroduce locally rare or extinct species through translocation – for instance, the short-haired bumblebees were introduced from Sweden – or when animals are de-domesticated.33 Nonetheless, the quality, intensity and timing of these actions should be noted. While other forms of ecological restoration are brought about but also sustained through direct human stewardship,34 rewilding rejects continuous direct human management of rewilded subjects, instead placing emphasis upon the role of self-regulation within and amongst non-human species and ecological processes. Such an emphasis has led Peter Taylor to conceptualize rewilding as a paradigmatic shift in conservation that sets a challenge for conservationists to ‘eschew management . . . and allow [non-human] nature to lead the way in some areas at least’,35 echoing in sentiment critical stances toward the (over)management and regulation of non-human nature.36 Thus, rewilding projects can – and often are – initiated by human actors, but the intention is to reduce the level of direct control over rewilded species or ecological assemblages, and allow ‘ecological and evolutionary processes to reassert themselves’,37 so that the ‘autonomy’ of wild nature becomes a focus of restoration.38 Having now set out the broad terrain of the meanings of rewilding, we will next move on to consider some specific features of rewilding practices, and the types of aesthetic qualities that are likely to arise from these.

Temporality, imagination and the unmanaged aesthetic qualities of rewilding The temporal dimensions of nature and culture are central to discussions about ecological restoration practices – perhaps more so than with other forms of conservation practice. To get a sense of this, we need only look to how ecological restoration is defined, which, in almost every case, focuses on the recuperation or recovery of a historical landscape or ecosystem state temporally located before a human-induced form of degradation or disturbance has occurred.39 Here, emphasis is placed on reconfiguring contemporary landscapes so that they express certain qualities (ecological health, species diversity and so on) that are judged to be authentic in their fidelity to what has gone before. Concurrently, in this age of what has come to be known as ‘new’ or ‘nonequilibrium’ ecology, which rejects the notion that ecosystems or landscapes develop in linear, stable

Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding

15

and predictable ways through time,40 the ability to replicate a historical state has been questioned,41 particularly when future climate-change scenarios are taken into account.42 This has meant that, in some instances, the temporal orientation of ecological restoration theory has begun to change. Here, we are seeing a shift from restoration that is rigidly historically aligned, to restoration that is at least partly future-orientated43 so as to capture ‘desired characteristics for the system in the future’.44 While, as we shall see, non-rewilding restoration practitioners and theorists often frame any such unpredictability or ‘ecosystemic uncertainty’45 as a ‘problem’ which needs to be addressed, rewilders attempting to restore non-human autonomy must necessarily embrace such uncertainty. This presents an interesting set of aesthetic challenges. To consider these challenges, we focus on the Carrifran Wildwood restoration project, which is being undertaken across a 640-hectare valley in the Moffat Hills of southern Scotland (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2, and Plate 1). A former sheep grazing valley, since 2000 it has been owned by Borders Forest Trust, an environmental charity involved in woodland restoration projects throughout southern Scotland. A project to rewild the valley has been initiated by a grassroots voluntary grouping within the Borders Forest Trust called the Wildwood Group. The stated objective of the project is to ‘recreate an extensive tract of wild and largely wooded land, evoking the pristine countryside of 6,000 years ago’,46 and to this end over half a million trees and shrubs

Figure 1.1 A visually unobtrusive tree guard in use at Carrifran Wildwood. Photograph taken by Jonathan Prior, August 2009.

16

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

have been planted which are deemed native to the valley at this particular time and place, including rowan, birch, alder, hazel and sessile oak (see Figure 1.1).47 The woodland is not going to be used for commercial reasons; instead it is going to remain publicly accessible to act ‘as an inspiration and an educational resource’ for future generations.48 This is a clear invocation of a very distant past, based on aesthetic-ethical value claims over the ‘correctness’ of a particular landscape state;49 a distant past that has been reanimated through peat sampling and pollen-grain analyses,50 as well as a biocultural narrative of pre-agricultural humans moving through and hunting – but not settling – in the landscape.51 Through such an invocation, the Group are clearly placing value on historical authenticity – a type of temporal value shared with restorations that are not explicitly rewilding projects. Value, however, is also placed on deep future time, in the sense that the Group seek a shift towards autonomous non-human qualities within the valley, while acknowledging that this shift will be gradual across a long human timescale. Indeed, the Group expects that Carrifran Wildwood will not be a mature woodland ecosystem ‘for several centuries’.52 We can actually go so far as to say that desired future wild qualities are valued to such an extent that they may undermine historical authenticity: ‘We have no fixed view on what the structure and composition . . . of the woodland will be in the long term, as a key objective is to allow natural processes to predominate . . . the woodland may ultimately be of lower floristic and structural diversity than that established initially.’53 This poses a challenging temporal scale for aesthetic appreciation – importantly, not only for those directly involved in the project. Firstly, present generations of aesthetic appreciators will not be able to perceive the ‘final’ results of the restoration project.54 Indeed, intergenerational stretches of time will be required to comprehend the fullness of the restoration. Secondly and relatedly, it may be very difficult to preserve the original ethical-aesthetic objective of a wild woodland across multiple generations. Future generations may well have divergent ideas about how to utilize woodland resources or the composition of cultural and natural subjects and objects within the valley, which is acknowledged by the Group when they state that future generations who manage the site may tolerate the presence of non-native tree species.55 Compositional and structural uncertainty about what may develop in the distant future, and how future generations may manage (or not manage) the site, is compounded by the Group’s approach to post-restoration management. Due to reasons of climate, soil, herbivore pressure and a lack of existing tree cover, the Group decided that ‘natural regeneration’ – while being a preferable means of woodland regeneration – was not ‘practical over most of the valley’.56 This meant that direct tree planting and minimal indirect forms of tree management were deemed necessary, including the limited use of tree shelters, and a perimeter fence along the valley’s summit to prevent grazing herbivores from entering the site during the early stages of tree establishment. Efforts were made, however, to mitigate the assumed deleterious visual aesthetic effects of these temporary activities: transparent vole guards and green plastic tree tubes were chosen as they are relatively visually unobtrusive; the perimeter fence was positioned out of lines of sight from within the valley; and trees were planted in a way that was intended to mimic natural regeneration – fallen cherry-tree petals, for example, were

Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding

17

used as a guide to where saplings should be planted.57 These actions give a clear indication that there were practical challenges to the cultivation of particular aesthetic qualities that correctly align with the Group’s aesthetic values. At the same time, direct forms of management so common to other types of ecological restoration – including landscaping and earthmoving, pruning, strimming, uprooting fallen trees, removing dead matter, and applying pesticides – have been ruled out within the valley, with the intention that over the long term all forms of management will be relinquished to allow the stochastic, autonomous qualities of wild non-human nature to predominate. This undoubtedly jars with the ways in which ecological restoration policymaking so often plays out: uncertainty is addressed through adaptive management approaches, in which the direct monitoring of restored subjects and objects feeds back into and – where necessary – causes the adaptation of ongoing restoration and management practices through time.58 Even when a non-wild but largely self-sustaining ecosystem is the desired outcome, ‘it may and probably will need periodic post-restoration management to resist pervasive human activities, such as those caused by damaging land-use activities and the inexorable spread of exotic species’.59 In fact, the relinquishment of post-restoration management practices has been castigated to the point where it is seen as a project failure, particularly when this poses a threat to maintaining reintroduced native species.60 At Carrifran, by contrast, any future loss of an introduced – or for that matter, existing – native species is understood to be consistent with the development of autonomous non-human nature. Maturation of vegetation within the valley has already led to the decline of Orange-tip butterflies, as well as ground-nesting birds such as wheatears and stonechats, while woodland bird species such as the dunnock, blackcap, garden warbler and siskin are now appearing within the valley,61 giving only a sense of the consequences – both ecological and aesthetic – of unmanaged change over a longer timeframe. Unmanaged change will not only come about through species mobility or competition, but also through the restoration of ecological processes. Current drainage of the valley will not be maintained, so Carrifran Burn (Figure 1.2), which runs through the centre of the valley floor, may well with time carve a different channel – unlike restored rivers that are managed to prevent major morphological changes – or sections of it may become blocked by dead vegetation, causing localized flooding and watery habitats, as is hoped by the Group.62 Natural disturbances – for example, fires that ‘appear to have a natural origin’ – are to be tolerated,63 which would radically alter the valley’s composition and structure, and completely transform the valley’s aesthetic character. We see, then, that the lack of a ‘fixed view’ of woodland structure and composition means that this vision for rewilding is necessarily devoid of specific details of aesthetic qualities, while remaining affectively vivid in regard to the general character of the landscape.64 This allows the Group’s members a high degree of freedom in their individual imagining of desired aesthetic qualities and experiences. For example, during an interview with the project’s manager, he stated that his hope was to ‘see a woodland teeming with bird life and deer and badger and everything else’;65 while a previous project manager, still involved in and supportive of the project, said:

18

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 1.2 Carrifran Burn flowing through Carrifran Wildwood. Photograph taken by Jonathan Prior, August 2009.

I have walked through European wildwood and so having things in there that are scary is quite an interesting thing to think of . . . it would be wonderful to have wild cats rushing around and . . . I’d be quite happy to walk there with wolves, I’d be happy to walk there with bears as long as I had a rifle.66

The Group has briefly dwelt upon the desirable presence of charismatic mammals to increase Carrifran’s wild qualities; indeed, lynx, wildcats, pine martens, wild boar and wolves were all present six thousand years ago, but are no longer so.67 However, the valley has been deemed too small to support such mammals, though this may be possible within a century if a habitat network is created that links Carrifran to other extensive areas of restored woodland.68 The envisioning of the future aesthetic qualities of Carrifran, as conceived by the Group, is best captured through the notion of ‘ampliative imagination’.69 Here, Brady describes this type of imaginative activity as involving the more inventive or productive powers of imagination in a way that is responsive to the temporal qualities of natural places. It amplifies what is given to the senses, and can involve visual and non-visual leaps of imagination that enable us to construct a narrative of something’s past or future. We want to emphasize, with Brady, that imagination is not operating in necessarily fanciful ways here; rather, it is linked to what one might reasonably imagine once existed and what may exist again in the rewilded landscape of the distant future. With Carrifran, one might imagine the valley in its deep past, as carved out by glaciers, or its more recent past, as grazed by sheep, and then imagine a distant future state of

Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding

19

mature woodland enlivened by birdsong and the presence of wild charismatic mammals. Other types of rewilding projects – especially animal reintroductions – will bring about perceptible change within a relatively short space of time, both in terms of the bodily presence of the organisms and their wider effects on the ecosystem. This is of aesthetic interest for at least two reasons. Firstly, the appearance of new qualities may cause surprise or delight, particularly when such qualities have not been experienced within a given region during an appreciator’s lifetime. This will only be heightened when, say, this experience is of a relatively rare and freely mobile animal, wary of the presence of humans. Secondly, the appearance of new qualities may pose a challenge to an appreciator’s sense of place, especially when an appreciator has developed a strong place attachment to a given region over time.70 The sudden arrival, for instance, of wild mammal species may delight, but equally may discombobulate when experienced in what was previously a closely managed landscape.

The unscenic and terrible beauty of rewilding Because of its anti-interventionist objectives and procedures, rewilding can present some interesting cases of the emergence of more challenging aesthetic experiences such as ugliness, the ‘unscenic’ and terrible beauty.71 In landscape-level rewilding projects, there are likely to be practices that encourage less conventionally ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful’ landscapes, and because they will be subject to less management there will not be practices in place to preserve aesthetically valued qualities, such as a scenic viewpoint, or to prevent more difficult aesthetic experiences. To give just one example, we have already stated that at Carrifran the uprooting of fallen trees and the removal of dead vegetational matter will not occur. This is in large part because of the ecological role that dead wood plays in sustaining an autonomous woodland ecosystem, from acting as a habitat for a range of organisms to serving as a vital nutrient source, but also because of the aesthetic qualities dead wood engenders. While vegetative decomposition is often attributed negative aesthetic value,72 the Carrifran rewilders see dead wood as an important means of inculcating wild qualities: ‘tidy woodlands are common enough, but rare is the forest in Britain that feels wild and natural. So we shall leave fallen trees and branches where they fall, we shall walk around tangles’.73 In this quote we can detect a positive aesthetic valuation of fallen and dead wood, because it produces the sensation of being in an unmanaged place, as the trees are self-directed in their growth and spatial ordering. Additionally, the human/non-human relations that occur through such encounters create aesthetic engagement rather than detachment: an embodied, immersed and felt sensory experience of unruly non-human nature, rather than a scenic form of aesthetic appreciation; and the valorization of mobility over the static and formally pictorial. Such experiences of rewilding are potentially aesthetically challenging not only in the sense that they are unscenic – because they include messy or ugly things (the sight of dying vegetation, decomposing animal bodies or extensive fire damage; the stagnant smells of a blocked river channel) and because they necessitate a closeness that prevents

20

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

scenic distance – but also because this mode of aesthetic experience (on foot, proximate and changing from visit to visit, making the spatial composition of subjects and objects likely unmappable) is physically and navigationally demanding. It is, for instance, more challenging to traverse a woodland that has a dense understory than one cleared of dying or otherwise unwanted foliage.74 Aesthetically challenging encounters are also afforded in rewilding projects where there are no intentional efforts to disavow human cultural activities and landscape modifications. During winters at the Oostvaardersplassen reserve, for example, supplementary food has not been provided for the animals, in accordance with the anti-interventionist stance adopted by the reserve’s managers.75 As a result, some of the red deer and the de-domesticated Heck cattle and Konik ponies have been dying each year from a lack of food, which has proven to be highly – and very publicly – controversial.76 This anti-interventionist stance has also meant that animal carcasses have been left where they fall, providing a source of food for raptors, such as Whitetailed eagles.77 The point we wish to stress here is that the eventual rescinding of restoration management practices, which is foundational to each formulation of rewilding and which sets rewilding apart from the broader concept of ecological restoration, has implications for the types of ecological processes that are revealed to a human appreciator, and thus the likely aesthetic experiences that ensue. Those involved in a particular rewilding project are likely to attach positive value to such aesthetic experiences, even when they encompass death, decomposition and scavenging, because they are the logical outcome of autonomous non-human nature. At the same time, however, we know that for an ecological restoration proposal to gain support from external funders, institutional regulators and the broader public, it is necessary that likely resulting perceptual changes are understood as an outcome of a new management regime that foregrounds nonhuman autonomy, rather than, say, human neglect of, or disregard for, valued places. An often-cited example of an aborted restoration project from 1996 provides a good example of this. In DuPage County in west Chicago, a ten-year land management plan was developed by district restoration ecologists to restore seven thousand acres of densely wooded land to an oak savannah and open prairie ecosystem. This necessitated the felling of approximately half a million trees through cutting and burning regimes, and the removal of deer populations. Local community groups responded negatively to the proposals by appealing to the loss of valued aesthetic qualities and experiences if the proposals were to go ahead, culminating with the charge that the project amounted to ‘environmental vandalism’. This in turn led to a large media-focused campaign against the project and its eventual suspension.78 Rewilding thus presents a challenge to its proponents, particularly in landscapes where there is an existing preference for neatness and other visual clues that humans are actively managing a landscape, and a concurrent dislike for messy or unruly vegetation. From previous empirical research, this seems especially the case in agricultural landscapes where neat, rectilinear forms are associated with good land management and a strong so-called work ethic.79 We have already noted that proponents of rewilding have, in almost all cases, focused their conceptual energies on the reintroduction of charismatic mammalian

Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding

21

species and other megafauna. We find this problematic for various reasons, but for the purposes of brevity we wish to highlight just one: to focus too narrowly on such species ignores wider efforts to re-introduce and establish other less charismatic species – not to mention ecological processes – particularly in cultural or urbanized landscapes. Nonetheless, given that much of the rewilding literature and the existent rewilding projects in North America and Europe do maintain such a focus, we want to point to another challenging aesthetic feature that stems from the reintroduction of such species.80 When carnivorous mammalian species are reintroduced (particularly wolves, bears and big cats), this will also introduce the possibility of encounters that are exciting but also dangerous, causing a sense of anxiety and fear, perhaps evoking something like a sublime aesthetic experience. Although not limited to reintroductions, that danger is also linked to predation, which, if witnessed, may evoke more difficult forms of aesthetic encounters. Ned Hettinger (2010) adopts the concept of ‘terrible beauty’, to describe predation. Imagine the majestic beauty of a wolf and its skill in action mixed with the tragic feeling of a prey animal captured and eaten. Here, we have the exciting drama of the moment yet also the disturbing emotions that will accompany witnessing a bloody kill.

Conclusion In this chapter we have attended to some of the implications of rewilding from the perspective of environmental aesthetics. We have demonstrated that rewilding is distinct from other forms of ecological restoration in that it emphasizes autonomous self-regulation within and amongst non-human species and ecological processes. As a consequence of this distinctive feature, we in turn outlined how rewilding brings about a constellation of aesthetic qualities that are temporally and experientially challenging. Here, for instance, we showed that rewilding demands of an aesthetic appreciator more flexibility and openness to change across time, insofar as unpredictability is characteristic of rewilding. We also showed how the anti- or minimal interventionist objective of rewilding is at odds with the preservation of existing beauty, and is likely to lead to the emergence of difficult aesthetic experiences such as ugliness and terrible beauty. How people respond to these aesthetic outcomes will depend very much on the rewilded places in question, the ways in which they change and the context in which such places are experienced. For those directly involved in, or supportive of, a particular rewilding project, we may detect a ‘positive aesthetics’ account in which ‘negative aesthetic judgments have little or no place’.81 This, as we have detailed, is certainly the case for the Carrifran rewilders. For others, we might find that people quickly come to value the ‘messiness’ and diversity of a rewilded place, especially compared to the aesthetic monotony that came before. In other cases, aesthetic appreciation may come about rather more slowly, say through a gradual awareness of the ecological role of certain species and processes. Either way, we would suggest that it is vital that those advocating for rewilding policies directly confront any potential fallout from inculcating challenging aesthetic experiences. Policy makers often need to gain popular

22

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

consent and support for interventions that seek to radically alter the ecological and thereby the aesthetic composition of a given landscape – something that was not achieved in DuPage County in the mid-1990s. With this in mind, Sheila Lintott’s (2006) discussion of how educational programmes can bring about the appreciation of things previously found ugly or repugnant is pertinent, as is Joan Iverson Nassauer’s notion of ‘cues to care’ (1995), which forwards strategies for communicating the ecological value of challenging aesthetic experiences. When we contrast these types of rewilding projects with restorations that require human interventions to maintain beauty,82 we can discern a granting of aesthetic autonomy to more-than-human nature which is consistent with the common call among environmental aestheticians to appreciate nature ‘on its own terms’.83 Essentially, this call is for us to respect natural environments as autonomous assemblages which ought not to be valued through overly humanizing, anthropocentric or artistically driven aesthetic perspectives. The rewilders of Carrifran Wildwood, for example, have a vision of enabling non-human, natural autonomy to express itself in ways that could work against the preservation of scenic beauty. Finally, we have advanced a more inclusive conceptualization of rewilding than that which is generally promoted in environmental-conservation circles. Using Woods’ (2005) definition of wildness as a starting point, we have outlined how rewilding does not equate to the (re)establishment of wilderness experiences, as it is equally applicable in densely humanly populated and urbanized landscapes. Accordingly, it is our hope that proponents of rewilding will embrace this more inclusive vision of rewilding, and actively advocate urban and peri-urban rewilding in the future.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

This chapter has previously been published in the journal Environmental Values 17, no 1 (2017), 31–51. doi:10.3197/096327117X14809634978519. The chapter is reproduced in Wild. The Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered by permission from White Horse Press. For example, see Donlan et al., 2005; Foreman, 2004; Fuhlendorf et al., 2008; Taylor, 2005. Rewilding has also caught the imagination of popular environmental writers; for an example from the UK, see Monbiot (2013). See, for example, Aronson et al., 2007; Brook, 2006; Elliot, 1997; Higgs, 2003; Jordan III, 2003; Katz, 2000; Light, 2000; Merchant, 1991. Hands and Brown, 2002; Junker and Buchecker, 2008. Sayre, 2010. Gobster, 1997, 2000. Foster, 2005. Lee, 1995. Brigham, 1993; Jordan III, 2003; Murray, 1991. Turner, 1990. Diggelen et al., 2001, 115. See, for example, Brady, 2003; Callicott, 1994; Hargrove, 2008; Lintott, 2006; Porteous, 1996

Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding

23

14 As an important aside on this point, it should be noted that there have been recent calls to use advanced genetic techniques to bring extinct organisms back to life, a process termed ‘deextinction’ (Seddon, 2014). While this has yet to be reflected broadly within the academic literature, a few conservation biologists have spoken in favour of de-extinction through popular media reporting; see The Long Now Foundation, for instance, at http://longnow.org/revive/ 15 See, for example, Caro, 2007; Huynh, 2010; Martin, 2005; Oliveira-Santos and Fernandez, 2009; Smith, 2005; Stolzenburg, 2006; Wolverton, 2010. 16 On the other hand, see the example of Pleistocene Park in northern Siberia: http:// www.pleistocenepark.ru/en. 17 Soulé and Noss 1998, 6–7. 18 Cromsigt and te Beest, 2014. 19 Gamborg et al., 2010; Klaver et al., 2002. 20 Fuhlendorf et al., 2008; Hawley, 2011. 21 See Sandom et al. (2013) for further thoughts on dysfunctionality and rewilding. 22 See, for example, Arts et al., 2012; Bauer et al., 2009; Foreman, 2004; Soulé and Noss, 1998. 23 See the exchange between Hintz [2007a; 2007b] and Woods [2007]. 24 Cole, 2000. 25 Chapman, 2004, 2006. 26 Chapman, 2006, 471. 27 Woods, 2005, 177. 28 Gamborg et al., 2010; see also Drenthen, 2005, 328. 29 Mulligan, 2001, 27. 30 Lorimer and Driessen, 2013, 178. In a review of George Monbiot’s Feral, a popular and positive account of rewilding, Ned Hettinger neatly summarises the distinction: ‘the result [of rewilding] is not wilderness ecosystems, but self-willed areas, governed not by human managers, but by nature’s own processes’ (Hettinger, 2014, 362). 31 The re-introduced bumblebees are not being directly managed, meaning that it has been necessary for restorationists to re-introduce them over successive years. It is now hoped that the bumblebee ‘is on the way to become a self supporting wild species in the UK’ (BBC News, 2013). 32 Dungeness is as much a landscape of gravel extraction, nuclear power production, World War II-era concrete aircraft ‘listening ears’, and a filmic backdrop (most notably in Derek Jarman’s 1990 film The Garden), in both its material configuration and popular cultural imagination, as it is an important site for a range of different floral and faunal species. 33 It should be noted at this juncture that, while in this chapter we will concentrate on restoration practices where wildness is a desired outcome of human actions (explicit rewilding), there are also examples where wildness may unwittingly emerge (spontaneous rewilding). 34 See Gross, 2003; Sandlos, 2005; Turner, 1994. 35 Taylor, 2005, 5. 36 See Bavington, 2005. 37 Klyza, 2001, 285. 38 Woods, 2005, 176. If this appears to take us back full-circle to wilderness, it should be noted that rewilding does not preclude other forms of human-environment interactions (only those that seek to continuously manage or regulate rewilded subjects) that ‘wilderness’ usually does.

24 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered See, for example, Morrison, 1987, 160; SER, 2004, 12; Throop, 2000, 11. See Scoones, 1999. Allen et al., 2002; Jentsch, 2007. See Harris et al., 2006. Choi, 2004. Hobbs and Harris, 2001, 241; emphasis in original. Scoones, 1999. Ashmole and Ashmole, 2009, 6. While we don’t have space to deconstruct this, we want to note that we are aware of the problematic nature of invoking ‘pristine countryside’ (see Prior [2012] for what this means in the context of Carrifran Wildwood). Matthews, 2009, 146. For more background detail, see Ashmole and Ashmole (2009), and the project’s website at http://www.carrifran.org.uk/. See Prior, 2012. Ashmole and Tipping, 2009. See Martynoga, 2009, 58. Ashmole and Ashmole, 2009, 204. Wildwood Group, 2000, 26–27. While the woodland will constantly undergo ecological change, the ‘finality’ we speak of here is the mature, self-sustaining woodland ecosystem which is the objective of the restoration project. Wildwood Group, 2000, 27. Ibid., 53. Chalmers, 2009, 161. See, among many examples, Allen et al., 2002; Schreiber et al., 2004; Teal and Weishar, 2005; Thom, 2000. Clewell, 2000, 216. See, for example, Galbraith-Kent and Handel, 2007; Norton, 2009. Ashmole and Ashmole, 2009, 199–201. Ibid., 204. Wildwood Group, 2000, 66. See Brady (2014) on making predictions of future natural aesthetic qualities in the case of climate change. Prior and Moffat, 2010. Prior and Chalmers, 2010. Ashmole and Ashmole, 2009, 62. Ashmole and Ashmole, 2009, 206; Prior and Moffat, 2010. Brady, 2003. See Drenthen, 2009. Saito, 1998a; Korsmeyer, 2005. Daniel, 2001, 18; Gobster, 1999, 56. Ashmole and Ashmole, 2009, 204. For a useful discussion of aesthetics and the physical challenge of being in and navigating some kinds of environments, see Callicott’s (1994) discussion of bogs. Vera, 2009 See Vera (2009, 35) for more information about the controversy surrounding the lack of supplementary feed. Vera, 2009, 35. Gobster, 1997, 2000.

Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding

25

79 Egoz et al., 2006. 80 For an overview of some large-scale rewilding projects in Europe, see the ‘Rewilding Europe’ project website at http://www.rewildingeurope.com/. 81 Carlson, 2002, 72. We want to emphasise that here we are making an observation about positive aesthetics in practice, and not offering our support to this view. Indeed, one of us (see Brady, 2012) has argued against the adoption of Carlson’s positive aesthetics. 82 See Lee, 1995. 83 Saito, 1998b.

Literature Allen, Craig D., Melissa Savage, Donald A. Falk, Kieran F. Suckling, Thomas W. Swetnam, Todd Schulke, Peter B. Stacey, Penelope Morgan, Martos Hoffman, and Jon T. Klingel. ‘Ecological restoration of Southwestern ponderosa pine ecosystems: A broad perspective’. Ecological Applications 12, no. 5 (2002): 1418–1433. Aronson, James, Suzanne J. Milton and James N. Blignaut. ‘Restoring natural capital: Definition and rationale’. In James Aronson, Suzanne J. Milton and James N. Blignaut (eds.), Restoring Natural Capital: Science, Business, and Practice, 3–8. Washington, DC : Island Press, 2007. Arts, Koen, Anke Fischer and René Van der Wal. ‘The promise of wilderness between paradise and hell: A cultural-historical exploration of a Dutch National Park’. Landscape Research 37, no. 3 (2012): 239–256. Ashmole, Myrtle and Philip Ashmole (eds.). The Carrifran Wildwood Story: Ecological Restoration from the Grass Roots. Ancrum: Borders Forest Trust, 2009. Ashmole, Philip and R. Tipping. ‘The peat core from Rotten Bottom – a unique record of a changing environment’. In Myrtle Ashmole and Philip Ashmole (eds.), The Carrifran Wildwood Story: Ecological Restoration from the Grass Roots, 76–80. Ancrum: Borders Forest Trust, 2009. Bauer, Nicole, Astrid Wallner and Marcel Hunziker. ‘The change of European landscapes: Human–nature relationships, public attitudes towards rewilding, and the implications for landscape management in Switzerland’. Journal of Environmental Management 90 (2009): 2910–2920. Bavington, Dean. ‘Homo Administrator: managing a needy nature?’ In Thomas Heyd (ed.), Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature: Theory and Practice, 121–136. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005. BBC News. ‘Short-haired bumblebee nests in Dungeness’. 2013. Online at: http:// www. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-24112752 Brady, Emily. Aesthetics of the Natural Environment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Brady, Emily. ‘The ugly truth: Negative aesthetics and environment’. In A. O’Hear (ed.), Philosophy and the Environment, vol. 69, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 83–99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Brady, Emily. ‘Aesthetic value, ethics and climate change’. Environmental Values 23, no. 5 (2014): 551–570. Brigham, Joan. ‘Reclamation artists: A report from Boston’. Leonardo 26, no. 5, (1993): 379–385.

26

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Brook, Isis. ‘Restoring landscapes: The authenticity problem’. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 31 (2006): 1600–1605. Callicott, J. Baird. ‘The land aesthetic’. In Christopher Key Chapple (ed.), Ecological Prospects: Scientific, Religious, and Aesthetic Perspectives, 169–170. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994. Carlson, Allen. Aesthetics and the Environment. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. Caro, Tim. ‘The Pleistocene re-wilding gambit’. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22, no. 6 (2007): 281–283. Chalmers, H. ‘Establishing woodland at Carrifran’. In Myrtle Ashmole and Philip Ashmole (eds.), The Carrifran Wildwood Story: Ecological Restoration from the Grass Roots, 154–167. Ancrum: Borders Forest Trust, 2009. Chapman, Robert. ‘Crowded solitude: Thoreau on wildness’. Journal of Environmental Philosophy 1 (2004): 58–72. Chapman, Robert. ‘Ecological restoration restored’. Environmental Values 15 (2006): 463–478. Choi, Young D. ‘Theories for ecological restoration in changing environment: Toward “futuristic” restoration’. Ecological Research 19 (2004): 75–81. Clewell, Andre F. ‘Restoring for natural authenticity’. Ecological Restoration 18 no. 4 (2000): 216–217. Cole, David N. ‘Paradox of the primeval: Ecological restoration in wilderness’. Ecological Restoration 18, no. 2 (2000): 77–86. Cromsigt, Joris P. G. M. and Mariska te Beest. ‘Restoration of a megaherbivore: Landscapelevel impacts of white rhinoceros in Kruger National Park, South Africa’. Journal of Ecology 102, no. 3 (2014): 566–575. Daniel, T. C. ‘Aesthetic preference and ecological sustainability’. In Stephen R. J. Sheppard and Howard W. Harshaw (eds.), Forests and Landscapes: Linking Ecology, Sustainability, and Aesthetics, 15–30. Wallingford: CABI Publishing, 2001. Diggelen, R. V., A. P. Grootjans and J. A. Harris. ‘Ecological restoration: State of the art or state of the science?’ Restoration Ecology 9, no. 2 (2001): 115–118. Donlan, Josh, Harry W. Greene, Joel Berger, Carl E. Bock, Jane H. Bock, David A. Burney, James A. Estes, Dave Foreman, Paul S. Martin, Gary W. Roemer, Felisa A. Smith and Michael E. Soulé. ‘Rewilding North America’. Nature 436 (2005): 913–914. Drenthen, Martin. ‘Wildness as a critical border concept: Nietzsche and the debate on wilderness restoration’. Environmental Values 14 (2005): 317–337. Drenthen, Martin. ‘Ecological restoration and place attachment: emplacing nonplaces?’ Environmental Values 18 (2009): 285–312. Egoz, Shelley, Jacky Bowring and Harvey C. Perkins. ‘Making a “mess” in the countryside: Organic farming and the threats to sense of place’. Landscape Journal 25, no. 1 (2006): 54–66. Elliot, Robert. Faking Nature: The Ethics of Environmental Restoration. London: Routledge, 1997. Foreman, Dave. Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century. Washington, DC : Island Press, 2004. Foster, Jennifer. ‘Restoration of the Don Valley Brick Works: Whose restoration? Whose space?’ Journal of Urban Design 10, no. 3 (2005): 331–351. Fuhlendorf, Samuel D., David M. Engle, Jay Kerby and Robert Hamilton. ‘Pyric herbivory: Rewilding landscapes through the recoupling of fire and grazing’. Conservation Biology 23, no. 3 (2008): 588–598.

Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding

27

Galbraith-Kent, Shannon L. and Steven N. Handel. ‘Lessons from an urban lakeshore restoration project in New York City’. Ecological Restoration 25, no. 2 (2007): 123–128. Gamborg, Christian, Bart Gremmen, Stine B. Christiansen and Peter Sandoe. ‘Dedomestication: Ethics at the intersection of landscape restoration and animal welfare’. Environmental Values 19 (2010): 57–78. Gobster, Paul H. ‘The Chicago wilderness and its critics. The other side: A survey of arguments’. Restoration and Management Notes 15, no. 1 (1997): 32–37. Gobster, Paul H. ‘An ecological aesthetic for forest landscape management’. Landscape Journal 18, no. 1 (1999): 54–64. Gobster, Paul H. ‘Introduction. Restoring nature: Human actions, interactions, and reactions’. In Paul H. Gobster and Bruce R. Hull (eds.), Restoring Nature: Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities, 1–20. Washington, DC : Island Press, 2000. Gross, Matthias. Inventing Nature: Ecological Restoration by Public Experiments. Lanham, MD : Lexington Books, 2003. Hands, Denise E. and Robert D. Brown. ‘Enhancing visual preference of ecological rehabilitation sites’. Landscape and Urban Planning 58 (2002): 57–70. Hargrove, Eugene C. ‘The historical foundations of American environmental attitudes’. In Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott (eds.), Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty, 29–48. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2008. Harris, James A., Richard J. Hobbs, Eric Higgs and James Aronson. ‘Ecological restoration and global climate change’. Restoration Ecology 14, no. 2 (2006): 170–176. Hawley, Steven. Recovering a Lost River: Removing Dams, Rewilding Salmon, Revitalizing Communities. Boston, MA : Beacon Press, 2011. Hettinger, Ned. ‘Animal beauty, ethics, and environmental preservation’. Environmental Ethics 32, no. 2 (2010): 115–134. Hettinger, Ned. ‘Book review of G. Monbiot, Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding’. Environmental Values 23, no. 3 (2014): 361–363. Higgs, Eric. Nature by Design: People, Natural Process, and Ecological Restoration. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2003. Hintz, John. 2007a. ‘Some political problems for rewilding nature’. Ethics, Place & Environment 10(2): 177–192. Hintz, John. 2007b. ‘Response to Woods: On with the debate (but let’s be careful with those swords)’. Ethics, Place & Environment 10(2): 208–216. Hobbs, Richard J. and James A. Harris. 2001. ‘Restoration ecology: Repairing the Earth’s ecosystems in the new Millennium’. Restoration Ecology 9, no. 2 (2001): 239–246. Huynh, Howard M. ‘Pleistocene re-wilding is unsound conservation practice’. BioEssays 33, no. 2 (2010): 100–102. Jentsch, Anke. ‘The challenge to restore processes in face of nonlinear dynamics – on the crucial role of disturbance regimes’. Restoration Ecology 15, no. 2 (2007): 334–339. Jordan III , William R. The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 2003. Junker, Berit and Matthias Buchecker. ‘Aesthetic preferences versus ecological objectives in river restorations’. Landscape and Urban Planning 85 (2008): 141–154. Katz, E. ‘The big lie: The human restoration of nature’. In William Throop (ed.), Ecological Restoration: Ethics, Theory and Practice, 83–93. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000. Klaver, Irene, Jozef Keulartz, Henk van den Belt and Bart Gremmen. 2002. ‘Born to be wild: A pluralistic ethics concerning introduced large herbivores in the Netherlands’. Environmental Ethics 24, no. 1 (2002): 3–21.

28

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Klyza, Christopher McGrory. (ed.). Wilderness Comes Home: Rewilding the Northeast. Hanover, NH : Middlebury College Press, 2001. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. ‘Terrible beauties’. In Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, 51–63. Malden, MA : Blackwell, 2005. Lee, Keekok. ‘Beauty forever?’ Environmental Values 4 (1995): 213–225. Light, Andrew. ‘Restoration, the value of participation, and the risks of professionalization’. In Paul H. Gobster and R. Bruce Hull (eds.), Restoring Nature: Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities, 163–181. Washington, DC : Island Press, 2000. Lintott, Sheila. 2006. ‘Toward eco-friendly aesthetics’. Environmental Ethics 28, no. 1 (2006): 57–76. Long Now Foundation. ‘Revive and restore: Genetic rescue for endangered and extinct species’. Project website. 2016. Online at: http://longnow.org/revive/ Lorimer, Jamie and Clemens Driessen. ‘Wild experiments at the Oostvaardersplassen: Rethinking environmentalism in the Anthropocene’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (2014): 169–181. Martin, Paul S. Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 2005. Matthews, M. ‘Seed collection and propagation’. In Myrtle Ashmole and Philip Ashmole (eds.), The Carrifran Wildwood Story: Ecological Restoration from the Grass Roots, 145–150. Ancrum: Borders Forest Trust, 2009. Martynoga, F. ‘People in historic times’. In Myrtle Ashmole and Philip Ashmole (eds.), The Carrifran Wildwood Story: Ecological Restoration from the Grass Roots, 58–63. Ancrum: Borders Forest Trust, 2009. Merchant, Carolyn. ‘Restoration and reunion with nature’. In Bill Willers (ed.), Learning to Listen to the Land, 206–211. Washington, DC : Island Press, 1991. Monbiot, George. Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding. London: Allen Lane, 2013. Morrison, Darrel. ‘Landscape restoration in response to previous disturbance’. In Monica Goigel Turner (ed.), Landscape Heterogeneity and Disturbance, 159–172. New York, NY: Springer Verlag, 1987. Mulligan, Martin. ‘Re-enchanting conservation work: Reflections on the Australian experience’. Environmental Values 10, no. 1 (2001): 19–33. Murray, Ann H. 1991. ‘Pits and pitfalls: Harriet Feigenbaum’s reclamation art’. Woman’s Art Journal 12, no. 1 (1991): 29–35. Nassauer, Joan Iverson. 1995. ‘Messy ecosystems, orderly frames’. Landscape Journal 14, no. 2 (1995): 161–170. Norton, David A. ‘Species invasions and the limits to restoration: Learning from the New Zealand experience’. Science 325 (2009): 569–571. Oliveira-Santos, Luiz G. R. and Fernando A. S. Fernandez. ‘Pleistocene rewilding, Frankenstein ecosystems, and an alternative conservation agenda’. Conservation Biology 24, no. 1 (2009): 4–6. Pleistocene Park. Project website. Accessed 3 October 2016. Online at: http://www. pleistocenepark.ru/en/. Porteous, J. Douglas. Environmental Aesthetics: Ideas, Politics and Planning. London: Routledge, 1996. Prior, Jonathan. ‘The roles of aesthetic value in ecological restoration: Cases from the United Kingdom’. Unpublished PhD thesis. Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh, 2012.

Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding

29

Prior, Jonathan. and George Moffat. Interview between Jonathan Prior and George Moffat conducted via private communication, 2010. Prior, Jonathan and Hugh Chalmers. Interview between Jonathan Prior and Hugh Chalmers conducted via private communication, 2010. Rewilding Europe. Project website. 2016. Online at: http://www.rewildingeurope.com/ Saito, Yuriko. 1998a. ‘The aesthetics of unscenic nature’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56(2): 101–111. Saito, Yuriko. 1998b. ‘Appreciating nature on its own terms’. Environmental Ethics 20: 135–149. Sandlos, John. ‘Purple Loosestrife and the “bounding” of nature in North American wetlands’. In Thomas Heyd (ed.), Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature: Theory and Practice, 137–153. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005. Sandom, Chris, C. Josh Donlan, Jens-Christian Svenning and Dennis Hansen. ‘Rewilding’. In David W. Macdonald and Katherine J. Willis (eds.), Key Topics in Conservation Biology 2, 430–451. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Sayre, Nathan F. ‘ “Climax and “original capacity”: The science and aesthetics of ecological restoration in the southwestern USA’. Ecological Restoration 28, no. 1 (2010): 23–31. Schreiber, E. Sabine G., Andrew R. Bearlin, Simon J. Nicol and Charles R. Todd. ‘Adaptive management: A synthesis of current understanding and effective application’. Ecological Management & Restoration 5, no. 3 (2004): 177–182. Scoones, Ian. ‘New ecology and the social sciences: What prospects for a fruitful engagement?’ Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 479–507. Seddon, Philip J., Axel Moehrenschlager and John Ewen. ‘Reintroducing resurrected species: Selecting deextinction candidates’. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 29, no. 3 (2014): 140–147. Society for Ecological Restoration [SER]. The SER International Primer on Ecological Restoration. Tucson, AZ : Society for Ecological Restoration International. 2004. Also online at: www.ser.org. Smith, Christopher Irwin. ‘Re-wilding: Introductions could reduce biodiversity’. Nature 437 (2005): 318. Soulé, Michael and Reed Noss. ‘Rewilding and biodiversity: Complementary goals for continental conservation’. Wild Earth 8 (1998): 19–28. Stolzenburg, William. ‘Where the wild things were’. Conservation in Practice 7, no. 1 (2006): 28–34. Taylor, Peter. Beyond Conservation: A Wildland Strategy. London: Earthscan, 2005. Teal, John M. and Lee Weishar. ‘Ecological engineering, adaptive management, and restoration management in Delaware Bay salt marsh restoration’. Ecological Engineering 25, no 3 (2005): 304–314. Thom, Ronald M. ‘Adaptive management of coastal ecosystem restoration projects’. Ecological Engineering 15, no. 3/4 (2000): 365–372. Throop, William. ‘Introduction’. In William Throop (ed.), Ecological Restoration: Ethics, Theory and Practice, 11–23. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000. Turner, Frederick. ‘The self-effacing art: Restoration as imitation of nature’. In William R. Jordan III , Michael E. Gilpin and John D. Aber (eds.), Restoration Ecology: A Synthetic Approach to Ecological Research, 47–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Turner, Frederick. “The invented landscape”. In A. Dwight Baldwin Jr., Judith De Luce and Carl Pletsch (eds.), Beyond Preservation: Restoring and Inventing Landscapes, 35–66. Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

30

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Vera, Frans W. M. ‘Large-scale nature development – the Oostvaardersplassen’. British Wildlife 20, no. 5 (2009): 28–36. Wildwood Group. Carrifran Wildwood Project, Native Woodland Restoration in the Southern Uplands of Scotland: Management Plan. Ancrum: Borders Forest Trust, 2000. Wildwood Group. Project website. 2016. Online at: http://www.carrifran.org.uk/ Wolverton, Steve. ‘The North American Pleistocene overkill hypothesis and the rewilding debate’. Diversity and Distributions 16, no. 5 (2010): 874–876. Woods, Mark. ‘Ecological restoration and the renewal of wildness and freedom’. In Thomas Heyd (ed.), Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature: Theory and Practice, 170–188. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005. Woods, Mark. ‘Conservation biology, deep ecology, and the outside world: Some problems for the politics of nature’. Ethics, Place & Environment 10, no. 2 (2007): 192–207.

2

‘Wild Thing’: The Aesthetic Prospects of Wildness Arto Haapala

In this chapter, I will be looking at the concept of wildness, but not primarily as a category into which we classify some phenomena in nature, but rather as an existential concept which singles out phenomena – both natural and man-made – that are somehow beyond our control, and are, in varying degrees, surprising, thrilling, strange, and, in extreme cases, threatening. Similar to the way we encounter comfort and peace both in natural and in human environs, we encounter wildness both in natural and urban settings. Being an existential category, wildness is relative to circumstances and to humans themselves. What an adult male Finn experiences as wild is different from what a nine-year-old child from New York does. An experienced sailor tames waves that are extremely rough for a landlubber. There are degrees of wildness, in a way that is analogous to degrees of naturalness1 and of artificiality. There are also varieties of wildness, in the sense that emotions besides sheer fear, for instance of something threatening, have a leading role to play. I will argue that it is exactly when we move away from the simply threatening that wildness becomes aesthetically interesting. As a comparison, the traditional notion of the sublime is relevant, as well as that of wonder and, related to it, curiosity and fascination. However, none of them captures what makes wild things wild. Wild things are somehow out of the ordinary, something else. There is an aspect of otherness involved, although not everything out of the ordinary – in the sense involving otherness – is wild. Wildness certainly raises our curiosity and is fascinating, and otherness brings an aspect of strangeness and thrill into the experience. From the arts, it is easy to find examples of thrilling stories. Horror fiction is its own genre, and there is plenty of research about the various emotional responses works of art raise.2 I will take a few examples from literature to illustrate some of my points. However, my interest is not in fiction but in responses and experiences that real-world situations raise. Wildness is of existential importance to us. I will spend a fair amount of time in exploring the condition, or relation, which I will argue to be the opposite of wildness – namely, domesticity and home. Home is the bedrock from which we can encounter wildness. This might well be an evolutionary fact – the longing for safety3 – but it certainly is an existential fact, defining the human 31

32

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

way of being in the world. Despite the thrilling and sometimes threatening aspect of wild things, wildness is a crucial constituent in our existence, as is its opposite, the comforting, the peaceful, the tamed. Although humans have domesticated many natural creatures, and try to control by rules and legislation the wildness caused by other humans, there will always remain a residue of the untamed. New surprises will appear, and the possibility of thrill will linger. Conflicts such as wars are the extreme examples of human-made wildness. Natural catastrophes such as tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions exemplify the naturally wild in its extreme. These provide little room for aesthetic considerations – at least for those in the middle of these catastrophic events. But the variations and degrees of wildness are many, and between the threatening wildness and completely domesticated, there is plenty of room for the thrilling, intriguing, surprising and strange to occur. These are the adjectives, perhaps with a few others, that characterize wildness. I will clarify the phenomenon through examples, and in this way show its role in our lives. But most importantly I will consider the aesthetic potential of wild things especially in urban environments. As will become clear below, wildness in nature has long been considered aesthetically important, but urban wildness in my sense has gained hardly any attention.

The naturally wild The term ‘wilderness’ is most often used when referring to areas of pristine nature, natural sites untouched by humans. ‘Being wild’ or ‘wildness’ is the property that characterizes entities in wilderness areas. The notion of wilderness has a long history, going back at least to the eighteenth-century poets and naturalists, such as Wordsworth and Thoreau. It has carried different kinds of connotations, values and presuppositions, and especially in North America both the scholarly and the public debate have been lively. Although I am not going to enter this discussion in any detail – the purposes of this chapter are elsewhere – I will quote a passage from William Cronon’s influential and controversial essay from 1996, entitled ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting back to the Wrong Nature’. Cronon’s formulations demonstrate nicely what the key issues with wild things and wilderness have been: For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the world. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness. Seen in this way, wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet. As Henry David Thoreau once famously declared, ‘in Wildness is the preservation of the World.’ But is it? The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation – indeed, the creation of

‘Wild Thing’: The Aesthetic Prospects of Wildness

33

very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made.4

In the notion of wilderness, there is, indeed, an imbedded dichotomy between culture, referring to anything man-made, and nature. For some purposes, this might be a useful distinction; for example, in many discussions concerning the preservation of a particular natural habitat, say a swamp, it is wise to rule out direct human intervention – no ditches allowed to dry it. But as a general ontological principle, the dichotomy is untenable. First, as living organisms, humans are natural creatures too. Second, and this is Cronon’s argument, wilderness is a human invention; there is no wilderness in nature. The very fact that we name and categorize objects and areas as wild or wilderness, indicates that they are something from a human point of view; they are ‘humanized’. Or as John O’Neill puts it, ‘the perception of the landscape as “natural” or “wilderness” is itself a culturally specific achievement’.5 This applies to the notions of ‘wild’ and ‘wildness’ too: they are culturally specific.6 If wilderness is understood in this way, there is yet another disadvantage, indeed, a discriminating tendency towards those bits and pieces of nature that are not wild in the sense of constituting an area of wilderness, or having been given origin by human hand. There is an oak tree in my yard which I have planted, and another one the seed of which came into the yard on its own accord. Is the latter one wilder than the former? Are they both less wild than the oaks growing in the forest nearby?7 The fact that we have to think about these matters – the answer is not self-evident – shows that categories such as ‘being wild’ are our creations. This entails that they are also subject to change. This is how Cronon puts the matter: ‘Most of us, I suspect, still follow the conventions of the romantic sublime in finding the mountaintop more glorious than the plain, the ancient forest nobler than the grasslands, the mighty canyon more inspiring than the humble marsh.’8 This is an important point: even though we all understand the importance of preserving areas in which human influence is minimized, we should see wild thing also closer to home: If the core problem of wilderness is that it distances us too much from the very things it teaches us to value, then the question we must ask is what it can tell us about home, the place where we actually live. How can we take the positive values we associate with wilderness and bring them closer to home? I think the answer to this question will come by broadening our sense of the otherness that wildness seeks to define and protect.9

I will follow the clue Cronon offers, and, indeed, both widen the scope of wild things and bring them closer to home in the sense that wild things are not necessarily far away from where we live, even though at home we most often try to minimize wildness. I will continue with what is supposedly furthest away from wildness and wilderness – home. In this way, we can indirectly throw some light onto the phenomenon of wildness.

34

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Home – dwelling We all know what home is through first-hand experience. Everybody has a home of some kind. Homeless people may not have a permanent indoor place to stay, but even they may have familiar locations and shelters in which they dwell more or less regularly.10 Home in this sense is a relation between a person and the environment, rather than a particular building, or a certain slice of space. Home is a place where one feels safe, it is a tamed place with few threats or surprises. Robert Frost tells us what home is not in his poem ‘The Death of the Hired Man’ from 1914. In the poem, Mary and Warren are discussing the sudden return of Silas, the hired man who left when his help was needed.11 Warren’s sarcastic phrase ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in’ designates rather a misuse of other people’s kindness or generosity than a homey, welcoming atmosphere. Silas is not welcome; the place is not his home. He returns there to die, because he has no other place to go. Home is not a place where you ‘have to go’; it is a place where you want to go. I am, of course, fully aware of various unfortunate circumstances which can make a place called ‘home’ unsafe and unpredictable, a place in which one does not ‘feel at home’. There is domestic violence; there is alcohol abuse and drugs. There is mental repression of various kinds. They easily and too often create an atmosphere of uncertainty, and in extreme cases illicit sheer fear. These places do not constitute homes, although they might be places in which people have to stay; in my usage, ‘home’ is an evaluative notion that is positive in character. Needless to say, there is also very little if any room for aesthetic considerations, when there is extreme worry and fear. The philosopher who has made the notion of home an important constituent in his explorations is Martin Heidegger. The more general notion that Heidegger uses is the still politically somewhat burdened concept of Heimat, ‘homeland’ or ‘home region’. Here I am not going to enter into the depths of Heidegger’s ontology, partly because of the heavy terminological burden it carries, and partly because of not wanting to enter the debate about Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies. Instead, I will apply some considerations put forward by Jeff Malpas, who has investigated Heidegger’s concepts related to place in a very illuminating way, and who has also gone beyond the pure exegesis. Malpas argues that the idea of place, and together with it the notion of home, Heimat, has a ‘twofold character’. The first is ontological in Heidegger’s sense, referring to the structure of our existence. We are always situated somewhere, and we always try to create familiarity around us. The second sense might be more familiar and in accordance with the common usage and commonsense, and refers ‘to the placed character of our own being as that is worked out in and through the specific places in which we live and move – as our lives are shaped and formed in relation to this place and these places. . . . – a sense that refers to just this idea of the place-bound identity and determination of human being’.12 I will continue with the notion of home as a ‘place-bound identity’ because the concept of identity will be important towards the end of this chapter. Home is something which determines our identity, and it is always located somewhere. German

‘Wild Thing’: The Aesthetic Prospects of Wildness

35

expressions are somewhat more nuanced for our purposes than the English ones. Heimat refers to a larger geographical unit – it can refer to one’s Vaterland, homeland, but also to a region or much more limited geographical unit. Heidegger’s Heimat was, for the most of his active life, the south-western corner of Germany, in and around the city of Freiburg, including the famous Hütte, cottage, in the Black Forest mountains. The German word Heim denotes the actual place in which one lives, e.g. a house or an apartment. ‘To be at home’ translates into German zuhause sein, and in this expression, the word hause has its roots in das Haus, in English ‘house’, i.e. the concrete building in which one dwells. So, ‘home’ can refer both to the most immediate and intimate surroundings in the meaning of das Heim and zuhause, and to the larger area in which one lives, e.g. a village or a quarter of a city. Being at home, whether in the first or second meaning, always involves a special kind of relationship between persons and their surroundings. Home is an intimate place in the sense that I am acquainted with it, and attached to it. To be at home is to be in attunement with the surroundings; in the Heideggerian sense, it is a mood, Stimmung.13 When talking about home, there is a communion between me and my surrounding, because home constitutes me, and I myself constitute my home. I am attuned to my surroundings which I call ‘home’. The basic characteristics of the homey mood are familiarity, reliability and security. We could also speak of an intimate area. Home is intimate, because it constitutes you and reveals aspects of you. Nobody wants intruders in their intimate areas. Privacy, for instance, arises from this. Understood in this way, it is clear that one can have, and often has, several homes, places of a certain kind of attunement. You can feel at home at work – your office is thoroughly familiar to you. You can feel at home at a place you have not visited for a long time because it once was a place where you lived. In Finland, many families have cottages as their second homes, and accordingly, two places to be attuned to. Home is a domesticated area; it is a tamed place in the sense of producing few, if any, surprises. In our homes, in the sense of zuhause, we have control over matters, at least to a certain degree. The degree of control clearly varies from case to case, but it is at home, if anywhere, where you have a say. On the other hand, wild things are something most people want to minimize at home; safety is the key word. If uninvited pieces of wilderness occur, for example in the form of insects or pests, the standard human procedure is to try to get rid of them. To be at home is to dwell. Although I am using the Heideggerian term in a somewhat less demanding sense than does Heidegger, it is still useful to look at what Heidegger has to say about it: Still, not every building is a dwelling. Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not dwelling places. Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling. That domain extends over these buildings and yet is not limited to the dwelling place. The truck driver is at home on the highway, but he does not have his shelter there; the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in

36

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered the power station, but he does not dwell there. These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them.14

Heidegger’s notion of dwelling is a strong one: not every building designed and built to be lived in is a dwelling. To use Heidegger’s own example, in my usage, the truck driver does dwell in the cabin of his truck. The engineer dwells in the halls and offices of the power station, even though he might not stay there overnight to sleep as the truck driver in his truck. To dwell is to occupy a familiar place. To dwell is not only, literally, to ‘be at home’. To dwell is to be somewhere which is not strange or uncanny.

From homey to strange What are the threats to human dwelling? What can shatter our feeling of security and familiarity? In fiction, both in literature and movies, one of the strategies to create uncertainty, strangeness and an atmosphere of the uncanny – and in the end suspense – is to introduce a stranger into a familiar setting. There is someone else or something else in the house. It may be natural – an uninvited human like a burglar or a murderer – or supernatural – the house is haunted. There is an uncontrollable element in a place which we normally completely manage. This is not only strange and uncanny, but also an insult to our identity. Our privacy has been intruded upon: a stranger has crossed the border, and entered into an intimate sphere in which strangers are not – by definition – allowed to come. It is because of the connection of home and our identity that we are upset if we find that a stranger has entered our sphere without our invitation or knowledge. Anthony Vidler traces the history of the uncanny to authors such as Edgar Allan Poe: By far the most popular topos of the nineteenth-century uncanny was the haunted house. A pervasive leitmotiv of literary fantasy and architectural revival alike, its depiction in fairy tales, horror stories, and Gothic novel gave rise to a unique genre of writing that, by the end of the century, stood for romanticism itself. The house provided an especially favored site for uncanny disturbances: its apparent domesticity, its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by contrast the terror of invasion by alien spirits.15

When discussing a piece by Poe, Vidler uses an interesting expression: ‘The effect was one of the disturbing unfamiliarity of the evidently familiar.’16 This is certainly an atmosphere and an effect Poe mastered and often created, but the strangeness I am after should be put slightly differently: ‘The effect of the disturbing unfamiliarity in the evidently familiar.’ This is a crack in the comforting familiarity and a disturbing element in the mood of safety. It is not homely things that shatter the comfort – they do not change or provide surprises, it is rather the uninvited new.

‘Wild Thing’: The Aesthetic Prospects of Wildness

37

We have a cluster of concepts which are related to the notion of wildness, in one way or another – strange, unfamiliar, uncontrollable, uncanny, intriguing, exciting, thrilling. But there is yet a concept which cannot be discarded, if only because it has played such an important role in philosophical aesthetics – the sublime. I do not think that there is any necessary connection between wildness and sublimity, but traditionally, places of natural wilderness have given rise to sublime feelings – the Grand Canyon being a paradigmatic example. Both the Kantian mathematical sublime and dynamic sublime clearly satisfy the criteria of being uncontrollable. In both, the crux of the matter is that something goes beyond human comprehension and control. Unlike in the ‘monstrous’ (ungeheuer),17 there is a positive element in the sublime: it is enjoyable, rather than distressing, although it is not a simple pleasure as with the beautiful, but rather a ‘negative pleasure’.18 I think a similar point can be made of the varieties of wildness: as we saw earlier, wilderness in nature is often romanticized, and by these means becomes something positive. There are grand structures in the urban environment too, which can raise the feeling of the sublime. Large buildings, such as pyramids, skyscrapers and churches, are good examples. They can contribute to the atmosphere of wildness by their sheer size. Although they are man-made, and in this sense within human control, to a single human walking on the streets, they easily give the impression of being uncontrollable. However, they are not ‘monstrous’ in the sense of being simply frightening. Although sublime and wildness have similarities, there are significant differences. What is lacking in the sublime, and present in wildness, is the element of surprise, the unexpected, and accordingly a sense of thrill and excitement. To put it in another way, there are sublime objects that have the potential of being surprising and thrilling, but not every sublime object is exciting and thrilling. They are ‘simply sublime’.

Urban wildness The bits and pieces of nature that we encounter in a city rarely count as wildness in the sense I have sketched. Parks and gardens are very much domesticated. From an ecological point of view, it is very interesting that some species, formerly regarded as inhabitants of wild nature, have become residents in a city. There are numerous examples from different part of the world from this, but I’ll take mine from my own surroundings, the city of Helsinki. A few years ago, it was major national news that an eagle owl (Bubo bubo) had settled in at the very heart of the city. Although still a rare event, sightings have become more frequent; I personally encountered one in January 2020. The eagle owl still counts as an example of wildness in the sense of wild, nondomesticated nature, but I can imagine that if the city population of these birds grew considerably, we would be more reluctant to regard them as a specimen of wilderness. This is what has happened to the barnacle goose – it is such a common species in parks in the southern part of Finland that many regard it as a nuisance, rather than an enjoyable example of wildlife in the city.

38

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

One of the few authors who has extended the meaning of wilderness beyond the obvious natural connotations is Arnold Berleant. He asks what the metaphor of ‘wilderness city’ might say about human experience: What insight does the wilderness metaphor have for the city? Like any metaphor, it enlarges experience by expanding its connections and reference. The metaphor of wilderness helps us grasp urban experience in a way that is clearer from being articulated in this fashion. Urban experience becomes more understandable, even if not more congenial, by being seen as exhibiting the hostile, dangerous, dark sides of wilderness (wilderness → city). . . . To consider the city a trackless region uninhabited by humans is, of course, literally false, yet from the standpoint of experience it may be singularly accurate. By its endless extent, overbearing structures, and mammoth scale, the city overpowers its small and fragile inhabitants. With hard pavements dominated by cars and trucks, patterns of streets and sidewalks decreed by geometrical figures and their distances unwalkable, the city is hostile to the passage of the human body. In the uncaring impersonality of the big city, the lonely, lost lives of many of its dwellers and its blatant aggressiveness and masked cruelty, the city thwarts humane feeling. . . . Behind the veneer of customs, conventions, and institutions we discover the raw harshness and brutality of wilderness.19

This is a fair and accurate description of a possible human experience. An individual may well feel lonely and threatened in a big city. Berleant is painting a picture of something that is beyond human control. The city can be something overwhelming, extending our capabilities. There is no positive aspect in Berleant’s description, so it is not an experience of the sublime, nor that of something thrilling or exciting – it is not an aesthetic experience at all. Berleant is emphasizing one extreme of wildness, that of threatening and being hostile. As I pointed out earlier, when there is an acute threat, there is no room for an aesthetic experience. Walking frightened in a dark alley leaves very little room for admiring the shades of grey in the shadows, nor does the environment thrill us in any positive way. Seeking safety is the priority. But as we have seen, wildness occurs in degrees, and in different shades, and rather than being just frightening it can also be exciting. Then it is safe enough so that no immediate threat is present, but it is also out of the ordinary – intriguing if nothing else. There is an element of the unknown, perhaps a shadow of mystery, something that is not quite in our comprehension, and this is what entices us, raises our curiosity, and our desire to be involved. Curiosity clearly is an element in our urban experiences; people take city vacations because of curiosity. It is the attitude that is behind the tourist gaze. Heidegger was critical of curiosity, Neugier: The basic state of sight shows itself in a peculiar tendency-of-Being which belongs to everydayness – the tendency towards ‘seeing’. We designate this tendency by the term ‘curiosity’ (Neugier), which characteristically is not confined to seeing, but expresses the tendency towards a peculiar way of letting the world be encountered

‘Wild Thing’: The Aesthetic Prospects of Wildness

39

by us in perception. . . . When curiosity has become free, however, it concerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen . . . but just in order to see. It seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty. . . . Therefore curiosity is characterized by a specific way of not tarrying alongside what is closest. Consequently it does not seek the leisure of tarrying observantly, but rather seeks restlessness and the excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters. In not tarrying, curiosity is concerned with the constant possibility of distraction. Curiosity has nothing to do with observing entities and marveling at them – θαυμάζειν. . . . Curiosity is everywhere and nowhere.20

Heidegger is not talking about psychological problems such as concentration difficulties, caused by different kinds of distractions – nowadays, for example, from the social media. He is referring to the inability to settle down, not to be able to dwell anywhere. I am not sure whether this kind of existential curiosity really exist, but that is not so relevant here. Rather I want to draw attention to curiosity and to wonder – to which Heidegger refers by the Greek word thaumazein – which are both relevant reactions and ways to deal with what is wild. Curiosity may be more superficial than wonder, but one can also argue that some kind of curiosity is a prerequisite for wonder – if you are not interested at all in something, there is no chance for wonder either. However, Heidegger is correct in emphasizing that when it comes to marvelling,21 simple curious looking is too quick to be able to concentrate and be involved. From marvelling it is a short step to wonder, and the Greek word Heidegger uses, thaumazein, has been understood to cover wonder.22 Curiosity is often a motive for seeking wildness, and curiosity is, indeed, typical to humans. Wild creatures can raise wonder, too, although, there is no necessary connection here. It might be the case that the thrill and excitement characteristic in wildness do not leave much room for wonder – which requires a more contemplative atmosphere – but if nothing else, wonder can follow wildness; that wild phenomena exist raises the feeling of wonder.23 Urban environments, due to their varied nature, and complexity, offer plenty of possibilities for experiencing wildness. When living in a big city, there always remains a residue of areas and things that one does not know, where something strange lurks around the corner. This is intriguing, and possibly raises our curiosity so that we will go and seek wild things. Unlike in the most familiar of surroundings, home, there is, in the urban environment, something more than what we know. There is often more than what we can handle. There is a surplus of meaning.24 This again leaves the door open for strangeness and surprises. Even in a city someone regards as their home, Heimat, the possibility of something new persists. Clearly, this depends on the size of the city, but even in a fairly small capital like Helsinki, there remains a residue of the unknown, even for someone like myself, who has lived in the city for most of my adult life. The human scale for a Heimat has its limits. Once again, it obviously varies from case to case, from one person to another, but it does not make sense to say, for example, that one’s home region is a whole city, such as London or Tokyo. There are local areas, shopping streets, markets and their surroundings, that humans can manage, and make

40

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

their own. There can be several areas within a city, not necessarily next to each other, that a person regards as their home. However, the human scale is limited, and this leaves room for wildness to occur.

Wildness as an aesthetic feature Let me recapitulate. Wildness in its extreme, be it natural or man-made, excludes aesthetic considerations. When a major threat is involved, an earthquake, a violent action, safety is the first priority. To seek aesthetic or any other kind of satisfaction from, say, car crashes, is abnormal to say the least. There are fictional examples of this, like J. G. Ballard’s Crash, but clearly, one does not need to argue against practices of this kind in real life. They endanger human lives, and are both morally and legally unacceptable. But if I get a thrill, say, when walking for the first time in Manhattan, impressed by the various aspects of the city, feeling slightly intimidated, but at the same time excited, by the urban wildness, my reactions are out of the ordinary in the sense of not encountering familiarity, but in no way morally or legally suspect. I may be curious, astonished, and even feelings of the sublime and wonder may arouse in me. The elements of the uncontrollable and the surprising are present, but not in a threatening way. The feeling of strangeness, of not having been in this place before, feeds my curiosity, and indeed, my tourist gaze hungers for more. As I pointed out, contrary to Heidegger, I think the curious gaze can stop, and often does stop, to observe and to marvel, even to the point where a level of thaumazein is reached. Where, then, is the aesthetic aspect of wildness? There are similarities between the sublime and wildness. Wonder and wildness can go hand in hand, at least for some time, but they cannot be equated. It is the element of the unknown, being beyond our control, as well as the excitement there involved, that creates the kind of atmosphere which can well be included under the notion of the aesthetic. ‘Thrill’ and ‘excitement’ are the best words to describe this. Without going into the problem of the issues of atmospheres, I want to emphasize the role of the recipient in the constitution of atmospheres and aesthetic qualities. They are not in the perceiver nor in the object or surroundings, but somewhere in between the two.25 Interestingly, in many empirical studies about human aesthetic preferences, ‘mystery’ has often been categorized as an aesthetic quality.26 In standard philosophical accounts this has not been the case. What is, in the end, meant by ‘mystery’ is not very clear, but it seems to be akin to wildness. An element of the unknown and otherness plays a role in both, but, as I see it, excitement and thrill are more dominant in wildness. My argument has been that wildness provides pleasure similar to more traditional aesthetic properties, such as the sublime, the powerful, the wondrous and the mysterious. When talking about wildness, or ‘wild things’, we use adjectives such as ‘thrilling’, ‘exciting’, ‘novel’, ‘surprising’, ‘awesome’, and also somewhat more negative ones, such as ‘strange’, ‘uncanny’ and ‘weird’. What is characteristic to wild things is an element of the unexpected, and something being somehow beyond our control without posing a direct threat or danger.

‘Wild Thing’: The Aesthetic Prospects of Wildness

41

Besides the homey atmosphere, opposites to wildness are qualities such as the serene, sombre, moving, and also unified and balanced. Otherness is a prerequisite to wildness, but not everything we regard as other is a case of wildness. If the other does not challenge us in any way, there is no thrill, no excitement, nothing surprising. As much as I do like greenness in the city, even cultivated parks and gardens, as well as larger woodlands, these do not count as wildness or even wilderness in my sense. In no way do I want to downplay the importance of cultivated nature, or even the slightly more unmanaged bits and pieces of nature. My point is simply that compared to wildness, other aesthetic concepts are needed when appreciating them aesthetically.

The role of wildness in urban existence I have argued elsewhere that there is a sense in which we can talk about an ‘urban identity’.27 In an urban environment, meaning here a city-like, large-scale environ, rather than a small town or village, there is always a surplus of meaning, possibilities for surprise, always something beyond our control. In this sense, cities offer possibilities for thrill and excitement; wildness and urbanity go hand in hand. For an urban dweller, this is part of their identity: you can always, without much effort and time, leave the safety of your home to enjoy the wild side. As I have pointed out above, this does not necessarily involve anything dangerous or morally dubious. Looking for the wild side of things may not be everybody’s piece of cake, and there clearly are generational and personal differences. However, the phenomenon exists, and it is a reason for many to live in cities. If the home is safe and reliable, it can also be boring, and a city offers the possibility to experience something new and exciting. Wildness as an aesthetic property has a role in the life worlds of city dwellers. How big a role it is varies from person to another. Wildness is the aesthetic opposite of everyday aesthetic qualities created by the most familiar surroundings. It is over and against the homey that one can fully appreciate the wild, and vice versa. For most of us, constant thrill and excitement would be too much; as humans we have a need for something ‘safe and sound’. But the other side of safety and control is boredom, and this is where wildness comes to the rescue. Depending on the person, the balance between the two varies considerably, and there is no recipe for an aesthetically correct way of life in this respect. The balancing act remains a personal responsibility.

Notes 1

2 3

Stephanie Ross, ‘Paradoxes and puzzles: Appreciating gardens and urban nature’, Contemporary Aesthetics, no. 4 (2006), http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/ pages/article.php?articleID=400. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990) offers one of the first systematic accounts of the problem. Jay Appleton was the first who formulated the ‘prospect-refuge theory’ in The Experience of Landscape (London: Wiley, 1975).

42 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered William Cronon, ‘The trouble with wilderness: Or, getting back to the wrong nature’, Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 7. John O’Neill, ‘Wilderness, cultivation and appropriation’, Philosophy and Geography 5, no. 1 (2002): 41. Without going into ontological issues as regards the nature of reality, I can say that I agree with O’Neill’s commonsensical position against full-fledged constructivism: ‘There is a clear distinction to be drawn between the sources of our attitudes, which are economic, political and cultural, and the objects of our attitudes which can still remain non-cultural. That our capacity to appreciate and respond to the non-human natural world in a certain way is a cultural achievement, the outcome of social and cultural processes, does not entail that the object of our attitudes is a cultural object. This is not to deny that many landscapes that are presented as “natural” are cultural in a real material sense – they are the result of human activity. – However, it would be simply false to hold that at the level of geology, for example, that all is human product: it has a history before us’ (Ibid. 43–44). Cf. Cronon, ‘The trouble with wilderness: Or, getting back to the wrong nature’, 24. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 23. Needless to say, I am not claiming homeless people should not be provided possibilities for proper housing. My point is purely conceptual. Robert Frost, North of Boston (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1914). Jeff E. Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012), 63. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 172–173. ‘Building, dwelling, thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 145–146. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 17. Ibid., 18. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952 (1790)), §26.; Jacob Rogozinski, ‘The gift of the world’, in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, ed. Jean-François Courtine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 136. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, §23.; Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics: The Eighteenth Century, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 444. Arnold Berleant, ‘The wilderness city: An essay on metaphorical experience’, in The City as a Cultural Metaphor: Studies in Urban Aesthetics, ed. Arto Haapala (Lahti: International Institute of Applied Aesthetics Series, Vol. 4, 1998), 20–21. Heidegger, Being and Time, 216–217. The German expression is ‘bewundern’, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979), 172. Ronald Hepburn, ‘Wonder’, in ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighbouring Fields (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), 134. I have discussed problems of wonder in ‘Wonder and the Everyday: Hepburnian Considerations and Beyond’, Journal of Scottish Thought 10 (2018). I have discussed these issues in ‘The urban identity. The city as a place to dwell’ in Place and Location III , ed. Virve Sarapi and Kadri Tüür (Tallinn: Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Arts, 2003).

‘Wild Thing’: The Aesthetic Prospects of Wildness

43

25 I am following Gernot Böhme’s well-known characterization here, cf. ‘Atmosphere as the fundamental concept of new aesthetics’, Thesis Eleven 36, no. 1 (1993). 26 Cf. Mikel Subiza-Pérez et al., ‘Perceived Environmental Aesthetic Qualities Scale (PEAQS) – A self-report tool for the evaluation of green-blue spaces’, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 43 (2019), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S1618866719301359. 27 Haapala, ‘The urban identity. The city as a place to dwell’.

Literature Appleton, Jay. The Experience of Landscape. London: Wiley, 1975. Berleant, Arnold. ‘The Wilderness City: An essay on metaphorical experience’. In The City as a Cultural Metaphor: Studies in Urban Aesthetics, edited by Arto Haapala. Lahti: International Institute of Applied Aesthetics Series, Vol. 4, 1998. Böhme, Gernot. ‘Atmosphere as the fundamental concept of new aesthetics’. Thesis Eleven 36, no. 1 (1993): 113–126. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cronon, William. ‘The trouble with wilderness: Or, getting back to the wrong nature’. Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 7–28. Frost, Robert. North of Boston. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1914. Guyer, Paul. A History of Modern Aesthetics: The Eighteenth Century. Vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Haapala, Arto. ‘The urban identity. The city as a place to dwell’. In Place and Location III , edited by Virve Sarapi and Kadri Tüür, 13–24. Tallinn: Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Arts, 2003. Haapala, Arto. ‘Wonder and the everyday: Hepburnian considerations and beyond’. Journal of Scottish Thought 10 (2018). Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962. Heidegger, Martin. ‘Building, dwelling, thinking’. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. In Poetry, Language, Thought, 145–161. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979. Hepburn, Ronald W. ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighbouring Fields. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952 (1790). Malpas, Jeff E. Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012. O’Neill, John. ‘Wilderness, cultivation and appropriation’. Philosophy and Geography 5, no. 1 (2002): 35–50. Rogozinski, Jacob. ‘The gift of the world’. In Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, edited by Jean-François Courtine, 133–156. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Ross, Stephanie. ‘Paradoxes and puzzles: Appreciating gardens and urban nature’. Contemporary Aesthetics, no. 4 (2006). http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/ pages/article.php?articleID=400. Subiza-Pérez, Mikel, Kaisa Hauru, Kalevi Korpela, Arto Haapala, and Susanna Lehvävirta. ‘Perceived Environmental Aesthetic Qualities Scale (PEAQS) – A self-report tool for

44

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

the evaluation of green-blue spaces’. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 43(2019): 126383. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2019.126383, https://www.sciencedirect. com/science/article/pii/S1618866719301359. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992.

3

A Shelter in the Wilderness Eivind Kasa

Architecture has always engaged with the wild. This becomes salient in architecture’s character as ‘shelter’: as refuge in particular from the often-brutal forces of climate and climes, but also from wild beasts and even fellow human beings – a shelter from the wild. This character is so obvious that it has often been proposed as architecture’s fundamental defining quality. In his Ten Books on Architecture, written in the first century BC, the Roman architect Vitruvius, founder of architectural theory, presents his anthropological hypothesis on the origin of buildings: As was usual in ancient times, men were born like wild animals in the forests, caves and woods, and spent their lives feeding for fodder . . . when the initial impetus for men’s social gatherings, for their councils and communal life, occurred because of the discovery of fire, and more of them assembled in one place, and they were endowed by nature with the advantage over other living creatures that they could walk upright without facing the ground . . . as well as being able to handle any object as readily as they wished with their hands and fingers – it was then that some of them from these first groups began to make shelters of foliage, others to dig caves at the foot of mountains and yet others to build refuges of mud and branches in which to shelter in imitation of the nests of swallows and their way of building.1

This passage became the origin of the idea of the primitive hut, which has resurfaced several times during the history of architecture as a paradigm to measure other buildings against. Joseph Rykwert writes in On Adam’s House in Paradise, The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History: ‘my theme has been the constant interest in the primitive hut. It seems to have been displayed by practically all peoples at all times, and the meaning given to this elaborate figure does not appear to have shifted much from place to place, from time to time’.2 My focus on the primitive hut here, stemming from Vitruvius’ and Rykwert’s perspective, is on its sheltering aspect. It goes without saying that there is more to architecture than mere sheltering. The importance of architecture’s function as shelter within architectural history reflects its importance to humanity. The shelter made it possible to create an artificial 45

46

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 3.1 A Norwegian barn wall during winter. Photo: Eivind Kasa.

refuge in a wilderness that originally was hostile, dangerous or even lethal to human presence and persistence. From the harsh winters of Siberia – or Norway – to the extreme heat of African deserts in summer; from the tents of nomads to the palaces of kings, architecture as shelter has made it possible for humans to inhabit the earth, to map it out, to colonize and govern wild nature beyond the borders of the Great Rift Valley, through settlement. Essentially, architecture as shelter has been of fundamental phylogenetic importance. Thus, shelter makes sense. It is meaningful to humans. However, on closer analysis, the questions of how the experience of it creates its identity as shelter, and how singular shelters are linked to each other, establishing the concept of shelter, are not as easily answered as one might think from a traditional point of view. In this chapter I will examine the effects of a specific established position within psychological research on the understanding of this problem. Advocates of this position claim that the psychological identity and meaning of shelter at a fundamental level are established naturally, without the mediation of concepts or culture. This is the stance taken in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception by James Gibson. If Gibson is correct, his position unveils an entire dimension of how architecture creates meaning; a dimension that has been insufficiently acknowledged and understood. The reason I ask this question about the identity and meaning of shelter is because it informs us about the identity and meaning of the wild we are sheltered from. The ecological approach to visual perception sheds an interesting light on relationships between experience, identity, concept and reflection on the wild. It even indicates how the wild disrupts every human endeavour to tame the world through signification, shattering these efforts and setting up its own wild meanings.

A Shelter in the Wilderness

47

The meaning of shelters according to James Gibson The question about identity and meaning in architecture is complex and often inadequately understood. So, too, is the way it enters the aesthetic discourse of architecture. In architectural theory we encounter positions extending from what we might call naturalism to culturalism: from a position where the identity and meaning of a work of architecture are established through natural, causal relations between the work of architecture and its users, to one where they are established merely through hermeneutic interpretation of their immaterial cultural meanings. There are reasons for both approaches. However, one significant problem is how to bridge the traditionally conceived gap between matter and meaning in architecture. It is in this context that the psychologist James Gibson’s work on visual perception is relevant. The perception process comprises two phases, the forming of sense impressions and their interpretation. Consequently, a perceptual theory has consequences for our ideas about how we psychologically form conceptions of the experienced world. Gibson is known for his work on visual perception. As such, it is particularly fitting for the study of a profoundly visual subject like architecture. Yet his findings and perspective may be generalized to cover all kinds of perception, hereby acquiring relevance to the understanding of aesthetics as well. Gibson’s approach to visual perception is summed up in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, which was published in 1979. Architecture is more extensively discussed in Reasons for Realism,3 a compilation of his essays. Several aspects of his theory are remarkably recognizable to architects. Gibson describes his approach precisely as ecological. Ecological in this context means that Gibson discusses visual perception, not merely from the point of view of the perceiving organism or the object of perception, but from the relationship between the organism as an embodied being and its environment. As such, it is also evolutionary. This relates his perspective directly to our topic of the wild. Gibson offers a new take on a crucial problem in traditional psychology of perception; namely, how we proceed from the detection of sense qualities to their meaning. Traditional psychology of perception states that we first perceive sense qualities, and second, connect them into meaningful phenomena with consequences for us as human beings. Gibson turns this sequence around. He claims that we, prior to recognizing the environment’s qualities, perceive what it offers us; in other words, the consequences of the environment to us as embodied beings. This is summed up in the concept of affordances – his own neologism. Gibson claims the composition and layout of the surfaces of the environment constitute what they afford: ‘The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.’4 From this follows perhaps the most controversial aspect of his theory; namely, that ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ of things in the environment can be directly perceived. They are, in a sense, external to the perceiver. They do not have to be ascribed with the help of concepts. They can be discovered and described. Gibson also elevates this discussion from empirical psychology to epistemology. With explicit reference to Kant’s position, he claims, ‘if you agree to abandon the dogma

48

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

that “percepts without concepts are blind”, as Kant put it, a deep theoretical mess, a genuine quagmire, will dry up’.5 Later, under the heading ‘To Perceive an Affordance is not to Classify an Object’, in discussing Wittgenstein’s family resemblances, he develops this further: ‘the theory of affordances rescues us from the philosophical muddle of assuming fixed classes of objects, each defined by its common features and given a name . . . you do not have to classify and label things in order to perceive what they afford’.6 From an epistemological point of view, Gibson may be identified as a representative of what may be called evolutionary epistemology (see Gerhard Vollmer’s description in his Lexikon der Erkenntnistheorie7). Evolutionary theory of knowledge is closely related to our topic as it discusses how nature – first, and in particular wild nature – shaped our bodies, our sense organs and perception, and thereby our knowledge of the world. The dangerous and endangered wilderness fundamentally shaped us to offer optimal information for survival. Because we are still here, it is reasonable to suppose that our knowledge of the world, in terms of basic survival, is sufficiently correct. Interestingly, very early in his book, in a passage that appears to echo Vitruvius, Gibson applies his perspective to what he calls shelter and architecture at large: The atmospheric medium, it will be remembered, is neither entirely homogeneous nor wholly invariant. Sometimes there is rain in the air, or hail, or snow. Sometimes the wind blows, and in certain latitudes of the earth the air periodically becomes too cold for warm-blooded animals, who will die if they lose more heat to the medium than they gain by oxidizing food. For such reasons, many animals and all human beings must have shelters. They often take shelter in caves or holes or burrows, which are animal-sized partial enclosures. But some animals and all humans of recent times build shelters, constructing them in various ways and of various materials . . .. Human animals build what I will call huts – a generic term for simple human artificial shelters . . . its usual features are, first a roof that is ‘getunderneath-able’ and thus affords protection from rain and snow and direct sunlight; second, walls, which afford protection from wind and prevent the escape of heat; and third, a doorway to afford entry and exit, that is an opening. A hut can be built of sticks, clay, thatch, stones, brick, or many other more sophisticated substances.8

In other words, the identification and meaning of shelters are perceived naturally, prior to finding any similarities between objects, or forming classes as the basis for conceptualizations. We may not even have a word for the shelter, but the sheltering against the wild is still immediately experienced with a clear identity and is, thereby, existentially meaningful. An ordinary experience which makes it tempting to accept that this may be correct is that animals – representatives of the wild – sometimes seem to identify aspects of the environment as shelter in the same way as humans do; for example when sheep, like humans, take cover under a tree.

A Shelter in the Wilderness

49

Figure 3.2 Sheep taking refuge from rain under a tree. Photo: Eivind Kasa.

The body as the wild within The meaning of the shelter is established in the relationship of the surroundings to the organism. In other words, it is established in relation to our bodies and our embodied being. Wild weather, for instance, is felt in our bodies, in our bones. A reason for this is, of course, that our bodies and their surroundings share a fundamental quality. Our bodies, and to an extent our minds as well – the embodied being comprises not only the body, but the senses and ways of ordering sense information through the nervous system – are part of nature. They are biological and have evolved as the result of influences from wild nature surrounding us. This biological nature establishes a fundamental structure and even existential meaning to our being that pre-dates and, to a large extent remains unmodified by, human conceptualizations. In this sense, our embodied being is the wild within. Through our bodies, the wild therefore intrudes into the world that is subjugated to human will; what we usually call the human world, setting up its own meanings and orders. This becomes particularly noticeable through our limitations, the frustrations of drives and needs, illness and death, but also through the order of the body acknowledged through the active unfolding of its life, satisfactions and pleasures. Our bodies, if seen as the wild within, challenge what may initially seem obvious: that the tamed is the sphere of humankind – of culture – and the wild is something outside and in opposition to humanity him.

50

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

In this sense the wild world, with its meanings and orders of meanings, is the world of our body, fundamentally shaped by it. However, this does not mean it is subjective, nor is it inter-subjective in a traditional sense. As Gibson emphasized, it may be said that it is objective in the sense of the natural sciences, even if he claims that a better way of conceiving it is as cutting across the dichotomy between subjective and objective. The crucial role of our bodies in our perception of our environment may be the reason it has also enjoyed such a varied and prominent position in the history of architecture, with regard to the establishment of its order, from Vitruvius and onwards.

Architects building in the wild Gibson takes as the point of departure for his understanding of buildings, embodied humans’ encounter with an inadequate or even hostile nature that forces humans to build ‘huts’ – ‘a generic term for simple human artificial shelters’. According to Gibson, the basic sheltering aspects in relation to the body are that a shelter affords protection against rain, snow and direct sunlight from above; laterally from wind and the escape of heat, and that it allows entry and exit. Gibson does not develop his ideas with respect to the building process as such, merely its end results. Yet his approach seems to offer a meaningful perspective to their realization as well. This originates from his opposition to the approach of traditional psychology regarding the process of visual perception, which, according to Gibson, treats the eye as a passive camera. Contrary to this, Gibson views the eye as sitting in a body which is actively exploring the world. This exploration even includes the manipulation and transformation of the world. The transformation of the world, or more precisely the transformation of what the world affords, I will claim, unveils a much richer experience and set of meanings related to the shelter, the wild it is realized against, as well as the human condition in the world. This has long been known by architects, who originally were, and still to a large extent are, builders, and thereby perceive shelter – and through it the wild – not merely as an available object, but through the whole process of realizing it, dwelling in it, resisting its demise, and ultimately losing shelter.

Figure 3.3 Wild weather. Photo: Eivind Kasa.

A Shelter in the Wilderness

51

With respect to affordances of the wild that create the need for shelter, architects have, since time immemorial, been acquainted with what hurricanes, rain, hail, snowfall, excessive coldness or heat, lack or excess of light, the presence of inferior air, lack or excess of ventilation, poisonous gases and so on afford. What is more, these phenomena of the world are highly articulate. Rain for instance may be torrential, strong, light, drizzle, mist, fog and so on. Furthermore, it may be continuous, accidental, rhythmical, intermittent or scarcely felt. It changes through the seasons, thereby creating a rhythm to life. Consequently, it has a rich structure of qualities. These form patterns – often cyclical – belonging to day and night, the seasons, and to regions, forming local climes. These highly articulate affordances of the wild world, that present something negative to the organism, have to be responded to by building in a similarly articulate way to overcome them and make the shelter habitable, ensuring life, health and comfort for the inhabitants. With respect to the affordances of the wild being subjugated by building, Vitruvius has commented on this in relation to the choice of sites for cities: These will be the principles to follow with regard to city-walls. First, the choice of a very healthy site: this will be in a high place, without mists or frost, and exposed to weather conditions that are neither sweltering nor freezing, but temperate; moreover, proximity to marshy terrain is to be avoided. For when the morning breezes blow towards the town at sunrise, and these are joined by the mists that have sprung up, and the noxious breath of marsh animals mixes with the mist and wafts into the bodies of the inhabitants – all this makes the site unhealthy. Again, if the city-walls are to be on the sea and face south or west, they will not be good for the health, because in the summer the zones exposed to the southern sky heat up with the rising sun and burn hot at midday, while a site facing west is warmed when the sun has risen, is hot at midday and swelters in the evening. So the result is that these oscillations between hot and cold will damage the bodies of people living in these places.9

Along the same lines, Vitruvius continues later with the climate’s influence on the inner planning of the cities: ‘When the walls have been built around the city, the lots for housing inside them must be allocated and the main avenues [platae] and narrow cross-streets [angiporta] orientated so that they take account of climatic conditions.’10 Later, he returns to it in relation to buildings.11 To counteract the troublesome affordances of the wild at a site, one has to build. As mentioned, from the very beginning of historical times, architects have been builders. ‘Architekton’ simply means the principal among the builders. Architecture was a craft, or ‘a servitudinal art’. Planning took place at the building site. The building site and the planning of the work of architecture to be built there were not separated till the Renaissance. The crafts were based precisely on the body and its ecological interaction with the materials of the world, which was the origin of the identification of affordances. The entire process of production is based on the craftsman’s intimate bodily contact with

52

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 3.4 Choosing a site in the wild. Photo: Svein Erik Aksetøy.

the wild world. This seems to be a significant reason for the presence in architectural education of building in full scale. It is vital for students to become acquainted with the body of what the world affords, and the affordance-dimension itself. A merely theoretical approach is inadequate. The process of building is, in particular, related to the Vitruvian concept of ‘firmitas’ or ‘durability’. It is often called the tectonic aspect of architecture. Vitruvius describes it thus: ‘Durability will be catered for when the foundations have been sunk down to solid ground and the building materials carefully selected from the available resources without cutting corners.’12 This quote emphasizes the prerogative of the establishment of the foundation of the building, which is the sine qua non of erecting a stable shelter. Architects as craftsmen have an embodied knowledge of what the world as wild affords in this regard as well. They know what terrain like sandy soils, mires and marshlands, or land affected by landslides, flooding, earthquakes and avalanches, affords when it comes to resisting a stable foundation of the shelter. However, as affordances may be good as well as bad, architects are equally acquainted with the affordances of rocks and other stable grounds. The prerogative of the foundation originates from architects having to overcome gravity. According to Gibson,13 this is not only a scientific fact, but one belonging to the ecological world creating fundamental affordances. It transforms the univalent,

A Shelter in the Wilderness

53

homogeneous space of geometry into an ecological one that is qualitatively differentiated and ordered. It gives space orientation both vertically and horizontally. It establishes the ground as well as the horizon. It orders the world. When the fundament is created, the building must stand up against gravity. With respect to the construction to be erected to do this, architects, as craftsmen too, have known through their bodies what the materials of the wild world afford when it comes to playing nature out against itself in realizing the shelter. The philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel describes it thus in his essay on ruins: architecture . . . uses and distributes the weight and carrying power of matter according to a plan conceivable only in the human soul, within this plan the matter works by means of its own nature – carrying the plan out, as it were, with its own forces. This is the most sublime victory of the spirit over nature.14

In overcoming gravity, the static rigidness, dimensions and heaviness of the materials have been of particular importance. To do this, architects employ columns, walls, beams, architraves, vaults and other constructive elements. Of equal importance is how the constructive elements are joined together, which emphasizes the importance of working on what is called architectural details. Vitruvius describes the constructive aspect of architecture in continuation of his description of the origin of buildings: at first, after putting up stakes with forked ends and laying branches across them, they covered the walls with mud. Others built walls by drying out lumps of mud, binding them together with wood and covering them with reeds and foliage to avoid the showers and the heat . . .. And we can see for ourselves that these practices developed from the origins which I have written about because to this day buildings are constructed of these materials in foreign countries: for example, in Gaul, Spain, Lusitania and Aquitaine, houses are roofed with oak shingles or thatched.15

Then, he goes on to describe how the entire wooden construction of a house originated from the abundance of wood at Pontus, in the land of the Colchians. Architects as craftsmen seem to have been concerned with the tectonics of the shelter as crucial to the profession and subject, at least since our earliest written sources. Architecture, after all, has often been described as the art of building. In some epochs of architectural history, most recently by modern constructive functionalists like the Swiss architect and second rector at the Bauhaus, Hannes Meyer, the tectonics of construction has been seen as the very core of architecture, sometimes to the exclusion of the rest of its aspects, in particular aesthetics. It has in a reductionist way been turned into an absolute. Thus, architecture has simply been defined as the art of erecting constructions. Yet architects have traditionally been engaged with all the affordances of materials, not merely their structural qualities. Their affordances relate to different kinds of ‘function’, but also to their sensual and aesthetic qualities, such as feeling hard or soft,

54

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

warm or cold, with structured or slippery surfaces, the opaqueness or translucence of materials, colours and so on. However, the shelter is not realized merely by overcoming wild gravity in erecting the construction as such. Its aim is the barring or regulating of all aspects of the wild. The building skeleton needs a skin. This is a core role of the wall and in particular the roof, and the function of the construction is to uphold this. In the same way as with the fundament and the construction, builders have been bodily acquainted with the affordances of walls and roofs. This has led to the development of a host of related building-motives. Vitruvius offers a glimpse of craftsmen’s active engagement to ward off the wild in this respect as well: When roofs proved incapable of resisting showers during winter storms, they made gables, and having covered the inclined roofs with mud, led the rain down them. ...... But the Phrygians, who live on the plains, have very little timber because of the lack of forests: they chose natural mounds . . .. Above, they bind stout branches together to form conical roofs which they cover over with reeds and brushwood, then pile up great heaps of earth on top of their homes. These types of roof keep them very warm in winter and very cool in the summer. Some peoples build huts with roofs made of sedge from the marshes. Among other nations as well, and in other locales, the structures of houses are built using the same, or similar methods. So too at Marseilles we can see roofs without tiles made of earth worked with straw.16

Thus, even the early builders, from their available materials, developed different kinds of roofs; different densities of the material versus the sun, rain or snow; different slanting of the roof, from the horizontal to the very steep; deep or shallow eaves, spouts, gutters, trenches and piping for drainage; different densities of the walls to allow for aeration or insulate against frost; as well as constructions that were elevated to avoid rot in the base of the construction, or even put on stilts when built in the water. All these were developed because they afforded shelter in relation to the particular climate, ground and available materials at the specific site.

Upholding buildings against the wild However, as Simmel reminds us, the spirit’s victory over matter is never established once and for all: The unique balance – between mechanical, inert matter which passively resists pressure, and informing spirituality which pushes upward – breaks, however, the instant a building crumbles. For this means nothing else than that merely natural forces begin to become master over the work of man: the balance between nature and spirit, which the building manifested, shifts in favour of nature. This shift

A Shelter in the Wilderness

55

becomes a cosmic tragedy which, so we feel, makes every ruin an object infused with our nostalgia; for now the decay appears as nature’s revenge for the spirit’s having violated it by making a form in its own image.17

Neither comes this as a surprise to architects as craftsmen. Firmitas or durability, which is an aim of building, is not attained with the finishing of the shelter. Architects seem from the very beginning to have been aware of what the wild affords with respect to the forces of the wild that attack the shelter, weakening it, turning it into a ruin – which is the very topic of Simmel’s essay – and ultimately swallowing it up, returning it to wild nature. Volcanos, flooding, storms, rain, humidity, fungi, bacteria, aging of materials, moss and plants leading to rot, rust, crumbling and so on are all well known. History offers many spectacular examples of the return of the wild as a destructive force. In these cases, Simmel’s tragedy becomes cosmic in a very real sense. From ancient times, the floods described in the Gilgamesh and the book of Genesis in the Bible seem to be reminiscent of real ones. In Western architecture, few examples are as eloquent as the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii. They are particularly impressive examples of the wild destroying shelters with profound consequences for embodied humans. Shelters and even the grandest houses have always been falling apart through attacks from the wild, and eventually return to wild nature. It is likely that architects as

Figure 3.5 Acqua alta in Venice eroding its foundations. Photo: Alex Booker.

56

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

craftsmen have been acquainted with this process from the very beginning. Moreover, architecture has, from historical times, reflected on this fact in several ways. From Vitruvius onwards, a particular topic for architectural craftsmen has not merely been to create a durable structure, but to mend it when the wild has taken its toll, to ensure that it may continue standing up against the wild. Yet with the development of modern archaeology and the growing acquaintance with, and aesthetic appreciation of, the ruins of the past, a large debate ensued, in particular during the nineteenth century, about how to deal with shelters and other buildings that were threatened with being ruined by wild nature. In the discussions during the nineteenth century we find all kinds of positions being adopted, from leaving a shelter to be overtaken by the wild because this will be the most beautiful, via halting the process and admiring the ruin, to re-establishing the shelter as it was when it was new, or even turning it into an ideal state, which may lay in nuce in the building, but in fact never has actually existed at any time in history. One of the main advocates for the last position was the French architect Viollet-le-Duc. His most famous work of restoration was the Notre Dame de Paris. This was ravaged by wildfire in 2019. As a kind of historical irony, one of the items that created most damage was the spire, which was Viollet-le-Duc’s own addition to the historical building, contributing to his turning it into an ideal, albeit unhistorical, gothic creation. The debate about how to treat buildings threatened and even ruined by the wild remains wide open.

From wild meanings to concepts Earlier I indicated that, if we follow Gibson, there seems to exist a fundament of existential body-based meanings, or a meaningful world, including shelters, which exists prior to any creating of classes of objects or concepts, and forms their foundation. Even if it may appear that I have been speaking of ‘shelter’ as a concept that relies on classes of phenomena, types and so on, the focus till now has been on the affordances that emerge objectively from the relation between our bodies and the environment, without relying on similarities with other phenomena, classes and concepts. However, this naturally meaningful world that originates from the relation between the environment and our embodied being may, in different ways, eventually form the basis for the development of similarities, classes and concepts, and thereby a meaningful world in a more traditional epistemological sense. Some similarities are more or less forced upon the builders by the wild through local climes, the nature of foundations, natural material available for construction, and environment-required ways of articulating the ‘skin’ of the shelter and fighting the wild and decay. With regard to climes and houses, Vitruvius writes: Houses, then, will be correctly planned if, first, we take careful notice of the regions and latitudes of the world in which they are built. For it clearly makes sense that one type of building should be built in Egypt, another in Spain, some other type in Pontus and a different one again in Rome, and so on, depending on the different characteristics of the countries and regions. The reason is that one part of the earth

A Shelter in the Wilderness

57

is oppressed by the trajectory of the sun, another is a long way from it and yet another lying along the middle zone, is temperate. Therefore, since the position of the heavens relative to the mass of the earth is naturally governed by the inclination of the circle of the zodiac and the course of the sun, producing very different results, it is obvious that the siting of houses must be organized similarly with reference to the characteristics of the regions and variations of climate.18

With respect to how the availability of building materials influenced the way of building by the Colchians, we have already quoted Vitruvius.19 Here, he develops this general point further, taking into account the buildings of the Phrygians, who lack forests, and others as well. In the same way, articulation of the skin of the shelter, at the walls and roofs may have similarities enforced upon them by nature; by the wild. However, through the powerful force of social learning, these solutions may turn into something very different, such as technical skills and rule-based crafts. It seems that fundamental aspects of this learning may occur naturally as well, even if the argument is not absolutely necessary in our context. The zoologist Mark Pagel writes about two human features that single humans out from other animals in his book Wired for Culture. The Natural History of Human Cooperation: One is that we are capable of sophisticated copying and imitation of new or novel behaviours merely by watching or observing others, and without the need for specific training or rewards. We can then transmit these new behaviours faithfully to others. The second feature is that humans act as if they know what they are copying and why, and so they can choose to copy the best from among a number of alternatives, and even attempt to improve it.20

In a way that, to a certain extent, echoes this, Vitruvius writes: ‘Since men were naturally imitative and quick to learn, they would show each other the results of their building, proud of their own inventions, and so, sharpening their wits in competition, became more competent technically every day.’21 Through practice, humans moved from their wild, rustic lives to gentle civilization ... Then, growing in self-confidence and looking forward with greater ambition on the basis of the variety of the arts, they began to construct houses, rather than huts, with foundations and walls built of brick or stone and roofed with timberwork and tiles; next, as a result of the observations they made during their investigations, they progressed from vague and imprecise ways of thinking to the ascertainable rules of modularity. After they had noticed that nature had given birth to copious materials, they developed them carefully when they used them and enhanced the elegance of their lives, already improved by the arts, with luxuries.22

Modularity here is the foundation of proportion and harmony, which is the aesthetic aim of architecture.

58

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

All this leads to typologization of architectural elements, as well as the shelter as a whole, and to not only naturally but also socially founded habitual and conventional rules on how to build, which form the basis of the ‘art of building’. These types then become linked to local geographies or regions, and local ways of living, and become symbols for general semantic universes and world views. From this point we could follow the transition from affordances to more conventional forms of meaning of the house. In so doing, architecture’s work with wild nature turns into culture. However, here we will pursue a different, pre-cultural line of thought, related to the natural meaning of shelters.

Affordances established by crafts and industrial production The wild has shaped architecture. Not least, this applies to traditional, vernacular architecture. In particular vernacular, crafts-based architecture has been very sensitive to local needs, in particular climates, with local materials and ways of building, to ward off threats from climates, wild animals and hostile humans. From this one might get the idea that the relation between the body and the affordances of the environment is different in the era of industrial production of architecture. If so, what we have described here would be of limited relevance to the production of architecture – as well as the wild – in our industrial age. Gibson, however, opposes such an idea: This is not a new environment – an artificial environment distinct from the natural environment – but the same environment modified by man . . .. It is also a mistake to separate the cultural environment from the natural environment, as if there were a world of mental products distinct from the world of material products. There is only one world, however diverse, and all animals live in it, although we human animals have altered it to suit ourselves. We have done so wastefully, thoughtlessly, and, if we do not mend our ways, fatally. The fundamentals of the environment – the substances, the medium, and the surfaces – are the same for all animals.23

The world as wild Gibson’s theory of affordances is more complex than we have presented it here. However, more important in this connection is what the notion of affordances means to the meaning of what the shelter shelters us against – the wild. The wild is here understood, not merely as particular, delimited experiences, but as one of the fundamental qualities of the world we live in that shapes the human condition. From Gibson’s perspective, not only the hut, but also the world outside it, is objectively meaningful in the sense that it is defined as to what the world and its parts afford embodied humans. As we have discussed earlier, according to Gibson, the affordances of the world are objectively meaningful in the same sense as the objects of the natural sciences are (or rather they reach across the opposition between subjective

A Shelter in the Wilderness

59

and objective). However, as we have also touched upon, Gibson claims that the natural sciences lack any notion about the world because it emerges from the relations between the world, animals and humans, and the ecological meanings and meaningful world that originate from this. What follows from this is first that the natural sciences are devoid of this perspective to such a degree that Gibson dedicated the first forty-four pages of his book to developing an entirely new nomenclature to describe the total world, perceived as emerging in relation to embodied beings as an environment. From an architectural perspective, it is interesting that Gibson, from this position, defines elements of the environment like substances, surfaces, media and space, as well as the ground, place, path, obstacle, water margins, brinks, steps and slopes that are of fundamental architectural importance. Gibson even claims that this is a perspective that has been known all along by architects. Yet with reference to the Hungarian-British philosopher Michael Polanyi, he describes this knowledge of the world as tacit, and even claims: ‘Architects and designers know such facts, but they lack a theory of affordances to encompass them in a system.’24 Second, and more immediately to the point here,‘wild’ obviously is not a phenomenon – or at least not an important one – of the natural sciences. In fact, neither the natural sciences nor Gibson have developed a concept for this. And yet Gibson’s perspective shows its relevance here. At this point, our discussion may expand on Gibson’s perspective. Seen from Gibson’s point of view, we may say that to a large extent the world emerges as wild in relation to our embodied beings as it does not relate to, withdraws from, and resists human will and efforts to tame it. The wild passively ignores, and actively refutes, human pleasure, comfort, needs, and even existence in its passive as well as active state. The wild, then, is a quality of the ecological environment. From this perspective, we may conceive of the wild not only as what the world, unmediated by men, affords humans for good and for bad, but what this unmediated character in itself affords us. This has been caught in a well-known poem by the American poet, Stephen Crane: A man said to the universe: ‘Sir, I exist!’ ‘However,’ replied the universe, ‘The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.’25

The wild is most easily detected and identified in its negative form. Nature often emerges even as dangerous like in the title of the present book. Lacking shelter, we are immediately left exposed to the forces of the wild world. We experience it on, and through, our bodies; we feel it in our bones. It often actively induces unpleasantness, pain, and even death. Death, from this perspective, is the ultimate manifestation of the wild. Shelterlessness, thus, may turn into a much more concrete cosmic tragedy than the one mentioned by Simmel in relation to ruins. A heart-breaking depiction of the consequences of the lack of shelter is encountered in H. C. Andersen’s fairy-tale The

60

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Little Match Girl. Unsheltered encounters with the wild indicate that we are fundamentally not at home in the world. As such, the wild instigates shudder. Actually, the intrusion of the fundamentally untamed phenomenon of death in human life, that resists all human efforts to make it disappear through re-interpretation, is the best example of an important side of the wild: again and again it disrupts our efforts to tame our human life world through giving it meaning, and defeats them through its own order of wild meanings. Yet as Gibson wrote, and which, with all the drama of the negative aspects of the wild, may be overlooked, affordances are not necessarily negative. The affordances of the wild may be experienced as positive as well, even to such a degree that one might forget the refutation of the human that lies hidden in its immensity. These positive affordances may include existential space – even vast amounts of it – and the pleasures of the existential space, like a comfortable or luxurious climate, an abundance of satisfaction of needs like fresh air and water, food, exquisite comforts, immense pleasures and stunning beauty as well. Furthermore, we could note the space of wide and fertile prairies, the beauty of islands like the Maldives or Seychelles, the immense starry sky above, the mild zephyrs of spring, the light Nordic summer nights, the Maldivian seashores inviting a bath, and the wild exotic exuberance of flowers and birds in the rainforests. The flamboyant appearance of positive affordances in the wild may create the impression that humans are reconciled with their surroundings and the wild condition has come to an end. The dream of reconciliation has been taken care of by myths like those of Arcadia or Eden.

The dream of being at home in the wilderness: gardens There are few departments of architecture where reconciliation may seem to have been attained as obviously as in gardens; that part of architecture that encircles the building and mediates between the house and its surroundings. In a particular way the history of the gardens reflects humans’ struggle to realize the dream, often in stunning aesthetic form. They may create the illusion that humans are reconciled with the wild, and fundamentally at home in the world. Gardens have even given rise to the concept of paradise. Etymologically this stems from old Persian ‘pairi-dae’-za’,26 which means ‘walled enclosure’ and later was used to indicate the expansive walled gardens of the first Persian Empire. From here, the term filtered into Greek and Semitic languages. An echo of these paradise gardens, including their organization, we can see in the description of the prelapsarian garden of Eden. In the Western world, these walled gardens dominated till the Age of Enlightenment. Even in old Persian history, walled gardens were seen as artifice, yet gardens seem to a particular degree to have been a medium, not merely for relating to, but reflecting on and even embracing the wild. Later, for instance in the geometric Renaissance gardens, they acquired a more complex character. They were walled off against what we see as wild. Their interior, however, was seen to reflect nature in its most perfect sense, questioning the relation between nature and the wild. These gardens were seen as the true presentation of nature untouched by human hand. They were, in a way, a

A Shelter in the Wilderness

61

Figure 3.6 In gardens, magnificent rhododendrons may contribute to an impression of being reconciled with nature, yet, outside the gardens, they show their wild character by wreaking ecological havoc. Photo: Eivind Kasa.

representation of the wild. Still, humans were at home in this world because the same nature also permeated humans, creating the beautiful harmony of the body. What existed outside the walls, on the other hand, was imperfect nature: nature, so to speak, in a fallen state. This seemingly chaotic nature was not so much at odds with the world of humans as it was at odds with nature itself. However, at the dawn of the Age of the Enlightenment, architects became increasingly interested in nature beyond the walls. In art and architecture, this originated in a seminal way from the experience of nature that British members of the leisured class underwent on their Grand Tours, having been barred from the continent for almost a century by wars. They came from an island where it has been said that most areas of nature had been groomed by humans for centuries. Beyond the English Channel, however, they encountered a novel nature, nature untouched by humans and untamed. This was also seen as nature in its original state, one that differed much from the natural state envisaged by the Renaissance. The aesthetic experience of this nature was captured by the concepts of the picturesque and the sublime. These experiences were the basis for the creation of the first modern landscape gardens in England, and from here they influenced the architecture of buildings, changing it forever. The picturesque and the sublime became the aesthetic expressions of modern architecture as a whole.

62

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

The picturesque – or painterly – view of ‘wild’ nature was a view of ‘rough’ and ‘rugged’ nature, as depicted through the paintings of men like Salvator Rosa, the Ruisdaels, and in particular Claude Lorrain. They reflected the experience of a nature lacking the order, symmetry, harmony and beauty of Renaissance nature, or humanly groomed nature. And still this perspective represented a taming of nature of its own kind. It was a perspective on nature as a set of views seen from the point of view of humans, and in particular, painters. It is even intimately linked to the creation and optical logic of modern landscape painting as a genre. Its human origin is reflected in the picturesque aesthetic being one of ‘views’ of particular painterly vitality. And the view is constituted by the viewer. The picturesque aesthetic transformed the architecture of gardens fundamentally. This is noticeable even in the first picturesque ones laid out by the painter, landscape architect, furniture-maker and architect of buildings, William Kent, for the gardens at Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House during the 1720s, and later, perhaps the most famous, the gardens at Stowe in Buckinghamshire. The human dominance at the source of this new aesthetic of seemingly wild nature is illustrated by Sir Horace Walpole’s well-known comment about William Kent, saying that he was the first that leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden. This kind of gardening was a dissemination of the human order, a swallowing up of the wild. One step closer to a wild experience of nature when released from the human dimension, as we have examined it, we may find in sublime gardens. These exhibit qualities like monumentality, privation, infinity, or death and other qualities of the sublime described by Burke. The experiences that laid the ground for the sublime of landscape gardens originated from British travellers’ experiences of real dangers on their Grand Tour to Italy. At sea and crossing the Alps they experienced the immensity and lack of order of wild nature that seemed to refute human existence. Crossing the sea, they encountered fog, heavy rain showers and gales, and the possibility of shipwrecks and drowning. Similarly, crossing the Alps, they encountered the risk of being killed by snowstorms, landslides, deluges and icy frost. These experiences actualized death as the paramount wildness. Naturally, Burke called death ‘this king of terrors’.27 And yet the sublime experience, too, is controlled in the sense that it – as Burke28 states – is an experience of the wild from two steps’ distance and presupposes in some sense the taming of the wild: ‘When danger or pain press to nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and are delightful, as we everyday experience.’ Some English landscape gardens like Stourhead, or perhaps even more so the Nordic natural gardens, reach such a semblance to the wild that they seem to be reconciled with it. Yet even in the most natural ones, there lurks a fear: the essence of the wild – whether it is for ill or for good – is the refusal of human dominance, scale and even meaning. This fundamental indifference to humans makes humans homeless in the world. It makes us vulnerable and evokes shudder and even fear. The persistence of fear when humans face nature is aptly taken care of by the myth of Arcadia, which was the mythical place of reconciliation between humans and nature, and also the home of the forest god Pan. This deity might suddenly strike humans and animals with senseless fear, with ‘panic’.

A Shelter in the Wilderness

63

Humans and nature are involved in a continuous struggle, which is linked to the topic of the present book. What is subjugated into servitude and may even seem endangered, may dangerously return. It may intrude again into our human world and instigate fear. Earlier we referred to Simmel’s comments on the relation between humans and nature as volatile. When nature gains the upper hand, it creates ‘a cosmic tragedy which, so we feel, makes every ruin an object infused with our nostalgia; for now the decay appears as nature’s revenge for the spirit’s having violated it by making a form in its own image’.29 This is eminently noticeable in gardens. Gardens may crumble and be recaptured by the wild. Their buildings may turn into ruins. The sense of melancholy created by this is in a unique way represented by decaying gardens like the well-known Lost Gardens of Heligan,30 the hanging gardens of Babylon that are lost forever, and perhaps, in an even more profound sense, the mythical Garden of Eden. In the Anthropocene the tenuous character of what is actually a ceaselessly unstable balance between architecture and the wild, and how easily nature overpowers buildings making them uninhabitable, turning them into ruins and ultimately swallowing them up, has acquired renewed relevance.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Vitruvius, On Architecture, trans. Richard Schofield (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 37–38. Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise. The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: The MIT Press, 1997), 183. James J. Gibson, Reasons for Realism. Selected Essays of James J. Gibson (Hillsdale, New Jersey; London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1982). James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, New Jersey, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986), 127. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 134. Gerhard Vollmer, ‘Evolutionäre Erkenntnistheorie’, in Lexikon der Erkenntnistheorie, ed. Thomas Bonk (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2013), 43–48. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 37–38. Vitruvius, On Architecture, 20. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 183. Ibid., 19. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 33. George Simmel, ‘Two essays’, The Hudson Review 11, no. 3 (1958): ‘The ruin’, 379. Vitruvius, On Architecture, 38. Ibid., 38–39. Simmel, ‘Two essays’: ‘The ruin’, 379. Vitruvius, On Architecture, 166 (My italics). Ibid., 38–39. Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture. The Natural History of Human Cooperation (London: The Penguin Group, 2012), 38.

64

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

21 22 23 24 25

Vitruvius, On Architecture, 38. Ibid., 39–40. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 130. Ibid., 137. Hart Crane, The Project Gutenberg EBook of War is Kind, by Stephen Crane, (n.d.), gutenberg.org/ebooks/9870. Peter C. Mayer-Tasch, ‘Der Garten Eden’, in Die Geschichte der Gärten und Parks, ed. Hans Sarkowicz (Frankfurt a. M. and Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1998), 14. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings (London: The Penguin Group, 1998), 86. Ibid., 86. Simmel, ‘Two essays’: ‘The ruin’, 379. As the result of two World Wars, the gardens at the Heligan estate in Cornwall were seriously neglected and ultimately scarcely detectable. Thus, at the time of their rediscovery at the end of the twentieth century, they embodied the melancholy and mystery so often characterizing lost gardens. The gardens were restored and are now very popular.

26 27

28 29 30

Literature Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings. London: The Penguin Group, 1998. Crane, Hart. The Project Gutenberg EBook of War is Kind, by Stephen Crane. n.d. gutenberg.org/ebooks/9870. Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, New Jersey, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986. Gibson, James J. Reasons for Realism. Selected Essays of James J. Gibson Edited by Edward Reed and Rebecca Jones. Hillsdale, New Jersey; London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1982. Mayer-Tasch, Peter C. ‘Der Garten Eden’. In Die Geschichte der Gärten und Parks, edited by Hans Sarkowicz, 13–26. Frankfurt a. M. and Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1998. Pagel, Mark. Wired for Culture. The Natural History of Human Cooperation. London: The Penguin Group, 2012. Rykwert, Joseph. On Adam’s House in Paradise. The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The MIT Press, 1997. Simmel, George. ‘Two essays’. The Hudson Review 11, no. 3 (1958): 371–385. doi:10.2307/3848614. Vitruvius. On Architecture. Translated by Richard Schofield. London: Penguin Books, 2009. Vollmer, Gerhard. ‘Evolutionäre Erkenntnistheorie’. In Lexikon der Erkenntnistheorie, edited by Thomas Bonk, 43–48. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2013.

4

Of Wolves and Walls: Architecture and the Wild Andrew Ballantyne

‘The men of old were born like the wild beasts, in woods, caves, and groves, and lived on savage fare,’ said Vitruvius.1 They were brought together by the campfire – in his account – before they even had speech or society. We can imagine the campfire in the night, as people ate together and told one another stories, while in the darkness round about there were nameless threats that stayed unseen away from the light, looking in at the people in their space defined by shadow. We look from face to face and feel safe in this company, our attention fixed away from the worries of the night. Architecture is never wild. The originary purpose of building is to exclude the wild, to keep it at bay, so we are safe inside, away from it. The sense of wildness and its exclusion is there in the earliest imaginings of what a building is. In this mindset the wild is not ‘us’ – it is what threatens us. The picture is complicated by the fact that the whole of this world-before-buildings looks wild from a modern perspective, and also because while the zone of sociability and safety defined by the campfire seems benign and cosy, it does leave others excluded from this zone. This becomes clearer and significantly less negotiable once the space is defined not by the limitations of fire-light but by a wall. Walls began in earnest with the construction of permanent settlements about 10,000 years ago. There were humans for millions of years before that – people lived in places where the climate allowed. They certainly made fires and travelled with dogs, maybe with sheep, and they might have built shelters like the nests that apes still build for themselves each day. Such structures do not leave a trace to be found thousands of years later, unlike campfires, which if they are made on clay soil can fire the earth beneath them and leave a detectable ceramic trace.2 The idea of ‘civilization’ comes in with the development of towns, and once it is established the people who live without permanent buildings start to seem in a sense ‘wild’, but for most humans through most of the time there have been humans, that was the only condition there was.3 Everyone was wild, but no one knew it so it makes no sense as a category – no one would have looked at another and thought them wild. The first settlements seem to have been associated with agriculture in the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers – Mesopotamia – in places that are now in Iraq.4 By modern standards they were small, and some fell out of use as their soil was depleted by farming, but over the centuries they proliferated and grew. Ur of the Chaldees counted as a mighty city in Biblical 65

66

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

times. Four thousand years ago, its population of about 65,000 made it the largest settlement in the world.5 That population would fit into a few blocks of Tokyo – the population of which is now above 38 million for the metropolitan area. The thing that is striking about the change is how rapidly it has happened. The human population was negligible 10,000 years ago and could easily have lapsed into extinction, but now there are about 8 billion people. Collectively we move a greater quantity of minerals around the surface of the Earth than glaciers did during the Ice Age. This has led people to want to call our current epoch the Anthropocene — from ‘anthropos’ the Greek word for a person.6 In geological time the 10,000 years that separate us from the global warming that brought the Ice Age to an end are hardly noticeable, so the earlier coinage ‘Holocene’, meaning (more or less) ‘now’, does not need to be superseded and so long as we can think of those 10,000 years as less than the blink of an eye, the names Holocene and Anthropocene can be used interchangeably. If we are looking at human history then we want to slow down and pay more attention, because the changes for humans have been astonishing. We have moved from a state-of-affairs where there were no permanent buildings, to one where there are so many that most of us – and anyone at all likely to be reading this book – cannot imagine how we would live without them. How did people think 10,000 years ago? We do not know, but we can be sure that it was not how people ordinarily think today. Around the world now there are people who do not think like me. To take an example: the imaginations of the Dogons in Sudan were opened up for us through conversations with a wise man, Ogotemmêli, steeped in the traditions of his place. In the conversations a whole cosmogony is revealed, which is new to me. As Guy Davenport put it: The Dogon . . . will tell you that a white fox name Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impudent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, and there’s nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience. This is not folklore, or a quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans.7

One of the very striking things about the Dogon imagination is how strongly people’s activity is connected with their habitat, so metals are seen to be worked from the earth, and a blacksmith is someone who makes tools to work the earth. ‘By striking the anvil,’ said Ogotemmêli, ‘they get back from the earth some of the life-force they gave it. Their blows recover it.’8 An altar in a Dogon village was traditionally ‘erected above a man buried standing, who had offered his strength and his body for the stability of the human settlement on the new earth’.9 The smith is set apart, and does not work the fields himself, but he exacts a tribute: given grain by those who use his instruments. There is life in soil of course, but also in the hammer blows, which must be made in daylight or everything is negated. Deleuze and Guattari’s knowledge of Dogon ways comes through Ogotemmêli, and they say: The Dogons . . . formulate the problem as follows: an organism befalls the body of the smith, by virtue of a machine or machinic assemblage that stratifies it. ‘The

Of Wolves and Walls: Architecture and the Wild

67

shock of the hammer and the anvil broke his arms and legs at the elbows and knees, which until that moment he had not possessed. In this way, he received the articulations specific to the new human form that was to spread across the earth, a form dedicated to work. . . . His arm became folded with a view to work.’ It is obviously only a manner of speaking to limit the articulatory relation to the bones. The entire organism must be considered in relation to a double articulation, and on different levels.10

We need not pursue the implications here, beyond noticing that with the Dogon description of the world and the people in it there is a range of ways of thinking that would not ordinarily occur to me. Key concepts structure the ways in which experience is understood and elaborated, so not only the actual world is affected, but the whole of the imagination. There is a parallel in the idea of the episteme that Michel Foucault explained in Les mots et les choses, where characteristic ways of thinking belong recognizably to different epochs of human development.11 I do not need to understand the specifics of Ogotemmêli’s thought to realize that his way of dealing with the world is very different from mine. The shift in living, from nomadic to urban, over the course of five or six thousand years is great enough for us to suspect that a shift in patterns of thought might be the result. By the time the Great Ziggurat of Ur was built (let us say 4,000 years ago) we have an urban population and a society that is capable of building a great monument. It was built using sun-hardened brick – not an inherently expensive material – but used in such quantities that it displays a sustained and concentrated effort, impressive at the practical level (moving great quantities of earth into a tall geometric formation) but directed to a goal that is – in my mind – metaphysical, but which in the minds of the ancient rulers of Ur was worth the effort. In their minds the building was as practical and sensible as a motorway interchange is for us.12 Such monuments, when they are actually built, are powerful evidence of the real importance of the things that are valued in the society that built them. ‘Architecture is the expression of the true nature of societies, as physiognomy is the expression of the nature of individualism,’ said Georges Bataille.13 If such buildings had been seen as inessential then they would have been too costly to build. They are not just desirable things. At the time, in that place, they were seen to be necessary. Between the earliest settlements and the construction of the ziggurat there was a development and consolidation of a culture in which ideas that at first might have seemed quite nebulous, became firmly held beliefs, or – as we say of our own firmly held beliefs – self-evident truths. The brick is one of these facts of life. Nomads have no use for bricks. They were invented in Mesopotamia and as their properties became known they could be used for increasingly ambitious projects. These projects, whether it was the building of settlements or monuments, required organizational competence. The bricks were made from local clay, baked in the sun and assembled into buildings. For a building like the ziggurat, millions of bricks were needed. That is work for teams of people. One of the things that we find in towns and cities is that it becomes possible for specialisms to develop. In a small rural community perhaps everyone is a farmer, with maybe a blacksmith – or maybe the smith is a visitor, who trades with different places. In a larger town there are shopkeepers, lawyers, potters, weavers. The produce from the

68

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

farms is consumed here by people who exchange their specialist services for the food or for money. There is social specialization and stratification. At Ur, by the time the ziggurat was constructed, there were kings. In principle perhaps a nomadic people could develop a comparable range of social stratifications, but it does not happen. The king in a state of 65,000 sedentary dwellers can command a concentration of resources that goes far beyond the capacities of nomadic chiefs. The settlements made possible this stratification and saw the invention of the brick. It may well have ushered in a new type of consciousness, as Julian Jaynes has proposed.14 By our standards there was a blurring of mythic and factual categories. The inhabitants of Ur recorded that their early kings lived for 42,000 years each, whereas the more recent kings lived for more plausible durations. In a culture before fact-checking such ideas would not be challenged, but the kind of organizational rationality needed for the building works might nag for explanations. The early culture seems to have been conducted in the company of gods who were always present, influencing events and moods. By the time the new consciousness had taken hold, the gods were more remote. They were somehow in the sky, and their messengers were birds then angels. The ziggurat was built so as to reach the gods, so communication could be improved. Given the system of beliefs, it was a practical project. The move away from the wild, initiated by agriculture, saw the invention of bricks, social stratification, angels and consciousness. Doubtless the causes and effects could be worked out in different ways, but as a question of history if not of logic they are certainly associated. The culture that established this mentality and that produced bricks and angels also produced the first wild man in literature, Enkidu, who comes in from the wild under the influence of Gilgamesh, but then, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau 3,500 years later, wonders if the trade-off is worth it. He has the advantages of civilization – its comforts – but he is disconnected from the things that for him have real meaning.15 The Sumerian settlements were formed for agriculture and even the relatively few city-dwellers who were not active in the fields were not so remote from the nomads who would have come in to trade. Enkidu knows nothing of the cultivated land, but lurks with wild beats at water holes.16 He is unaware of the food that humans usually eat. He drinks from the breasts of wild animals and eats grass. A prostitute is sent to lure him, and she brings him to a shepherds’ camp on the way to the town where he is introduced to bread and wine. The shepherds are still nomadic, but they have access to the products of the town – the bread and wine are sedentary products from wheat fields and vineyards. Gilgamesh himself is two-thirds deity, and he is not an ideal king. He behaves to other men as would a wolf – Homo Homini Lupus.17 People resent his habit of having sex with brides before they have slept with their husbands. On his way to one such rape, Enkidu stands up to him, and wrestles him to the ground. Gilgamesh wins the fight, but the two end up as very close friends who treat each other as equals.18 Gilgamesh is always in touch with his wild side, but this is more clearly a good thing when he is in Enkidu’s company. The story of Enkidu’s induction into citizenship can be read as a symbolic way of discussing social evolution, and the two are both lawless – Gilgamesh because as king (and a capricious king at first) he decides what is the law, Enkidu because he is outside the law.19 Their union makes them even more formidable as Gilgamesh’s state power is guided by Enkidu’s sense of justice. The wildness that would seem to be excluded is reinscribed at the heart of the palace.

Of Wolves and Walls: Architecture and the Wild

69

In the modern world we look to the wild with a sense of greater distance. That is to say: there are people who live as wildly as anyone ever has, but if we are really immersed in the wild, we are not in a position to write about it. Take Francis Bacon, for example, in his essay on gardens. He begins by saying ‘God Almighty first planted a garden,’ by which he means the Garden of Eden – definitively wild, but presented in the Bible as benign and bountiful. Part of the princely garden that Bacon proposes is to be a heath, ‘framed, as much as may be, to a natural wildness’.20 But then when he goes into more detail, the wildness sounds very tame indeed. There are to be no trees, but thickets of sweet-briar and honeysuckle, the ground planted with violets, strawberries and primroses. This is a very civilized sixteenth-century idea of the wild, and far from being the wildest thing that Bacon would have known. The forests, which were still used for hunting for food and sport, were significantly wilder than the garden. Again, when Horace Walpole said that the artist and designer William Kent ‘jumped the fence and saw that all of nature was a garden’,21 it was part of his narrative about the development of landscape design that concluded with the then-modern taste for landscape that looked uncomposed – especially the arcadian landscapes of Capability Brown. The aim was to produce a garden that looked like nature, but without any of nature’s difficulties or terrors. To a degree this non-wild nature was enriched in the following generation, with the taste for craggy picturesqueness and raging torrents, but it was still a question of setting up landscapes that satisfied an aesthetic agenda without putting the visitor in actual peril, the way that genuine wildness would have done. Richard Payne Knight castigated gardeners who tamed the landscape with anodyne clumps of trees, and wanted to see them preserving the dark depths of the forests where the forces of nature could dwell. As he did this in verse in the eighteenth century, the forces of nature are nymphs and dryads and for the modern imagination their power is not evoked so vividly as he hoped.22 He commissioned a painting of Orpheus surrounded by wild animals, soothed and calmed by the harmony of his song. Of course, later he was torn limb from limb by the Bacchantes, but the wild beasts were tamed by the sound of harmonies. Francis Bacon, who saw Orpheus as the personification of philosophy, had this to say. Philosophy, being almost unequal to the task, has cause to grow sad, and hence betakes itself to human affairs, insinuating into men’s minds the love of virtue, equity, and peace, by means of eloquence and persuasion; thus forming men into societies; bringing them under laws and regulations; and making them forget their unbridled passions and affections, so long as they hearken to precepts and submit to discipline. And thus they soon after build themselves habitations, form cities, cultivate lands, plant orchards, gardens, &c.23

It was Bacon’s thesis that the myths of the ancient world were coded embodiments of wisdom, so Cupid was a personification of the atom, the Sphinx of science, and so on. There are times when Bacon’s decodings seem over elaborate, but the general approach of translating the ancient myths into insights about psychology, social formation and physics is serious and enlightening. In a world before modern consciousness and what we call rationality this symbolic language was a way of talking about and passing on

70

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

wisdom that resonates with personal feelings and experience, but that does not ordinarily come to the surface. Freud’s use of the Oedipus myth, for example, shows us in a modern context how the Theban royal family’s relationships make visible the feelings that we might all have but that we hardly ever act upon. The actions are unacceptable, so we do not normally even acknowledge having the feelings, let alone go through with the murderous incestuous acts.24 This ‘unpacking’ of the content of the myth makes it surrender an insight that we modern readers might not have noticed was there. It is a story that has its own internal logic. One act is the cause of the next. The disaster is brought about because it is predicted and because steps are taken to avoid it. This aspect is highlighted in Jean Cocteau’s retelling to the story as The Infernal Machine.25 The logic of cause and effect is part of what makes the narrative satisfying, but its real importance is its resonance within us. Similarly, to take a more recent example, the story we all hear as children – Little Red Riding Hood – best known in Charles Perrault’s retelling – is a way of rehearsing with children anxieties with distinctly adult themes. Angela Carter’s use of the story in ‘The Company of Wolves’ draws out unchildish aspects of the relation between girl and wolf.26 The story suggests something distinctly wilder than Bacon’s wilderness, where the wolf is at the top of the food chain – hungry and predatory. These stories resonate not because we continue to be afraid of wolves. At a practical level there is no need for that, so long as we stay in the parts of the world where wolves no longer feel at home. There has been a shift in thinking. When the first walls were being built there were very few people in the world and Sapiens might have died out altogether, like the Neanderthals did. But that is not what happened. The walls that exclude the wild and modify the climate so we can inhabit places other than the rainforest are part of the machinery that makes possible that survival and multiplication. It is now the wild that is endangered. Except that it is not. What we did when we shut out the wild with our walls, was to make it unnecessary for us to have some of the instincts that were bred into us over the millions of years when we had no walls. If we take away the walls and all the security that goes with them, we can find that those instances are still with us. Jack London in The Call of the Wild explored this idea in the persona of a dog, Buck – kept as a pet in a well-to-do household at the outset – who is treacherously sold into a condition like slavery, but who is then set free as his masters and companions perish and he reverts to a feral state, taking up with wolves and ‘singing a song of the younger world’.27 When Buck is well treated he adapts well to the company of humans, but it is the call of the wild that wins him round in the end. The reason the stories about wolves play well with us is because we recognize that there is something of the wild in us. We can put up walls to protect ourselves from the wild that is outside, but we can also shut the wild within, where it can if it is not properly managed erupt in depression, domestic violence and murder. On the whole, we manage things better than that, but these things happen. Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf is a novel in which the protagonist, Harry Haller, believes himself to be part wolf and ill-suited to polite society.28 Leonora Carrington imagined things the other way around, and in her story ‘The Debutante’ the narrator persuades a hyena to take her place in society. It is a very cultivated hyena – she has taught it French – and it wears the narrator’s maid’s face so as not to be detected.29 The

Of Wolves and Walls: Architecture and the Wild

71

oldest known sculpture, the Löwenmensch figurine, which may be 37,000 years old, shows a lion-headed person.30 Anubis, the jackal-headed god in ancient Egypt, had a part-human form and there is a rich literature of werewolves, from Ovid onwards – he tells of Lycaon of Arcadia, who was turned into a wolf by Zeus.31 And the tradition is not only literary. There were legal cases where people turned into wolves and were tried for crimes committed in the wolf state. In 1603 Jean Grenier was found guilty of attacking and eating children, but remained unpunished because of the disorganized state of his brain.32 He was not thought to be insane, but it was supposed that his transformation into wolf-form was something that happened only in his imagination. A philosopher, Mark Rowlands, wrote an account of his life with a wolf.33 He made mistakes from time to time – for example leaving the wolf without company or attention, and finding when he returned that his house’s furnishings and ventilation system had been absolutely destroyed. The account reminded me of something that happened to a colleague who had a wife and small children, living in a beautiful but isolated place – isolated not just because it was away from the city, but because the relatives were all on a distant continent. One day he returned home at the end of a day’s work to find that his wife had smashed every piece of crockery in the house. They moved. The wife had connected with her wolf-becoming and in that state could do things that she would not have dreamt of doing when she was relating to humans.34 The image of domestic contentment that is presented to the world in normal polite behaviour involves accommodating some wildness. Signs of chaos are not in themselves a problem. On the contrary. It is perhaps when signs of chaos are most completely concealed that the wildness can assert itself most unexpectedly and catastrophically. I can hear at the back of my mind Marianne Faithfull’s voice singing ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ – a bored housewife – who could clean the house for hours, or rearrange the flowers, or run naked through the shady street, screaming all the way.35 ‘Most people,’ said Henry Thoreau, ‘lead lives of quiet desperation,’ not least desperate housewives.36 We do not normally see it. We see well-regulated lives and respectable decorum, like the households in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, where old-fashioned children have intense conversations. They are not the sort of novels where improper behaviour is acceptable, but they are the sort of novels where the children will gather round and watch while one hen pecks another to death. ‘What are death-pangs like?’ said Henry. [. . .] ‘I don’t know,’ said his sister, [. . .] ‘And I don’t think the hen is having them. It seems not to know anything.’37

The children are innocent of the ways of the wider human world, but they have intuitions about the wild, so it seems obvious to Henry that the hens are angry with the one they are pecking because that one is ill. It seems self-evident that the hens would eliminate the weak one. By contrast, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, when she was asked ‘What is the earliest sign of civilization?’, replied ‘A healed femur.’ In the hens’ – and Henry’s – state of civilization the person with the broken leg would have been abandoned or worse. In a nomadic life that person without support would soon have perished. It is a mark of civilization that the injured person was cared for and the leg

72

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

had the chance to heal.38 The children in the novel are becoming civilized, but as yet their formation is incomplete and their intuitions as voiced are still informed by the wild. The call of the wild is innate in us, but we are socialized away from it. When we shut the wild away with walls then we bring it in with us. Some of the ‘wildest’ things we do – our bodily functions, our sexual acts – are hidden away in the most private parts of our dwellings, secreted right at the heart of them. They are things that everybody has to accommodate, but in ordinarily respectable households we do not want witnesses. Freud brought to light the importance of the things we learn not to discuss in polite company. One of his patients, from Russia, remembered from childhood a particular picture of a wolf that would make him scream with terror, afraid that the wolf would come and eat him. His sister would make sure that the picture kept coming his way.39 He had terrible problems – unable to move his bowels without an enema – and sudden uncontrollable panics. He had a terrifying dream of a tree full of white wolves, and when Freud published his account of the treatment he protected the man’s anonymity by calling him the Wolf Man, but he did not identify with them and did not think of himself as a wolf. Freud remarked that ‘In the psychology of adults we have fortunately reached the point of being able to give a clearly-worded description of both, With children this distinction leaves us almost completely in the lurch, It is often embarrassing to decide what one would choose to call conscious and what unconscious.’40 So perhaps this is a repetition of the shift in consciousness that Julian Jaynes was trying to document.41 In the mind as in the body, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, as Ernst Haeckel put it.42 When was that distinction first drawn? Now the distinction between conscious and unconscious is clear enough (Freud would say) that we can draw a clear line to separate one from the other. That can be disputed, and the work of Gaston Bachelard, for example, addressed the issue of how poetic and quasi-poetic images might have a role to play in even the most scientific thought.43 It is equally clear from Ogotemmêlli that to draw this distinction is not a universal in human nature. The line could be drawn in a different place or not drawn at all. It is something that is learnt, and anything that has to be learnt could be not-learnt by some individuals or by some whole cultures. If everyone around us has grown up being formed through a process that makes no distinction between conscious and unconscious and none of us thinks to invent that distinction, then no one is going to think that anything is wrong. So the emergence of settlements, the growth of cities, the origin of consciousness, the flight of the gods to the sky and the invention of angels could all be circumvented if we were to go unformed as children into the wild and see what our instincts tell us about how to deal with the world. That was the project of Jay Griffiths, as recounted in her book Wild: An Elemental Journey.44 In the rainforest we find ourselves in a place where spirits are not remote in the sky, but are immanent everywhere. Amazonian people speak of spirits everywhere in the forests. The Kumaka people say there are spirits in streams, lakes, trees, salt licks and the small garden plots. One Shawi man comments ‘We Shawi think that every living thing has its own spirit.’ For a Shiwilu man, Fidel Lomas Chota, there is a connection between

Of Wolves and Walls: Architecture and the Wild

73

wildness and spirit: domesticated plants don’t have a spirit, but by contrast las fruits sylvestres, wild fruits, have spirits, and everything in el monte (the wild forest) has dueño, spirit.45

Immersed in the forest, one’s survival depends on being able to understand these spirits and their messages. The sacred places of the forest are wild in the sense of not being subject to human will and management. They have their own volition. These places are, we might say in the language of the Anthropocene, ‘post-human’, but of course they are in themselves pre-human and whatever they do in their flourishing they do it without reference to human values, as they always have done. The ‘post-human’ perspective is our own, if we learn to see that the human elements of interaction are part of an ecology, which is to say in Gregory Bateson’s terms, part of a mind – conscious and unconscious.46 It is with such a mind that one can ‘think like a mountain’, as Aldo Leopold exhorted us to do, and for that the wolves are crucial.47 We try to make ourselves safe by eradicating the wolves, but as a result the deer population takes over and eats every green shoot, so the mountain dies. Too much safety kills us. ‘Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains but seldom perceived among men.’48 Leopold approvingly cites Henry Thoreau’s dictum ‘In wildness is the preservation of the world.’49 This is from Thoreau’s essay about walking, which takes him – of course – into the wild, where he finds that civilization is nurtured and sustained by wolves. This is the immediate continuation from Leopold’s quotation. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.50

Thoreau’s essay opens by declaring that he wishes to speak for ‘Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.’51 Thoreau and Leopold are important voices in the development of an ecological outlook that sees man as part of nature – taking us outside the barriers of our ancestral walls – but their reports of what they find are shaped by civil culture. By contrast Jay Griffiths is immersively feral. Thoreau values the wolf, but stops well short of becoming a wolf in the way that Griffiths becomes a jaguar. When he went to live in the woods, he took books with him and his writing is as likely to put us in touch with Homer as with the Penobscot people who inhabited the region nomadically before immigrants started to build houses and call the place New England. Already, though, we are far removed from Bacon’s wilderness shrubbery in a princely garden. Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein’s situation in twentieth-century Vienna was no less princely.

74

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

When she was living in a seventeenth-century palace designed by Fischer von Erlach, she commissioned a new house from her brother Ludwig, who had, for a while, retired from philosophy. He worked with a trained architect, Paul Engelmann, and produced a design for living grandly but austerely in a manner influenced by the example of Adolf Loos. What Ludwig learnt from the experience was that architecture was not for him. ‘Within all great art,’ he said there is a WILD animal: tamed [. . .] All great art has primitive human drives as its ground bass. They are not the melody [. . .] but are what gives the melody its depth and power. [. . .] My house for Gretl is the product of a decidedly sensitive ear, good manners, the expression of great understanding (for a culture, etc.) But primordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open – is lacking.52

There was nowhere more refined and cultivated than the Wittgensteins’ milieu. Brahms came to Ludwig and Gretl’s parents’ house to hear the first performance of his clarinet quintet.53 She had her portrait painted by Klimt.54 It is easy to imagine going through the motions of polite behaviour in such a setting, and if one were there by entitlement rather than by invitation maybe no one would notice if one had nothing much to say. But the wild life, erupting into the conversation – discussion of ideas that actually mattered – that would be more difficult. It would have to be veiled by decorum and might pass unnoticed, but in the right company it can work as it works with Brahms’s clarinet quintet, which seethes and swoons and soothes, moving through agitation and serenity to find some sort of affirmation. People still want to listen to it now – over 130 recordings of it are available. Whatever wildness it was that Brahms could connect with to stir him to write, it evidently finds a way to stir something in us, though what that is is hard to pin down. I will not here speculate about the precise mechanisms, but I do want to affirm Wittgenstein’s perception. The wildness in the music calls out for a response from the wildness in me. Again the wild things are in the house, within the walls.55 A concert pianist, Hélène Grimaud, has written about her involvement with wolves and their therapeutic effect, and has been photographed with wolves for her publicity material.56 The images make a visual claim to the state of affairs that Wittgenstein says there should be. If we can’t hear the wolf in her playing, we can see it in the photos and make the association. Now, far from protecting ourselves against the wild, we need to find ways to make sure we do not lose touch with it. ‘In wildness is the preservation of the world.’57 In the ecology of ideas the wildness is to be nurtured, maybe as a sacred duty – which is rather how Thoreau saw it – or maybe because in the end all our lives depend upon it – which is a more pragmatic line of reasoning, and how Thoreau thought he might persuade others to take up his cause. Now that we have learnt how productive machines can be – they can keep going, night and day, without fatigue or distraction – we tend to disappoint ourselves in the workplace if we cannot do the same ourselves. We expect ourselves to be efficient and are disappointed when our attention wanders. The Bauhaus-influenced architect in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is so in tune with modernity that he no longer needs to sleep.58 If we can do more, we can earn more and that must be a good thing, but – as Lucy Jordan reminds us – if we do not accommodate

Of Wolves and Walls: Architecture and the Wild

75

the wild that is in us, things can go badly wrong. Doctors can prescribe anti-depressants to help us carry on, but immersion in wildness is also a good therapy. If we put ourselves in a position where our instincts can act then we can live a satisfying life without needing to push ourselves so hard. This might entail withdrawing from the society we know, and that might seem like too high a price. Enkidu was familiar with those instincts and with acting on them. When he lay dying he cursed the woman who had lured him away from them, into the splendour of the city where he had lived at the highest level of society. His curses gravitate around her house. ‘You shall never make your house voluptuous again,’ he says, ‘The builder shall never plaster the walls. Owls will nest in your roof beams. Feasting will never take place there.’59 In his pure state he lived without any of these things himself, and lived contentedly. His curse wishes on her a state that he would welcome for himself. A voice from the sky reminds him of all the good things that have come his way since his involvement with the woman, and he retracts his curse. He has been won over by society, but he would have understood Thoreau being drawn to the wild and the woods. He said that he did it because he did not want, when he came to die, to discover that he had not lived.60

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15

Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio) book 2, chapter 1. Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan, The Ten Books of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 38. Steve Mithen. After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000–5,000 BC (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003). Norbert Elias. The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). James C. Scott. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). https://www.thoughtco.com/largest-cities-throughout-history-4068071 Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (London: Penguin, 2018). Guy Davenport. ‘The Geography of the Imagination’, in The Geography of the Imagination (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1981), 3–4. Marcel Griaule. Dieu d’eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmêli (Paris: Fayard, 1948); translated by Ralph Butler, Audrey Richards and Beatrice Hooke, Conversations with Ogotemmêli: an Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 87. Griaule, Ogotemmêli, 88. Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 41, quoting Griaule, op. cit., 38–41. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) translated by Paul Rabinow, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970). Andrew Ballantyne, Key Buildings From Prehistory to the Present (London: Laurence King, 2012), 44–45, 98–99. Georges Bataille, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, 35. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (New York: Mariner, 2000). Translated by N. K. Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh (London: Penguin, 1960). The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, edited by Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson, 676.

76

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

16 Gilgamesh, 63. 17 Carla Freccero, ‘Wolf, or Homo Homini Lupus’, in Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), M91–106. 18 Gilgamesh, 67. 19 Jacques Derrida, Séminaire: La bête et le souverain (Paris: Galilée, 2008) translated by Geoffrey Bennington, The Beast and the Sovereign 2 vols (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 2010). 20 Francis Bacon, Essays (London: Dent, 1972), 141. 21 Walpole, Horace (Lord Orford) The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, 1780 (New York: Ursus, 1995). 22 Richard Payne Knight, The Landscape: a Didactic Poem (London: 1795). 23 Francis Bacon, The Wisdom of the Ancients, Chapter 11. Knight was familiar with this work and often cited it – using its Latin title, De Sapientia Veterum, and Francis Bacon’s Latin title too. He was Viscount St Alban’s, and the place was called Verulamium by the Romans, hence Bacon’s Latin title, Verulam. 24 Juan-David Nasio, Oedipe: Le concept le plus crucial de la psychoanalyse (Paris: Payot, 2005). 25 Jean Cocteau, La machine infernale (Paris: Grasset, 1934) translated by Albert Bermel, ‘The Infernal Machine’ in The Infernal Machine and Other Plays by Jean Cocteau (New York: New Directions, 1963). 26 Angela Carter, ‘The Company of Wolves’, in The Bloody Chamber (London: Gollancz, 1979), 129–139. 27 Jack London, The Call of the Wild ([1903] 1982). 28 Herman Hesse, Der Steppenwolf (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1929) translated by David Horrocks, Steppenwolf (London: Penguin, 2012). 29 Leonora Carrington, ‘The Debutante’, in The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (St Louis MO: Dorothy, 2017), 3–7. 30 http://www.loewenmensch.de/figur.html and see Neil MacGregor, Living with the Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples (London: Penguin Random House, 2018), 3–13. 31 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), translated by Mary M. Innes, Metamorphoses (London: Penguin, 1955), 34–35; translated by A. D. Melville, Metamorphoses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 7–8. 32 Charlotte F. Otten, Werewolves in Western Culture: A Lycanthropy Reader (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 51. 33 Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness (London: Granta, 2009). 34 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, chapter two: ‘One or Several Wolves?’, 26–38, and chapter ten: ‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming Imperceptible . . .’, 232–309. 35 Shel Silverstein, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, 1974. The cover by Marianne Faithfull is on her album Broken English, 1979. 36 Henry Thoreau, Walden, 1854 (New York: Norton, 1966), 5. Actually ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,’ but I have rephrased it for the inclusive language that it certainly merits. For Desperate Housewives see ABC Studios and Cherry Productions, 180 episodes, 2004–2012. 37 Ivy Compton-Burnett, The Present and the Past (London: Gollancz, 1953), 5. 38 The story does not appear in print under Mead’s name, and may be apocryphal, but it was attributed to Mead by Paul Brand, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1980), 68.

Of Wolves and Walls: Architecture and the Wild 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

77

Freud, vol. 9, 243. Ibid., 346. Jaynes, Origin of Consciousness. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press [1958] 1994). Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey (New York: Jeremy Tarcher, 2006). Ibid., 54. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972). Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 129–133. Ibid., 133. Leopold gives it as ‘In wildness is the salvation of the world’, 133. Thoreau, ‘Walking’, in Henry David Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems (New York: The Library of America, 2001), 225–255, 239. Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’ in Collected Essays and Poems (New York: The Library of America, 2001), 225–255. Ibid., 225. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, edited by G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 43. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), 6. Ibid., 158. Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). Hélène Grimaud, Variations sauvages (Paris: France Loisirs, 2004) translated, Wild Harmonies: A Life of Music and Wolves (London: Riverhead Books, 2006). Thoreau, ‘Walking’, in Essays, 239. Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (London: Chapman and Hall, 1928). Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, 86–87 – slightly paraphrased [pronouns and punctuation marks that don’t make sense in the new context]. Thoreau, Walden, 61.

Literature Anonymous, translated by N. K. Sandars. The Epic of Gilgamesh. London: Penguin, 1960. Anonymous, translated by Andrew George. The Epic of Gilgamesh. London: Allen Lane, 1999. Anonymous, translated by Stephanie Dalley. Myths from Mesopotamia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Armstrong, Rachel. Liquid Life: On Non-Linear Materiality. Earth: Punctum Books, 2019. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press [1958] 1994. Bacon, Francis. Essays. London: Dent, 1972. Bacon, Francis. De sapientia veterum. London: 1609, translated by Sir Arthus George, The Wisdom of the Ancients. London: John Bill, 1619. Ballantyne, Andrew. Architecture, Landscape and Liberty: Richard Payne Knight and the Picturesque. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Ballantyne, Andrew. Key Buildings from Prehistory to the Present. London: Laurence King, 2012. Barnes, Simon. Rewild Yourself. London: Simon and Schuster, 2018.

78

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Bataille, Georges, Michel Leiris, Marcel Graille, Carl Einstein and Robert Desnos, translated by Iain White. Encyclopaedia Acephalica. London: Atlas Press, 1995. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1972. Bateson, Gregory. Naven. London: Wildwood House, 1980. Bateson, Nora. Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns. Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2016. Braidotti, Rosi, and Simone Bignall, editors, Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process After Deleuze. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Braidotti, Rosi and Rick Dolphijn. Philosophy After Nature. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Carrington, Leonora. The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington. St Louis MO: Dorothy, 2017. Coates, Peter. Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times. London: Polity, 1998. Dartnell, Lewis. Origins: How the Earth Made Us. London: Bodley Head, 2018. Davenport, Guy. The Geography of the Imagination. San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1981. Debaise, Didier. L’appât des possibles: Reprise de Whitehead (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2015) translated by Michael Halewood, Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 2 vols; vol. 1, L’antiOedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972) with a preface by Michel Foucault, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking, 1977); vol. 2, Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980) translated by Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire: La bête et le souverain (Paris: Galilée, 2008) translated by Geoffrey Bennington, The Beast and the Sovereign 2 vols. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 2010. Diamond, Jared. The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? London: Allen Lane, 2012. Egenter, Nold. Architectural Anthropology: The Present Relevance of the Primitive in Architecture. Lausanne: Structura Mundi, 1992. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Farrier, David. Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils. London: Fourth Estate, 2020. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966, translated by Paul Rabinow, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock, 1970. Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Sydney : Allen and Unwin, 2011. Griaule, Marcel. Dieu d’eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmêli. Paris: Fayard, 1948; translated by Ralph Butler, Audrey Richards and Beatrice Hooke, Conversations with Ogotemmêli: an Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Grimaud, Hélène. Variations sauvages. Paris: France Loisirs, 2004, translated, Wild Harmonies: A Life of Music and Wolves. London: Riverhead Books, 2006. Griffiths, Jay. Wild: An Elemental Journey. New York: Jeremy Tarcher, 2006. Gissen, David. Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009. Gould, Stephen Jay. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Guattari, Félix. Les trois écologies. Paris: Galilée, 1989, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, The Three Ecologies. London: Athlone, 2000.

Of Wolves and Walls: Architecture and the Wild

79

Hadot, Pierre. Le voile d’Isis. Paris: Gallimard, 2004; translated by Michael Chase, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006. Hadot, Pierre. Le Voile d’Isis: essai sur l’histoire de l’idée de Nature. Paris: Gallimard, 2004, translated by Michael Chase, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Hall, Matthew. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. New York: SUNY, 2011. Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992. Hesse, Hermann. Der Steppenwolf. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1929, translated by David Horrocks, Steppenwolf. London: Penguin, 2012. Hollier, Denis. La prise de la concorde. Paris: Gallimard, 1974, translated by Betsy Wing, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Higgins, Polly. Eradicating Ecocide. London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2010, 2nd edition 2015. Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. New York: Mariner, 2000. Hughes, Rolf, and Jenny Sundén. Second Nature: Origins and Originality in Art, Science, and New Media. Stockholm: Axl, 2011. Knight, Richard Payne. The Landscape: A Didactic Poem. London: 1794, 2nd edition 1795. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949. Lewis, Simon L. and Mark A. Maslin. The Human Planet: How we Created the Anthropocene. London: Penguin, 2018. Lewis-Williams, David. The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. London, Jack. The Call of the Wild. New York: Library of America, 1982. MacGregor, Neil. Living with the Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples. London: Penguin Random House, 2018. Mancuso, Stefano. Le piante hanna già inventato il nostro future. Rome: Giunti Editore, 2017, translated by Vanessa di Stefano, The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behaviour. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018. Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Mithen, Steve. After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000–5,000 BC. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003. Mithen, Steve. The Prehistory of the Mind. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. Mithen, Steve. The Singing Neanderthals. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992. Monbiot, George. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. London: Allen Lane, 2013. Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990. Montgomery, David R. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Morton, Timothy. Being Ecological. London: Penguin Random House, 2018. Naess, Arne. Ecology of Wisdom. London: Penguin, 2016.

80

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), translated by Mary M. Innes, Metamorphoses. London: Penguin, 1955; translated by A. D. Melville, Metamorphoses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Purdy, Jedediah. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Radner, Karen and Eleanor Robson. The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Scott, James C. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. New York: Harper and Row, 1963. Storr, Anthony. Music and the Mind. London: Harper Collins, 1992. Suzman, James. Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushman. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. New York: Norton, 1966. Thoreau, Henry David. Collected Essays and Poems. New York: The Library of America, 2001. Torey, Zoltan. The Conscious Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2014. Tree, Isabella. Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm. London: Picador, 2018. Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Vince, Gaia. Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty and Time. London: Allen Lane, 2019. Vince, Gaia. Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made. London: Vintage, 2014. Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio), translated by Morris Hicky Morgan. The Ten Books of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914. Vogel, Steven. Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy After the End of Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Walpole, Horace (Lord Orford). The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, 1780. New York: Ursus, 1995. Waugh, Evelyn. Decline and Fall. London: Chapman and Hall, 1928. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value, edited by G. H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Wulf, Andrea. The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science. London: John Murray, 2015.

5

Wild Being: On Human Animality Solveig Bøe

We are animals of the class Mammalia. Like all mammals, we enter the world as naked and defenceless animals through birth, from our mothers’ wombs. We began our individual lives in conception, which initiated the development of an embryo that at one point started to perceive. This is the first mystery, and it takes place in the warm natural environment of the womb, not in some supernatural sphere. The second mystery is that perception in the continuously developing human organism gives rise to thinking, something happening still in nature, but also in the social world that we are born into. These mysteries are facts of human life. Philosophers have, since antiquity, in their discussions of what characterizes human beings, had as their point of departure our animal nature as manifested in and expressed by our physical bodies. Almost immediately, though, they tend to move away from being interested in the animals that we are and focus on our rationality and cognitive abilities. Aristotle famously regards human beings as particular kinds of animal that are, in distinction from the rest of the animal kingdom, rational animals. Since then, it has been our rationality, and later our linguistic ability, that has been most avidly discussed among, and highlighted by, philosophers. Our animality, and how to approach and understand it, has largely been under-investigated and, when investigated, often has been seen as an obstacle and a problem.1 Why is this so? Perhaps because our animality reminds us of a long-gone past where we lived in the wild, entwined in the life forms of the other animals. Although we still are animals, we are not like the beasts living in the wilderness.2 We live in human-made societies, in or around cities, and our animality is civilized. From the first built enclosures that we made, we established a limit between what was outside – the wild – and what was inside – the civilized, the tamed, the cultivated. The use of reason is what made possible the establishment of communities where we could safely sleep, eat, and relax, have sex and give birth, die, without being afraid of all the dangers lurking in the darkness and in the depths of our wild surroundings. The activities listed we also share with the animals, but in human communities they have been culturally shaped and transformed. The development of human cultures has included, as a side effect, a forgetfulness of our origin in nature, and a blindness to the fact that we still are in nature – we live in nature, that has affected both our self-conception and the conception of nature itself.3 81

82

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

So, we are animals, and we still retain traces that tie us to the wild animals. I will in this chapter investigate this fact and how it shapes us as humans. One could say that my theme is our animal condition. This I will do by starting from below, from the animals that we are, and not from above, from us as rational beings. This undertaking is made difficult by the fact that language and rationality play a fundamental and imperative role in nearly all aspects of being human, regardless of the activities in which we should happen to be engaged, and which sensory experiences we have. It is unusually difficult to conceptualize animality from below. In highlighting the animal and wild dimension of the human being, we also must admit the necessity of, in our self-conception, reinstating us in nature, among the other animals and the plants. Even when we thought that we had left nature by establishing culture, we brought nature with us, by continuing to be animals, forever metabolically and physically tied to the material world. Nature surrounds us and is within us. We can ask ourselves if there are features of our animality that resist the efforts of culture and civilization and still may be regarded as wild, untamed, and dark. I will use the notion of wild being to refer to the nature within ourselves. This nature is intertwined with the nature surrounding us in ways mainly hidden and only partially under our control. Wild being is like nature (Φύσις) itself, as it was introduced in a fragment of the early Greek thinker Heraclitus (c. 535–c. 475 BC, in that it likes to hide (fragment 123).4 When we try to catch nature in this sense, it tends to retreat into darkness, into the invisible. In another sense, nature is like the Heraclitean river; one steps into it, but it is flowing and remains never the same. Even the banks of the river change with time. Combined, this gives us a dynamic materialistic view of nature. In this nature, there are forces working in the processes going on, and we are part of this nature where borders are not given once and for all, where the limits between outside and inside are unstable and porous; this nature is wild. Our being has this wild side; it is a wild being. The philosophers’ focus on reason has contributed to shrouding the wild within ourselves, pushed it down into the depths of the mind and down into the darkness where what maintains life takes place.5

Merleau-Ponty’s wild being among the things The French philosopher Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) writes about wild or brute being (his expressions, often linked together) in the working documents that he left behind from the last years of his life. His most famous work, Phenomenology of Perception, from 1945, prepares the ground for what is to come.6 In this work, he developed a phenomenological theory of perception that argued that when we relate ourselves to the world and its things, we necessarily do this as bodily subjects; the body makes us belong in the world and gives us the means by which it can be understood. This early work can be described as a phenomenology of the body, where the body as subject (the I who has perceptions and who acts) and the body as object (the human animal that is part of nature) are intertwined. In his own words: I am thrown into nature, and that nature appears not only as outside me, in objects devoid of history. But it is also discernible at the centre of subjectivity. . . . Just as

Wild Being: On Human Animality

83

nature finds its way to the core of my personal life and becomes inextricably linked with it, so behaviour patterns settle into that nature, being deposited in the form of a cultural world. Not only have I a physical world, not only do I live in the midst of earth, air and water. I have around me roads, plantations, villages, streets, churches, implements, a bell, a spoon, a pipe.7

Later, in the 1950s, he studied extensively conceptions of nature in philosophy and science and worked on sketching a new ontology. In the manuscript The Visible and the Invisible, which he was working on when he died in 1961 and which therefore remained incomplete, phenomenology is transformed into what he decides to name an ontology of the flesh.8 Animality appears as an important theme, connected with the notion of the flesh, and is developed further, connected and intertwined with the concept of wild being. From the fragments of the working notes included in The Visible and the Invisible, one can abstract the thesis that the wild in an essential, and not only accidental, sense, underlies both our rational and social being. Despite the threatening and chaotic forces that we often connect with the wild, it also seems to be a source of order and stability. If so, wild being can be regarded as underlying how the world opens up as a field for our perceptions. I will not enter into the discussions of how best to understand the technical notions of wild being, flesh, and other intertwined notions like reversibility, chiasma,9 and tissue in Merleau-Ponty, but will cite a remark dated November 1960 that point us in a direction or gives us a hint that may benefit the exploration of our animal condition from below. At the same time, this remark shows us that Merleau-Ponty’s thinking ended up becoming enigmatic and ‘wild’, in the face of the wild being: ‘Existential eternity, The indestructible, the barbaric Principle. Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother.’10 These sentences can themselves be regarded as wild. From this mother we were born. Merleau-Ponty did not just develop new concepts in his struggle to address wild being and sketch an ontology of the flesh; his own philosophical prose moved in the direction of poetry. This was probably not accidental, since he was of the opinion that art can express and articulate philosophical insights that otherwise would be inaccessible. In the lecture series ‘Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel’, held in Collège de France in Paris in 1960–1961,11 he used the expression ‘a philosophy which hides itself in “things” ’12 in connection with an examination of Karl Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, but this expression can as well be used to understand and explain what is manifested in some artistic works. Art can establish direct relations to things that as particulars are inaccessible to rational thought unaided by perceptions and affections and can thereby help us to experience the real in its particularity, as things. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) proposes in the lecture ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ from 1997 that thinking about animals at its best is poetic: ‘For thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry.’13 Poetic thinking can remind us of the intimate relationships that we have to other life forms and nature, but also of the nature under our own skin; this is Derrida’s message. By using his own cat as an example, he investigates how being caught by the animal’s gaze can make us realize our own animal nature permeating our human nature. He tries to

84

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

identify with the cat’s perspective and finds that there remains a bottomlessness in the cat that he then also realizes is there in himself. The cat and he address each other from ‘down there’. Poetic thinking can help express these insights and develop them in a manner that constitutes an examination of the human from below. His claim is even stronger; he claims that thinking concerning the animal must derive from poetry. I interpret this as maintaining that philosophy cannot say all there is to say about us, and that we therefore have to turn towards literature and art. Merleau-Ponty’s struggles with finding or inventing words for addressing the wild or brute being point in the same direction.

Clarice Lispector’s wild open heart Around the same time that Merleau-Ponty worked on what was to become his Phenomenology of Perception, a young Brazilian woman published her first book. The title was Near to the Wild Heart (original title: Perto do Coração Selvagem); her name was Clarice Lispector (1920–1977).14 Her parents were Ukrainian Jews, and they fled from the pogroms in their homeland with her to Brazil shortly after she was born, where they arrived when she was one year old. She grew up with Yiddish, not Portuguese, as the language spoken in the home, and for some time went to a Hebrew school. Near to the Wild Heart was published in 1943 when she twenty-three years old, a law student and working part time as a journalist. At that time, her father had been dead for three years, and her mother had died when she was only nine years old. The book can be regarded as a philosophical novel, since a significant portion of it is devoted to a phenomenological description of being in the world, concretized in a young woman’s realities and childhood memories, mediated in a modernist stream-ofconsciousness style, although it has a narrative structure. The descriptions that we find in the novel are at once metaphysical, profound, and visceral, and savagely tender in how they exhibit how the female protagonist, Joana, is open to her surroundings, by giving radical attention to her own wild sensations and thoughts. They can be regarded as an exploration of the wild ways of thinking that originate in the body, which is difficult, if not impossible, to explore in works of discursive philosophy. All that is wild comes to the surface in these descriptions. Literature and poetry are more apt to perform explorations like this. The explorations mean hard work on language to allow it to transform itself in order to allow the things to emerge. Groundbreaking philosophical works create new concepts; groundbreaking explorations in literature and poetry create new forms of expression.15 In Lispector’s novel, she not only experiments with forms of expression but also writes in a way where the visual impressions of the letters and signs themselves transfer features of nature. This is done, for example, by repetitions, rhythms, dots expressing silence. This will be seen in the citations I give. There is an almost strange materiality that we can feel when reading her text, in the text itself. Lispector herself had at this age no deep knowledge of philosophy, and the phenomenological descriptions are not informed by readings of phenomenology; they are rather informed by her own lived experiences and background.16 She discloses in

Wild Being: On Human Animality

85

the novel, and also in later work, an extraordinary ability to describe the details in our attentive relations to, even identification with, all earthy things that surround us, and the feeling of the things on our body through our different senses, on and under our skin. In happy moments, the mysteries of life and nature disclose themselves in the concrete, in the earthly world, if we only lift our ears, are attentive. In her novel she shares such moments with us. The book’s epitaph is from James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.’ This we can transfer to the protagonist of the book, Joana.17 In the novel, we can read long phenomenological descriptions of how Joana is intertwined with her environment, with people, animals and trees; the soil, breaths of wind, the movements of the ocean and lights of the sky; human and animal life and the natural elements – earth, air, light, water.18 Long segments are also descriptions of her feelings tied to the sensual relations with what envelops her – what she hears, smells, sees, and can feel – that disclose how the perceptions and affections are internally connected as in one flesh, her body, and in one world, both natural and human. The novel begins with a chapter named ‘The Father . . .’.19 Here, the child Joana’s experiences and thoughts on a day that she spends home with her father are described. This is how the chapter begins: Her father’s typewriter went clack-clack . . . clack-clack-clack . . . The clock awoke in dustless tin-dlen. The silence dragged out zzzzz. What did the wardrobe say? Clothes-clothes-clothes. No, no. Amidst the clock, the typewriter and the silence there was an ear listening, large, pink and dead. The three sounds were connected by the daylight and the squeaking of the tree’s little leaves rubbing against each other radiant.20

Joana is then introduced: ‘Leaning against the cold and shiny windowpane she gazed at the neighbor’s yard, at the big world of the hens-that-didn’t-know-they-were-going-to die’,21 smelling the earth, the worm in the earth that the hen soon will eat, and later the people will eat the hen. Already now what is at stake is introduced: the desire to catch the things in their concrete being. Later in the novel, Joana expresses that ‘vision consisted in surprising the symbol of the thing in the thing itself ’.22 This discovery of hers she calls the impassive mystery. It gives us a kind of specular image of the things. This reflection of Merleau-Ponty, written more than ten years after Lispector’s novel, expresses something akin: ‘The things . . . are no longer in themselves, in their own place, in their own time; they exist only at the end of those rays of spatiality and of temporality emitted in the secrecy of my flesh.’23 Her perceptions are described as organic, as belonging to the body. Everything that she feels is located, or lodged, in different places in the body. She takes in quiet in the world around her, like the typewriter’s clack-clack, the clock’s tin-dlen, the silence, the light, the smell of soil where the worms live, hens cackling, the background sounds tying it all together. Beneath all the realities, all the layers and membranes, is the only irreducible one, that of existence, of body and earth. She can feel the perfect animal within herself.24 This means accepting both the air and the lungs, in breathing. Despite

86

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

this, young Joana has a secret that she doesn’t even tell her father: she never managed to catch the thing, she is not able to say the things; she is unheeded, like Joyce’s ‘he’. She tries and tries, but does not reach her goal, the total identity. In the next chapter, ‘Joana’s Day’, Joana has grown up and is married to Otávio, but she continues to live in the tread from her childhood: ‘I have a body and everything I do is a continuation of my beginning.’25 The beginning is the conception and birth of the wild animal with its vital force. To be wild is for her to be a force, and this force is unsayable. ‘It is curious that I can’t say who I am. That is to say I know it all too well, but I can’t say it.’26 This is nothing like Descartes’ certainty of his own existence when thinking (cogito, ergo sum); it is the certainty of being alive when being quiet. The reality of existence is discovered and discerned in the quiet of feeling. When concentrating on the feelings, the wild comes to the surface, but it cannot be said.27 Lispector often uses metaphors from vegetative life when describing Joana’s perception, like in this passage that takes place early one morning. It strikes Joana that ‘The rain and the stars, this cold, dense mixture woke me up, opened the doors of my green, dark wood, of my wood that smells of an abyss where water flows. And made it one with the night.’28 When she is immersed in her interior, and in silence, she is part of the silence in the countryside surrounding her. In this state, she can have what we must characterize as the mystical experience of being outside of herself: ‘I feel scattered in the air, thinking inside other beings, lining in the things beyond myself.’29 Joana confirms, against Descartes in his ‘cogito, ergo sum’, that she is in her wild being, as animal, not even contained in herself, but also outside of herself. She is not in the solipsistic activity of thinking: ‘Deep down, beneath the lava, there was a desire already headed for an end.’30 This desire that she has because of being animal is the beginning of the freedom that she feels enveloped by nature and in her own nature. Without the feeling and the desires, no perceptions and knowledge are possible, and no actions. Even though most of the novel contains Joana’s own sensations, thoughts, and memories, there are a few places where Lispector lets us enter the body and thoughts of Joana’s husband, Otávio. One morning at home, before he begins his daily work of writing, as usual he orders his papers on the table, tidying the things around him, rearranging his clothes, and during this activity he thinks: ‘I shan’t lose myself in big ideas, I am a thing too.’31 He suddenly is aware that he is a thing among things. He is a thing with organs (Aristotle), an organized and concrete thing. He is more so than a spirit, and his freedom starts in this thing that he is. In the darkness of his body, the freedom starts, in the wild animal that he is. We are these things, bodies living, nothing more. The wild animal that one begins from, and always remains in, along the line from childhood till death, is enveloped by nature. In the chapter ‘. . . The Aunt . . .’ we meet Joana after her father has died, and she is now an orphan at the beginning of adolescence. She is living with her aunt and uncle in their big house, as her mother died when she was very young. Lispector describes how Joana is feeling trapped in the aunt’s house and on one occasion just runs away, runs ‘between sky and earth’,32 towards the ocean: ‘The wind was licking her roughly now. Pale and fragile, her breathing light, she felt it salty, run over her body, through her body, reinvigorating it.’33 As Lispector describes Joana’s life in the house with her aunt and uncle, she is trapped because the house is like

Wild Being: On Human Animality

87

Figure 5.1 The sea. Photo: Solveig Bøe.

a refuge where the wind and the light don’t enter. The natural elements that connect her to life are shut out, and her freedom is lost. To regain life, she has to escape. She has to escape to big, big nature, which is silent but sees her: The sea, beyond its waves, looked at her from afar, quiet, with no crying, no bosom. Big, big, big . . . suddenly she felt something strong inside her . . . it was a big thing that came from the sea, that came from the taste of salt in her mouth and from herself. It wasn’t sadness, an almost horrible happiness.34

The sea that looked at her is described as sprawling, like a living body, over the silent sand.35 In this happiness, she seems to be in a mystic union with the thing. She feels it in her waist, in her chest, and the sea meets her like a transparent beast. The salt is described as ‘shiny little arrows that were born here and there, tightening the skin of her wet face’.36 Her happiness is like an indicator of ‘(t)he freedom she sometimes felt, when near to the wild heart of life. It didn’t come from clear reflections, but a state that seemed to be made of perceptions to organic to be formulated as thoughts. Sometimes at the bottom of the feeling wavered an idea that gave her a vague awareness of its kind and color’.37 Shortly after, the happiness is replaced by sadness. All states of happiness slip away, although they give peace. Between the moments of peace, there is also suffering. These states she describes by exhibiting how they are bodily felt. In one of the last talks with Otávio before she ends the marriage, Joana ‘couldn’t stop the suffering from starting to palpitate through her body, like a bitter thirst’.38 How could suffering be explained without bringing up how it is bodily felt, we may wonder? We can relate when she is sighing, and accepting her fate: ‘She had been born, she would die, the earth . . . The feeling was swift, deep: a blind plunge into a color – red, as serene and broad as a field.’39 This novel can be seen as an argument for the position that peace is connected with our wild hearts, our wild being, and that it is in this state of peace that we are free. In the novel, Joana recalls the peace that came from the eyes of cows, the recumbent body of the sea, and the cat stiff on the sidewalk.40 In this peace there is internal silence. One doesn’t talk. The silence in the eyes of the cows, the sea, the cat, is an extension of the

88

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

silence in one’s own body, or vice versa. In this peace we are pure bodies deep down and observe without thoughts. We are in an enigmatic intimacy with the wild being that we are. The mysteries of our modes of existence connected with the wild being are then what makes possible, or grounds, ourselves as rational beings. We regard rationality as the defining feature of us as human beings. Nevertheless, only as animals can we think, and as animals we live.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5

6

7 8

Aristotle himself is an exception. In his De Anima – ‘on the soul’ – our animality is regarded and treated as central as the rationality. The human soul has fundamental features in common with the souls of animals (and plants); it is what makes possible all our outwards-directed activities, sensations, and the inner bodily processes tied to what makes us alive. Rationality cannot be isolated from the other sides of the soul, he argues. In the work De Motu Animalium – ‘on the movements of animals’ – Aristotle even situates the explanation of human action in the wider explanatory scheme of animal locomotion. For Aristotle, see The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Bollingen Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1912– 1954). The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Oxford: Bollingen Series, 1912–1954. The relationship between humans and animals has in our Western tradition most often been seen in the light of, or – if one will, a myth of – human exceptionism. The other animals are defined negatively, as creatures that lack what makes us human, either it is comprehended as soul, reasoning or language. And every time it becomes clear through developments in animal studies that animals have traits that we earlier had considered as exclusively ours (as the ability to feel pain and suffering, recognize oneself in a mirror, have concepts, a certain future horizon), the boundaries are moved so that the other animals are excluded once again. The kind of boundary-moving manoeuvre is bad not only for the understanding of complex and multidimensional relationships between humans and other animals but also for our self-understanding. Even urban nature has retained wild patches. The idea of the wild as a place without people has led us to undervalue, or not even see, the wildness where people in fact are. Heraclitus, Fragments (London: Penguin, 2003). This chapter is the continuation of an investigation of human animality that I begun in the article ‘Det ville i oss, og det dyriske’, which was published in the journal Norsk filosofisk tidsskrift no. 1–2 (2019). I have significantly expanded the presentation and phenomenological interpretation of Clarice Lispector’s work, and have omitted the extensive discussion of Aristotle in the journal article completely. Phenomenology is here to be understood like in Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) as a philosophy that returns to the things themselves, and that resists the temptation to situate the real world beyond the things that we have sensory and aesthetic relations to, that we are among. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [Phénoménologie de la perception], trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 346, 47. What this ontology is about is explained in this poetic remark from November 1959: ‘Say that the things are structures, frameworks, the stars of our lives: not before us, laid out as perspective spectacles, but gravitating about us. Such things do not presuppose

Wild Being: On Human Animality

9 10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29

89

man, who is made of their flesh. But their eminent being can be understood only by him who enters into perception, and with it keeps in distant-contact with them’ (The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes [Visible et l’invisible], ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 220.) Chiasma as used by Merleau-Ponty means intertwinement, visualized as two fibres entwined making a thread, or like the Greek letter chi: χ. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, 267. The series was ended abruptly by his death May 3, 1961. Hugh J. Silverman, Philosophy and Non-philosophy since Merleau-Ponty, Continental philosophy 1 (New York: Routledge, 1988), 69. Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am [L’animal que donc je suis], ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 7. Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart [Perto do Coração Selvagem], trans. Alison Entrekin (New York: New Directions, 2012). Being bilingual may have helped Lispector, as different languages allow different manners of expressing the same feelings, and even allow for different feelings, or different nuances in feelings. However, she had an interest in Spinoza’s Ethics, and his identification of Nature and God (God and Nature is one and the same), which I will not address in this chapter. She was not inspired by Joyce when she wrote the book but discovered him and the quote first after the book was written. It was her friend Lúcio Cardoso who suggested the title. See Benjamin Moser’s Introduction to Alison Entrekin’s English translation (Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, viii.). There is still a primal truth that resonates with the living body in the Empledoclean doctrine of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire. Lispector often uses ‘. . .’ to express silence. On page 3, she describes a ‘(g)reat, still moment, with nothing inside it’. I think we can read ‘. . .’ as such moments, and then take a pause when reading. On pages 127–128, she describes her own whole life from the past before her birth till the future beyond her body, as a dot: ‘lost like a dot, a dot without dimensions, once, a thought’. Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, 3. Ibid. Ibid., 38. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, 114. Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, 9. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. Recall Augustin (354–430) about time in Confessions: Books 9–13, ed. Carolyn J. B. Hammond, vol. LCL 27, Loeb classical library (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2016), Book XI, Chapter XIV. ‘What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.’ Lispector is often regarded as a mystic. In the traditions of negative theology, we can get closer to God only through what God is not. The same can perhaps be said here: we can get further in the exploration of the human condition by exploring through art and language what cannot be addressed by argumentative philosophy. Philosophical novels, poetry and art may then be regarded as ways of doing negative philosophy. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 59.

90 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered Ibid., 73. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 30. Ibid. Here the sea is looking at her. In other places in the novel, living things are looking. On page 129, we can read this: ‘The dark trees in the garden were secretly watching the silence, she just knew, she just knew.’ Ibid., 31. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 127. Ibid. Ibid., 38.

Literature Aristoteles. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Bollingen Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1912–1954. Augustinus, Aurelius. Confessions: Books 9–13. Loeb classical library. Edited by Carolyn J. B. Hammond. Vol. LCL 27, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2016. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal that Therefore I Am. [L’animal que donc je suis]. Translated by David Wills. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Heraclitus. Fragments. London: Penguin, 2003. Lispector, Clarice. Near to the Wild Heart [Perto do Coração Selvagem]. Translated by Alison Entrekin. New York: New Directions, 2012. 1943. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception [Phénoménologie de la perception]. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. [Visible et l’invisible]. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Edited by Claude Lefort. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Silverman, Hugh J. Philosophy and Non-philosophy since Merleau-Ponty. Continental philosophy 1. New York: Routledge, 1988.

6

Into the Wild: Aesthetics of the Monstrous Brit Strandhagen

Introduction That sunny valleys, flowering trees, rippling streams and bird song appeal to us aesthetically, is unlikely to come as a surprise. Strolling around in pleasing and calming natural surroundings is widely appreciated. However, nature is not always beautiful, harmonious and pleasing. Even a warm summer’s day may take us by surprise: the sun causes burns, the bees sting, the weather can change and we may become lost in the depths of the woods. Thus, nature may also appear inaccessible and frightening – sometimes even dangerous, uncontrollable and threatening; in other words, it may appear wild. The wild is the untamed, uncontrollable and unruly, which can be frightening. The wild may be external, in the shape of wild nature and wild animals, or wildness may be something inside: aspects of ourselves that we cannot control, completely grasp or fully understand. To us as human beings, vulnerable as we are, the wild represents danger, a threat to our existence, and yet it remains fascinating, interesting and attractive. This dual character of the wild may appear somewhat confusing, not least because the attraction we feel is somehow closely connected to the fear we experience. The following questions seem relevant in this regard: how can we be attracted to what we are afraid of? Why are we attracted to wild nature, even when it is dangerous and poses a threat to our existence? Can this attraction towards the wild be aesthetic? Can what is big, even monstrous, be an object of aesthetic experience? If so, can aesthetics in this way contribute to greater insights into the complex relationship between man and nature? In this chapter I discuss the somewhat mysterious and ambivalent attraction we feel towards the wild and frightening, and I do this by drawing on the traditional aesthetic category of the sublime. Although the sublime has its roots dating back to antiquity, it did not have a major impact on philosophical aesthetics until the eighteenth century, initially through the works of British thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Dennis, Addison, and Burke. The idea of the aesthetic relevance of the sublime also resonated on the continent, where Kant’s analysis of the sublime in The Critique of Judgment became central to the positioning of the sublime as a fruitful and highly relevant aesthetic concept.1 According to Kant, the experience of the sublime, like the experience of beauty, is rooted in emotional reactions, implying that both beauty and sublimity can 91

92

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

be classified as aesthetic judgments. In particular, magnificent and powerful nature is considered sublime, and a characteristic feature of the sublime experience is a highly complex, ambivalent feeling of being repelled and attracted at the same time and in which opposite feelings are interconnected to the extent that they can hardly be imagined as separate from one another. Nordic folklore is full of stories of supernatural and terrifying beings living in dark forests and on desolate mountains. I interpret the Nordic trolls as symbols of wild nature, symbols of the unmanageable, uncontrollable, and at times enormous and frightening aspects of Nordic nature – symbols of the violent forces of nature that can overwhelm and annihilate us vulnerable human beings before we know it. The troll is also a symbol of the wild in ourselves, the uncontrollable sides of our own nature, which sometimes are even more daunting than external threats. At the same time, the trolls represent the mysterious sides of nature, the hidden aspects of nature that we can never completely grasp or control. In this sense, trolls are aestheticizations of the wild. In the following, I take a closer look at the portrayal of trolls in Nordic folklore, as well as relevant aspects of the sublime tradition, which I discuss with close reference to the works of Kant and Burke. In taking this approach, I aim to show that the aesthetic category of the sublime most aptly adheres to the aesthetics of trolls.

Figure 6.1 Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914), The Forest Troll (Skovtroldet) (before 1892), 318 × 431 mm. Photo, Nasjonalmuseet/Jacques Lathion. Creative Commons CC-BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Public domain https://www.nasjonalmuseet. no/en/collection/object/NG.K_H.B.06912.

Into the Wild: Aesthetics of the Monstrous

93

Trolls in Nordic folk belief According to folklore, Nordic nature is inhabited by trolls: big, strong and scary creatures, which are dangerous to humans who encounter them. Trolls belong in the darkest of woods and forests (Figure 6.1), in remote, inaccessible places, in distant mountains areas, in deep caves, and even in water (Figure 6.2). Trolls are ugly and huge, even monstrous. They resemble humans, yet their proportions are not human. Measured by human standards they appear deformed. Some trolls have several heads. Their size and physical strength give them important advantages over humans. Additionally, trolls possess peculiar abilities that most people lack: for example, they are able to smell Christian blood over huge distances, which makes them very dangerous. However, trolls are supposed to be dumber than humans and therefore it is possible to outwit them.2 Trolls tend to appear in darkness. They are at home in remote places and scary surroundings, especially ones in which humans are lost. Sunlight is the ultimate enemy of trolls as they burst or turn into stone when hit by a ray of sun. Consequently, trolls are seldom spotted in the open during daytime. To survive, they need to take refuge in their dark caves. Numerous stories of trolls exist in Nordic folklore but there are also traces of mythical creatures similar to trolls in Norse mythology. There is reason to believe that,

Figure 6.2 Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914), Sea Monster (Sjøtroll) (1887), illustration, 320 × 480 mm. Photo, Nasjonalmuseet/Andreas Harvik. Creative Commons CC-BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/ collection/object/NG.K_H.B.06920.

94

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

at least since the Viking Age and up to the nineteenth century, large parts of the Nordic population were convinced of the existence of trolls and troll-like creatures, and that facing a troll entailed the greatest danger to life. The belief in the existence of trolls was also embodied in the legislation. The earliest Norwegian Christian laws of the eleventh and twelfth centuries forbade contact with trolls, as did Norway’s first national law of 1276.3 In addition to the danger posed by their combination of strength and hostile attitude towards humans, the prohibitions on contact with trolls also reflected the belief in the trolls’ connections with dark powers and even with the devil himself. The word ‘troll’ relates to the Norwegian word trylle, which means something like doing magic or conjuring, and in the magic in question is mainly of the bad kind. In the past, when someone disappeared in the mountains, it was often said that he or she had been bewitched and abducted by trolls, and especially young women were exposed to such incidences. Another widespread notion was that trolls sometimes replaced human newborns with their own offspring. The trolls could also harm humans in other ways, for example by enchanting cows so that they stopped milking. In Scandinavia, the alleged magic business, which so many were accused and convicted of all over Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was referred to as troll activity (trolldom). Several myths and stories in the Nordic folk belief relate to phenomena in nature, such as big landforms or big stones, as being due to troll activity. Apparently, trolls were

Figure 6.3 Johannes Flintoe (1787–1870), Jutlamannen i Lærdal (The Jutul Man in Lærdal) (1822), drawing. Photo, Nasjonalmuseet/Jeanette Veiby. CC-BY https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Public domain.

Into the Wild: Aesthetics of the Monstrous

95

very fond of throwing stones, especially at churches, and many big stones in nature were said to be the petrified forms of trolls. Close to Lærdal, in Norway, a huge stone adjacent to the old ‘Kings Road’, which runs through the central parts of the country, is known as ‘Jutlamannen’ (‘The Jutul Man’, Figure 6.3). According to legend, a jutul, meaning a giant or a huge troll, laughed at St. Olav when he failed in his attempt to shoe his horse. St. Olav took revenge by transforming the troll into stone.4 Eventually, not only natural daylight but also the ‘light of Christ’ were regarded as effective ‘weapons’ against trolls. After Norway converted to Christianity, the trolls slipped more and more into the role of the Antichrist, and the story of the ‘Jutlamann’ reflects the alleged opposition between the dark forces and the good, respectively represented by trolls and Christianity. Christian symbols were supposed to provide protection against trolls, and the sound of church bells was thought of as particularly effective in the ‘war’ against the horror caused by these terrible creatures.

Aesthetic appearance In Norway today, our conceptions of trolls are influenced by the efforts of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, who travelled around the country from c. 1835 onwards to collect Norwegian folk tales, which were later published in several volumes.5 Equally important to our visual image of trolls are Theodor Kittelsen’s paintings and drawings of trolls, as well as of other mythical and underground beings in Norwegian nature (Figures 6.1, 6.2 and 6.4). Kittelsen not only illustrated folk tale collections by Asbjørnsen and Moe but he is also known as an author, and several of his illustrated works have been published, including the autobiography Folk og Trold (People and Trolls) in 1911.6 In Sweden, John Bauer, with his beautiful illustrations of Swedish folk tales, held a position similar to that held by Kittelsen in Norway.7 Nature mysticism is prominent in Bauer’s works. His trolls may not always appear as terrifying as Kittelsen’s and the trolls’ relationship to nature’s hidden riches is more strongly accentuated in Bauer’s work. Nordic folk tales contain also another interesting aspect of the trolls, namely their wealth and hidden treasures, which usually were kept in their underground mountain caves and only from time to time exposed to humans. Their wealth, often in the form of jewels and glittering treasures, has given the trolls a glamorous trait and this glamorous, even shiny, side is prominent in many of Bauer’s illustrations. Glamorous appearances in the arts have almost become a trademark of trolls. A prominent example is Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, in which trolls play a crucial role. Edward Grieg’s music for Ibsen’s play constitutes one of the highlights of his production; in particular, ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ (I Dovregubbens hall) is one of many well-known orchestral pieces in one of his Peer Gynt suites. Examples of new Scandinavian trollthemed film productions are the Norwegian film Trollhunter (Trolljegeren) from 2010, as well as the Swedish film titled Border (Gräns) from 2018. As I have shown thus far, various representations of trolls and troll-like creatures are incorporated in valued aesthetic expressions, of which I have mentioned only a few.

96

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 6.4 Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914), Nu skal jeg sætte Knaphul i Bukserne dine til Jul (before 1891), drawing 401 × 275 mm. Photo, Nasjonalmuseet/Dag André Ivarsøy. Creative Commons CC-BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Trolls appear as topics of the arts in a narrower sense, but also as important characters in folk tales and myths. To the extent that trolls are referenced in different kinds of aesthetic processing, and are due to such aesthetic work in the broad sense, they have become important and interesting aesthetic objects. However, trolls are aestheticizations also in another, more inner sense. As mentioned in the Introduction, I see the troll as a symbol of the wild in nature. In this regard, the troll itself becomes an aestheticization, an aesthetic expression of the wild, uncanny, uncontrollable and unpredictable aspects of nature, both in the sense of external nature and as the wild within ourselves. I interpret the troll as a strategy to cope with these overwhelming aspects of the threatening wild. By aestheticizing the wild in this manner – by transforming the fear of nature into the shapes of trolls – another transformation takes place. The trolls become something more and other than sheer horror. What I refer to as an aestheticization of the threatening involves a kind of mental liberation, which is necessary to grasp the phenomenon of the troll as something more and other than horror – rather, it is sublime. What is the sublime and in what way may trolls represent the sublime in nature?

Into the Wild: Aesthetics of the Monstrous

97

On the sublime tradition The history of the sublime starts with the Greek treatise Peri Hypsos, a short but highly interesting text on how to produce grand and splendid literature able to evoke strong and uplifting emotions in the audience.8 Although the authorship is uncertain, the text has been attributed to Longinus (or Pseudo-Longinus), and was probably written sometime in the first century AD. The impact of Longinus’s text on aesthetics seems to have been almost absent for centuries. However, during the eighteenth century the sublime became important as a central aesthetic concept, not so much as a rhetorical term as connected to aesthetic appreciation in general. During the eighteenth century, the interest in nature and experiences of nature were growing, and even nature previously considered as having no aesthetic value, such as wild mountains and violent natural phenomena, became the subject of aesthetic interest. This in turn created a need for aesthetic concepts and terms adapted to experiences of nature, especially nature of a wilder kind that could not be subsumed under the concept of beauty. The category of the sublime made room for appreciating what was not immediately appealing, including natural phenomena of a more demanding kind with regard to attributing aesthetic value. However, the harder work involved in the appreciation of the wild may prove worth the effort and the reward will be greater, allowing for an aesthetic experience of a sometimes richer and more multifaceted nature than the experience of beauty. Strong, ambivalent, contradictory feelings of repulsion and attraction, and pain and pleasure constitute the core of the aesthetic category of the sublime. Whereas the beautiful represents harmony, elegance and comfort, the sublime relates to the disproportioned, to disharmony, conflict and fear, and even to the terrifying, to the overwhelming and the disturbing, but also to the uplifted and an awareness of human greatness. Like Longinus, who emphasized that sublime literature uplifted the mind and thus elevated the audience to a higher mental level, the theorists and poets of the seventeenth century also thought of the sublime as uplifting. However, the elevating effect is not simple and straightforward; it comes at a price. As I show in more detail in the following discussion of Kant and Burke, the sublime experience has its origin in pain. However, astonishingly, the pain transforms into pleasure and the initially repulsive becomes attractive, even uplifting. How can this strange dialectic of the sublime be explained?

Dynamic ambivalence: Kant An explanation of the dialectic turn of the experience of the sublime is exactly what Kant tries to provide in The Critique of Judgment. He starts his ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ by pointing out crucial differences between the beautiful and the sublime.9 According to Kant, beauty displays form. A beautiful object appears as if shaped according to a plan and with a purpose in mind, yet what such a possible plan could have been and what purpose one could have had in mind are irrelevant to the judgment of beauty.

98

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Therefore, according to Kant, a beautiful object will appear as purposive, as adapted to our cognition, but without having a specific purpose.10 By contrast, the sublime appears as unformed or formless in the sense of indefinite, unlimited and endless or even crossborder and transcendent. It seems impossible to attain a stable image of this apparently formless unlimited structure, and the sublime presents itself as inexpedient to judgment. In contrast to beauty’s harmonizing adaptability, the sublime rebels against cognition, seeming almost violent to the imagination: that which, without our indulging in any refinements of thought, but, simply in our apprehension of it, excites the feeling of the sublime, may appear, indeed, in point of form to contravene the ends of our power of judgement, to be ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation, and to be, as it were, an outrage on the imagination, and yet it is judged all the more sublime on that account.11

Thus, the sublime is not formless merely in the sense of not being shaped or not yet being shaped. The sublime opposes any attempt at shaping and opposes any submitting to the formative demands of cognition – the demands to fit into a tangible frame. This rejection of form on behalf of the sublime may appear as quite a paradox. How can something experienced as formless and in opposition to any attempt at formation be aesthetically attractive? Moreover, how can something that perpetrates violence against cognition, violence against our ability to make sense of the world, be regarded as sublime and hence as uplifting for our cognitive powers? For all of this to make sense, it needs to be seen in the light of what constitutes the quality of the sublime feeling. The peculiarity of the sublime experience is that it springs from something unpleasant, even painful, but in turn the pain gives rise to pleasure. The sublime feeling emerges precisely in the tension between pleasure and discomfort, between desire and unease, between attraction and repulsion, and the exchange and interaction between them. Thus, we can say that the sublime feeling has a genuinely ambivalent and dynamic character, such that the transition between pleasure and displeasure is a necessary part of the experience. Kant calls the pleasure of the sublime a ‘negative pleasure’,12 which refers to such a dynamic ambivalence: uneasiness turns into pleasure, but the original displeasure attaches to the pleasure. Thus, the contrast to the experience of beauty stands out even more strongly: unlike beauty, which sets the mind in calm contemplation, the sublime sets the mind in motion.13 While the experience of beauty emerges in the harmonious interplay between imagination and understanding, the sublime feeling originates in a conflict between imagination and reason.14 Still, although it is one thing to state that the sublime feeling involves a transition from displeasure to pleasure, it takes more to explain how this dynamic comes about. Why does pleasure emerge from an originally unpleasant experience? How can a conflict between imagination and reason be pleasing? To explain in more detail how the shift comes about, it may be helpful to bring in Kant’s distinction between the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime. The mathematically sublime concerns the overwhelmingly great, the phenomena of a size that challenges and exceeds our ability to form a picture of it. We are not able to keep the phenomenon together as a unit in our mind and in that sense our imagination has reached its limit.

Into the Wild: Aesthetics of the Monstrous

99

Thus, the confrontation with the vast, the monstrous, and the almost infinitely great initially arouses the unpleasant feeling of falling short.15 However, according to Kant, there is another way to capture the infinitely large. Reason is not limited in this manner; we are able to think and reflect on even the infinitely great. The awareness that our reason can think beyond what we can imagine turns the initial discomfort of falling short into a pleasure. We realize that we do possess an ability to cope with even the most magnificent natural phenomenon. To a certain extent, and in a certain sense, we are able to transcend nature and our natural limitations, which is the reason why this kind of experience may give rise to the elevated feeling of sublimity. In the case of the dynamically sublime, a similar mechanism takes effect.16 The dynamically sublime involves encounters with overwhelmingly powerful natural phenomena, described in a flourishing language that is unusual for Kant: Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piled up the vault of heaven, born along with flashes and peals, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river, and the like, make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might.17

Volcanoes, hurricanes and troubled oceans exert a force that exceeds our human proportions, such that we feel scared and helpless in the face of overwhelming nature. Here, too, a shift is taking place. The unpleasantness of being exposed to the powerful forces of nature, without enough physical strength to resist, turns into a pleasure the very moment we realize our strength on another level: as thinking beings, we have opportunities to transcend our physical limitations. The encounter with the violent forces of nature awakens a feeling of transcending nature. Again, the dynamic dialectical nature of the sublime experience becomes evident: the uplifting feeling of sublimity arises from a feeling of powerlessness, a powerlessness that transforms into power but never fully disappears. The sublime experience awakens our awareness that we are more than nature. In this way, the sublime experience exposes our freedom, understood as freedom from nature’s causality. At the same time, it is an experience of belonging to nature. According to Emily Brady, Kant was ‘motivated by an interest in showing how the sublime reflects both human independence from nature and our place within it’,18 thus suggesting the relevance of the sublime to Kant’s philosophy in general and to moral freedom in particular. The sublime feeling is twofold: it arises in the tension between dependence and independence, in the tension between facticity and transcendence, in the language of existentialism. Thus, the sublime feeling has a genuinely dual character: on the one hand it makes us aware of our freedom, and on the other it makes us conscious of our vulnerability as finite beings on earth, subject to the forces of nature. Our transcendence will never be absolute. Human life unfolds in this tension between transcendence and facticity, between freedom and the given, and our apparent control over nature can never be anything but preliminary. The wild is never fully controlled.

100

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Sublime terror: Burke In Kant’s analysis of the sublime, violent and powerful nature plays an important role, but the violent, even terrorizing aspect of the sublime experience is emphasized even more in the works of his predecessor, Burke.19 Like Kant, Burke points out crucial differences between the beautiful and the sublime: the great and violent represent the sublime, while the beautiful is small in comparison. The beautiful is ‘smooth, and polished’, ‘light and delicate’, unlike the sublime, which is ‘rugged and negligent’, ‘dark and gloomy’.20 Another similarity to Kantian thinking is that Burke considers both beauty and sublimity as based on emotion, and again Burke is very explicit when he points to fundamental differences between the beautiful and the sublime: They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure; and however they may vary afterwards from the direct nature of their causes, yet these causes keep up an eternal distinction between them, a distinction never to be forgotten by any whose business it is to affect the passions.21

Because the beautiful and the sublime have their basis in qualitatively different feelings, they will always remain different. Even though the sublime, in turn, elevates the mind, its origin in pain is never eliminated, which makes the sublime a much more disturbing and ambivalent aesthetic experience than the experience of beauty. The sublime feeling’s origin in pain also leads Burke to consider terror as its most basic feature: ‘terror is in all case whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime’.22 Thus, terror, pain and danger constitute the core of the sublime: ‘Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.’23 Although Kant also sees the sublime experience as painful in the first place, and even though he calls the pleasure of the sublime a negative pleasure, it is still clear that Burke’s sublime is more violent and terrorizing than the Kantian sublime. Also compared with its predecessors, Burke’s sublime is more violent, as pointed out by Emily Brady: ‘Burke’s account certainly echoes earlier ones, but we immediately see that he presents a more troubled, violent sublime, where a cluster of negative, heartstopping emotions – fear, terror, astonishment – are involved, in contrast to the more sedate sublime of the earlier theories.’24 The intimate relation between the sublime feeling and dreadful and terrorizing situations that are so explicitly emphasized by Burke makes his thinking particularly relevant to the aesthetics of trolls. In this connection, also Burke’s emphasis on the obscure and the dark as important qualities of the sublime experience is interesting.25 Trolls are creatures of the dark. They tend to appear in obscure situations and they disappear in the enlightenment of a clear day. Other interesting troll-relevant features of Burke’s sublime are vastness and power,26 both of which later became important elements of Kant’s analysis of the sublime in terms of the mathematically sublime (vastness) and the dynamically sublime (power). As huge, powerful and threatening figures, the trolls are topical candidates for arousing sublime feelings in both of the aforementioned manners.

Into the Wild: Aesthetics of the Monstrous

101

As shown above, the central feature of the sublime experience in Kant’s work is a dynamic exchange between pleasure and pain, and although the sublime has an overall uplifting effect, the aesthetic experience is fundamentally ambivalent. Burke accentuates the negative and violent aspect even more, which fits well with the aesthetics of trolls. However, the question remains as to how this terror, this pain and danger, both violent and obscure, may be considered aesthetically valuable. How can horror at all become delightful, as Burke claims it can?27 Moreover, what does it mean to be delightful in this respect? To make sense of this, we need to take a closer look at Burke’s analysis of three important concepts in this context, namely pleasure, pain and delight, and furthermore how delight relates to pleasure and pain. It is often assumed that pleasure and pain are relative emotions, which implies that they can only be felt in relation to one another. According to this view, pleasure occurs when the pain disappears and pain results when a feeling of pleasure ceases to exist. Burke strongly disagrees with such a view. According to him, pleasure and pain are not relative states; both may occur on their own, without the cessation of the opposite feeling, which implies that they must be regarded as positive, existing by themselves as simple, independent states. In this sense, also the state of indifference – the condition of being neither in pain nor in pleasure – is a positive state.28 What about delight? Is the feeling of delightful horror that is characteristic of the sublime also such a simple, primary and non-relative feeling? Because the effect of the sublime is a feeling of being uplifted, there must be a kind of pleasure involved. However, the sublime feeling is not a simple feeling like pleasure and pain. As pointed out above, Burke attaches crucial importance to the sublime being built on pain, a pain that never disappears even when it is attenuated and transformed into a more comfortable state of delight. The feeling of delight is therefore not simple and primary, because its existence depends on and builds upon the pain of terror. We feel delight because of a previous pain, and therefore the delight produced by the sublime is a relative pleasure. Burke reserves the term ‘delight’ for precisely this kind of relative pleasure, when the pleasure is the result of the removal of a pain or danger.29 By contrast, the pleasure of the beautiful is a positive pleasure, pleasing in its own right, and not dependent on any kind of privation. This difference explains the higher degree of complexity adhered to the experience of the sublime compared with the experience of beauty. The pleasure of delight is built upon pain and the pain remains within the delight itself. Therefore, the feeling of delight is, according to Burke, ‘a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which as it belongs to selfpreservation is one of the strongest of all the passions’.30 Hence, maybe this ‘delightful horror’ produced by the sublime can be interpreted as a kind of relief that the pain and danger have become less present, a more pleasant state of mind compared with the situation when one is in great pain or danger. Burke links the sublime to our instinct for self-preservation, which makes sense in the light of how he explains the cause of the delight. Removal (or diminishment) of pain and danger is obviously favourable for the preservation of the individual. The fact that terror, according to Burke, is always involved in the experience of the sublime, does not imply that every terrorizing situation is sublime – sometimes pain is just pain and terror is just terror. For example, life-threatening, dangerous situations do

102

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

not leave much room for sublime feelings. The sublime takes effect under certain conditions: ‘if the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person, [. . .] they are capable of producing delight’.31 Thus, situations in which we are subject to violence or direct harm cannot be sublime. Elsewhere, Burke suggests that the sublime cannot be associated with what constitutes real danger.32 Additionally, distance may have an impact: ‘When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.’33 It is unclear whether the mention of distance means physical distance or some sort of mental distancing. What does seem clear, though, is that Burke believes there is a limit to how involved one can be in order to experience the sublime. Kant, too, hints in the same direction of thinking. According to Kant, sublime feelings arise when we are safe: ‘provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime’.34 It makes sense that dangerous, life-threatening situations, as well as situations in which we suffer from severe pain, can hardly provoke sublime feelings. Still, an element of danger and pain must be present for the sublime feeling to emerge. Perhaps we could speak of the sublime experience as a kind of balancing. The terror would definitely be present, yet kept at arm’s length. We would also be frightened, yet attracted. We would be affected, but not terrified. The terror is not for real, at least not for the moment. Even though we would feel safe, the challenge to our safety would lure in the background, giving the experience the hint of ‘delightful horror’. Philip Shaw gives an interesting interpretation of bungee jumping within the frames of a sublime experience: [T]he experience of bungee jumping is pleasurable because the person who engages in this activity is reasonably certain that the elastic cord will rescue him or her from catastrophe. The bungee jump mimics the suicidal descent into the abyss, providing the person who falls with a glimpse of what that descent might really entail. Having exerted itself in this way, the individual feels correspondingly energised, more alive and thus more ‘itself ’. The impulse to sustain oneself in the face of danger is therefore closely related to the experience of the sublime.35

The pleasure in the activity of bungee jumping, like the pleasure in joining other kinds of extreme sport activities, emerges in a controlled situation, in which one also experiences to some extent the danger involved. Furthermore, there is always a slight risk that ‘the cord’ might break, the awareness of which is also a part of the experience. Being exposed to the powers of nature, getting this glimpse into death from a relatively safe place, makes us feel more alive and makes us feel ‘delight tinged with terror’. Burke’s analysis of the sublime may not be as philosophically sophisticated as that of Kant, yet Burke discusses the bodily and physical aspects of the sublime feeling more thoroughly. The sublime experience is undoubtedly a physical experience in Burke’s view, and occasionally he gives relatively detailed descriptions of the bodily processes involved. Richard Shusterman credits Burke for contributing to the physiology of aesthetics through his attempts to explain the bodily mechanism involved in the

Into the Wild: Aesthetics of the Monstrous

103

sublime and the beautiful. Although Burke’s explanations can be criticized for being all too simplistic and mechanistic, Shusterman claims that ‘his recognitions of the crucial bodily dimensions of aesthetic experience should be taken more seriously’.36 Burke also provides many examples of which phenomena are sublime and which are not, and discusses them in detail. For example, he argues that wild animals are sublime, while domestic animals are not. Sublime strength performs in completely different arenas from those of our domesticated everyday environments: [I]t comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros. Whenever strength is only useful, and employed for our benefit or our pleasure, then it is never sublime; for nothing can act agreeably to us, that does not act in conformity to our will; but to act agreeably to our will, it must be subject to us; and therefore can never be the cause of a grand and commanding conception.37

The useful is not sublime, because it is controlled. Domestic animals, however strong and powerful, represent a domesticated power – a power subject to human will. By contrast, sublime strength is untamed and beyond our control. We have no control over the wild tiger or the wild rhino. They belong to a sphere of wilderness, the one we find in ‘gloomy forests’ and ‘howling wilderness’, which is precisely the domain of the trolls.

Sublime trolls There is a strong element of overwhelming size and power, and of violence and terror, in the tradition of the sublime, and all of these rather scary features contribute to the elevated feeling characteristic of the sublime. How do trolls fit into this picture? Does it at all make sense to judge these wild, scary, ugly and dangerous monsters as sublime? How can they be so while representing a threat to our existence, and when encountering them would put one’s life at risk? As I have shown, the sublime experience has its origin in the dynamic exchange between pain and pleasure. It is not difficult to imagine that terrifying trolls can cause pain, but how can the terror of trolls have an uplifting and sublime effect? Nordic trolls share many characteristics with huge and powerful phenomena of nature, thus representing the paradigmatic cases of the aesthetic tradition of the sublime. Volcanoes and troubled seas, inaccessible mountain areas and wild tigers may all represent a threat to our existence. Trolls are even more dangerous because they possess magical powers in addition to their incredible strength and size. Thus, the magic of the trolls makes them less controllable and predictable than any powerful natural phenomenon, which makes it even harder for us as vulnerable human beings to escape their wrath. Trolls are huge and ugly creatures of the dark, monsters of a world in which we humans do not feel at home – a world we do not master and do not understand. The Nordic landscape, with its deep forests and huge inaccessible mountain areas can easily

104

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

give rise to fear, especially when darkness falls. It is difficult to orientate oneself in the dark. We can lose track and our sense of direction. It is hard to detect possible dangers, which can make us nervous and easily frightened. In the dark, our most familiar surroundings become unrecognizable. Shapes and figures that are well known in daylight can become strangers and transform into something dangerous and threatening, and we may imagine all kinds of creepy creatures lurking in nooks and crannies. When the horror of darkness comes creeping, the monsters emerge with it. When the light appears, our surroundings become familiar and the monsters disappear like dew before the sun. The monster of the night transforms into a rock when hit by the sun’s rays. It seems obvious to interpret trolls as personifications of our fear of the dark, but they can also be understood as personifications of the threatening wild in a wider sense. When the horror is attributed to these fantasy objects, the dangers related to wild nature become more collected and more manageable. I interpret the troll as an aestheticization of a nature that appears threatening and dangerous, as an aesthetic sublimation of the frightening. The troll represents the unpredictable dangers that lurk in the dark, the dangers of travelling in terrain in which we are not at home, and the scary feeling of being handed over to a powerful nature that we cannot control. However, all of these dangers are undefined and vague, as well as anxiety provoking. It is easier to deal with a danger to which a specific object, such as a troll, is exposed. In this way, by projecting our fear of the wild onto the image of something concrete that, despite its fearsome appearance, transforms into something manageable, the threatening wild can become endurable, without being domesticated. Trolls are wild, mysterious and monstrous creatures. They are dangerous and threaten human existence, but it is easier to cope with a threat that we can put into words, a threat we can form into an image. The aestheticization of the wild in the form of a troll functions as a kind of distancing from the threatening. By imagining terror as a concrete figure, as a troll, we can relate to it differently. As I have shown, both Kant and Burke emphasized that the sublime experience presupposes some kind of safe position, and Burke explicitly pointed to distance as a condition for the sublime. In my interpretation, the troll is an aesthetic distancing of terror – a mechanism for creating the necessary distance for the sublime to take effect. Thus, the forces of nature transform into something sublime, and the balancing act on the edge of the dangerous is functioning, as in Shaw’s account of the experience of bungee jumping referred to above. We are never entirely safe, as a trace of uncertainty is always present in the sublime experience. The sublime arises precisely in this interplay, in the alternation between feeling entirely handed over to the forces of nature and yet experiencing our freedom, our ability to resist, and our ability to transcend in some sense our natural preconditions. The tradition of the sublime has been accused of anthropocentrism and of expressing human self-admiration more than admiration of nature. Kant argues that it is the ‘disposition of soul’ and not the object that ‘is to be called sublime’,38 which might be interpreted as claiming that only humans are sublime and that the phenomenon of nature is superfluous. Several quotes by Kant may favour this interpretation, but there are others in which he explicitly ascribes sublimity to nature and natural objects, such

Into the Wild: Aesthetics of the Monstrous

105

as when he claims that ‘Nature, therefore, is sublime in such of its phenomena as in their intuition convey the idea of their infinity’.39 Undoubtedly, there is human self-esteem in the philosophical aesthetics of the sublime, but this self-esteem goes hand in hand with appreciation of nature. The sublime experience consists of a dialectical movement between subject and phenomenon, and a necessary condition for such a process to take place is that both the phenomenon and the subject are present. Therefore, the overwhelming natural phenomenon is an indispensable component of the sublime experience. According to Kant, aesthetic judgments are based on human feelings. Hence, aesthetic judgments are inextricably linked to human experience. However, what is experienced is the phenomenon, and the phenomenon is just as necessary for the sublime experience as is the individual human themself. Beauty, too, involves a reflexive relationship between subject and phenomenon. The judgment has its basis in the subject’s feeling, but what is judged beautiful is the phenomenon. The sublime accentuates the dialectical relationship between human beings and nature. Sublime nature is nature that does not subjugate to human domination, and for that reason the sublime experience is a reminder of our dependence on nature, a reminder to treat nature with humility and to preserve it. The sublime experience teaches us that we live in ambivalence, in the tension between immanence and transcendence, between facticity and freedom. The troll is itself an anthropocentrism. Nature’s frightening wildness is transformed into a human-like figure. This kind of humanizing of nature is a way of making nature more accessible, more understandable within our cognitive categories, and thus easier to handle. The interaction between human beings and nature constitutes the driving force of the sublime – this is what it is about and therefore the human perspective is central. The human reaction to nature is at the heart of the sublime experience. The troll is also a symbol of the mysterious aspects of nature. In the sublime experience, the mystery of nature puts itself on display. We get a glimpse into the mysterious and uncontrollable characteristics of nature, but the mysteriousness does not disappear. Nature is never fully understood, we will never be able to master it completely. Therefore, there always remains this mysterious veil over nature, which also makes it so attractive, engaging and enchanting. Although we may desperately want to remove the veil, something will always escape our understanding. The attraction we feel towards the wild, towards the frightening, hostile, uncanny, and horrifying aspects of nature is also an attraction towards the mysterious. We feel attracted to the enormous powers of nature, which transcend our human proportions and are beyond our comprehension and control. The idea of an area of nature populated by trolls and mysterious underground beings may not seem as relevant to our secularized and demystified world of the modern imagination as it did in the past. Today, Nordic trolls are mainly associated with mass-produced items for tourists, while the word ‘troll’ is enjoying a renaissance denoting ‘Internet trolls’. Do stories about scary trolls in the wild have any relevance to us today? We live in a more or less enlightened age with ever-increasing knowledge of the nature that surrounds us, and the field left to the imagination shrinks accordingly. There should not be any need to argue for the positive aspects of such a demystification

106

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

of nature, which are obvious. Still, something is lost. The scientific approach to nature implies a kind of alienation: nature becomes an object for our knowledge, as we place ourselves outside nature and relate to it as something other than ourselves. The stories of trolls can remind us of the mysterious, uncontrollable sides of wild nature, as trolls cannot be tamed, but neither can nature in an absolute sense, of which the sublime experience is a reminder. We are handed over to a nature to which we belong and at the same time we experience ourselves as free, free to do what is necessary to preserve nature and thus the future of man. Today, humans no longer fight dangerous trolls, but there are other sources of sublime experiences. It is tempting to explain people’s interest in extreme sports as an attraction towards the sublime, but also the growing interest in seeking out nature and experiences of nature can be interpreted in that direction. The sublime experience may give us a glimpse into the mysterious aspects of the world, hidden from us in our daily lives. Along this line of thinking, the sublime experience may even become an aesthetic access to a hidden realm, which otherwise might be impossible to reach. However, we can only get a glimpse, like the bungee jumper who gets a glimpse into the abyss, into death, for a split second in the moment before the elastic cord pulls him or her back up to safe ground.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952 [1790]). A range of different mythological creatures exists in folk belief, some of which are of a smaller, better-looking, even friendlier kind than the scary creatures described thus far in this chapter. However, for my present purposes these other figures are less relevant and therefore I focus on the huge and scary creatures, which allegedly represent danger to humans. Rune Blix Hagen. ‘troll’. Store norske leksikon. https://snl.no/troll, accessed 27 November 2020. Oddkjell Bosheim, ‘Jutlamannen’, Kulturhistorisk leksikon, accessed 3 December 2020. https://leksikon.fylkesarkivet.no/article/43ee1a79-6a9c-436c-9cd4-4ff2da5f90bb/ Peter Christian Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, Norske folkeeventyr (Oslo: Damms antikvariat, 1994). Theodor Kittelsen, Folk og trold: minder og drømme: med skizzer, tegninger og malerier (Kristiania: Gyldendal, 1911). See for instance https://www.wikiart.org/en/john-bauer, accessed 1 March 2022. An English translation of Longinus’s text is Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Createspace Independent Pub, 2014 [c. first century AD]). Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 90–93. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 94–109.

Into the Wild: Aesthetics of the Monstrous

107

16 Ibid., 109–114. 17 Ibid., 110. 18 Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 62. 19 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1990 [1757]). 20 Ibid., 113. 21 Ibid., 113–114. 22 Ibid., 54. 23 Ibid., 36. 24 Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, 23–24. 25 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 54 and 131. 26 Ibid., 66 and 59. 27 Ibid., 123. 28 Ibid., 30–31. 29 Ibid., 34. 30 Ibid., 123. 31 Ibid., 123. 32 Ibid., 121, 124. 33 Ibid., 36–37. 34 Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 110–111. 35 Philippe Shaw, The Sublime (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2017), 54. 36 Richard Shusterman, ‘Somaesthetics and Burke’s Sublime’, British Journal of Aesthetics 45, no. 4 (October 2005), 323. For a more thorough account of the physical aspects of Burke’s sublime, see Shusterman’s essay. 37 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 60–61. 38 Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 98. 39 Ibid., 103. For a detailed discussion of the status of the natural phenomenon in Kant’s theory of the sublime, see Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, 79–89.

Literature Asbjørnsen, Peter Christian and Jørgen Moe. Norske folkeeventyr. Oslo: Damms antikvariat, 1994 [1841]. Brady, Emily. The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Bosheim, Oddkjell. ‘Jutlamannen’. Kulturhistorisk leksikon, accessed 3 December 2020. https://leksikon.fylkesarkivet.no/article/43ee1a79-6a9c-436c-9cd4-4ff2da5f90bb/ Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 [1757]. Hagen, Rune. ‘troll’. Store norske leksikon. https://snl.no/troll, accessed 27 November 2020. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952 [1790]. Kittelsen, Theodor. Folk og trold: minder og drømme: med skizzer, tegninger og malerier. Kristiania: Gyldendal, 1911.

108

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Longinus. On the Sublime. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Createspace Independent Pub, 2014 [c. first century AD]. Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2017. Shusterman, Richard. ‘Somaesthetics and Burke’s sublime’. British Journal of Aesthetics 45, no. 4 (October 2005), 323–341.

7

Compulsions of Wildness: On Grieg’s Trolls in Lang’s M Magnar Breivik

The interaction of dangerous forces and their innocent targets is an issue frequently described in art. The point of view is often that from the endangered, be it from the righteous opponents of unjust powers or the guiltless victims of cruel deeds. Both within and without art the wildness aspects of evil may be associated with a kind of uncontrollability from which one cannot escape. Such recognitions reflect that the essence of powers triggering malevolence may be utterly complex. A corresponding intricacy applies to the components of a human being’s mental state proving capable of putting violence into action. How can an exposed group of people, even a whole society, guard themselves against invisible forces aimed at restless destruction? In cases where danger is recognized as omnipresent yet impossible to detect, it may seem hopelessly undefeatable. The problems of inescapable danger are dominant in Fritz Lang’s film M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (M – A City Searching for a Murderer), 1931.1 The plot is based on the chase of a paedophile serial killer, a character by the name of Hans Beckert. In the murderer’s persona, cruelty is hidden behind a normal façade, allowing him to easily melt into the crowd. To society this means that the murderer may be anyone and thus could strike anywhere. Hence no child and no parent can ever feel safe. Lang constructs his psychological thriller on the deeds and fate of a murderer by presenting him as a person with a mental disorder leading to uncontrollable actions. He describes the murderer’s impulses of evil on two main levels: first, to the contemporary public of the early 1930s he suggests parallels with murderers appearing in criminal cases known from real life. Second, on another and lesser time-bound level he opens up to wider interpretations through indirect references to Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. These references are transmitted by sounding a few bars from Edvard Grieg’s music to Ibsen’s play. As we shall see, Grieg’s piece ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ (‘I Dovregubbens hall’) epitomizes a tight knot of ruthless compulsions and relentless remorse in which murderer Hans Beckert is both a cause and a victim. Hence the title of this chapter and the focus of this text. Before M, the Austria-born Fritz Lang was especially known for Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler (1922), and spectacular films such as Die Nibelungen, consisting of the two parts 109

110

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Siegfrieds Tod and Kriemhilds Rache (1924), Metropolis (1927), and Frau im Mond (1929). These works were silent movies requiring continuous music. In posterity, the two Nibelungen films and Metropolis have maintained their fame also through extensive original scores written by composer Gottfried Huppertz. M, the very first sound film from Lang, had been promoted by producer Seymor Nebenzahl at Nero Film, Berlin. Yet the movie was made entirely according to Lang’s own directions. As with several of his other films the book was written by Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou. The initial working title for M was the even more urgent M – Mörder unter uns (M – Murderer Among Us), as pre-announced in the journal Licht. Bild. Bühne, 27 September, 1930 (Figure 7.1). However, as if taking a step back and assuming the perspective from a less uncomfortable position, the title was altered to the one known today, M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder. Lang claimed that it was the Nazis who forbade the former title, suspecting it to be referring to their own unorthodox political procedures. In Lang’s filmography, the story of a number of terrifying child murders arousing panic in a contemporary society represented a shift towards an up-to-date realism that had not been present in his earlier work. Here is a condensed version of the plot: A whole city is searching for an unknown child murderer [Peter Lorre]. Little Elsie Beckmann [Inge Landgut] is the ninth victim. The murderer bought her a balloon from a blind balloon seller [Georg John], while at the same time whistling a phrase from Grieg’s piece ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’. To the tight-knit city society, the murderer of Elsie and the other children could be literally anyone. Neighbours are turning in neighbours, and adults may be arrested for merely talking to a child. The police are desperately working around the clock to solve the case to prevent another atrocious deed being committed. The intensive police activities make the underworld of gangsters and criminals uneasy. They decide to act, not only on behalf of the children but also in order to shelter their own trade. Associating themselves with the beggars, they divide the city into sections where they strategically post themselves at street corners and squares. A kind of hide-and-seek continues until the murderer has got on the track of a new victim. Once again, he buys a balloon to seduce a little girl, and once again he whistles the Grieg tune. The blind balloon peddler recognizes the whistling from the day Elsie was killed, and

Figure 7.1 Fritz Lang: Mörder unter uns, pre-announcement, Licht. Bild. Bühne, 27 September 1930.

Compulsions of Wildness: On Grieg’s Trolls in Lang’s

111

manages to signal to a beggar nearby. The beggar writes an M on the palm of his hand with a piece of chalk and manages, seemingly by accident, to transfer the letter to the murderer’s back. Hans Beckert is caught by the city gangsters and criminals, trapped in a desolate factory basement. Here they enact a kangaroo court with criminals as lawyers and the murderer desperately defending himself. However, one of the criminals [Friedrich Gnass] has been lured into informing the police of the chase ending in the basement location. The police burst in, and at last the case is solved and a real trial can be held.

The movie premiere took place at the UFA-Palast am Zoo, Berlin, 11 May 1931. Critics found the film’s artistic and technical qualities impressive, hailing it as a new milestone in the development of film. The movie was rightly recognized as presenting a borderline case of a murderer by compulsion; the relevance to real life was all too clear through recent murder cases with gruesome facts that everyone knew. The relationship between the topicality of M and actual happenings in the Weimar Republic even made some critics accuse Lang of exploiting tragic murder cases for commercial purposes. Lang, however, claimed that he saw criminal cruelty as an omnipresent, permanent danger in contemporary society, and that his message was that the most endangered must be protected. Shortly after the premiere he published his ideas under the title ‘Mein Film “M”, – ein Tatsachenbericht’ (‘My movie “M” – a factual report’): If this film of factual reports can contribute to pointing an admonitory and warning hand to the unknown lurking danger, to the continual danger, caused by the constant existence of morbidly or criminally burdened people that are posing a kind of fire threat to our existence – especially to the existence of the most helpless among us, the children – and if the film can even help to prevent this danger, then it has fulfilled its best task and drawn from the quintessence of its facts the logical conclusion.2

Despite Lang’s focus on the overall message of his movie, the associations with actual murder cases were obvious constituents of his construction of the Hans Beckert character. In the early 1930s, no one would miss these specific connections to reality. The most immediate case was that of Peter Kürten, ‘the vampire of Düsseldorf ’, whose brutal murders had caused considerable panic, especially from 1929 onwards. Kürten was sentenced to death and executed on 2 July 1931, after possibly more than nine sadistic murders in addition to quite a few murder attempts. His nickname speaks for itself. The premiere of M had taken place less than two months before his execution. The associations with the Kürten case were so strong that in Italy M was billed as M – Il mostro di Düsseldorf (M – The Monster of Düsseldorf, Plate 2).3 A hardly less atrocious perversity was known from recent murderers such as Carl F. W. Grossmann and Karl Denke. Yet the most explicit real-life reference to Beckert’s personality was the sex sadist Fritz Haarmann, ‘the butcher of Hannover’. Haarmann was beheaded in 1925, after having killed twenty-four boys aged ten to nineteen. The Haarmann chase had been closely followed by the mass media of the time. The murderer was arrested on 23 June 1924. In early August the same year, a commercial

112

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 7.2 Advertisement from Film-Kurier, 14 August 1924.

Kulturfilm4 about the case was put on the market. The advertisement of the Haarmann movie (Figure 7.2), bluntly characterizing it as ‘the best box-office trade’, even refers to an already existing ‘short police film’ with which this new documentary should not be confused. In M, the names of both Grossmann and Haarmann are briefly mentioned in a discussion among the police detectives: Without this appearance of, let’s say inoffensiveness in private life, it would be impossible to believe that murderers like Grossmann or Haarmann were able to live for years in large, busy blocks of flats without their neighbors suspecting them in the slightest.5

The close association between real-life Haarmann and fictional Beckert is established already in the opening scene. The sound begins with a single strike of a gong, like in the announcement of a radio play, and from the dark screen a child recites a rhyme based on the so-called ‘Fritz Haarmann song’. After the first lines the camera focuses on a group of children playing an elimination game:6

Compulsions of Wildness: On Grieg’s Trolls in Lang’s

113

Little Girl (chants) Warte, warte nur ein Weilchen

Just you wait a little while.

bald kommt der Schwarze Mann zu dir,

soon the man in black will come,

mit dem kleinen Hackebeilchen

with his tiny little chopper

macht er Schabefleisch aus dir.

he makes minced meat of you.

Du bist raus!

You are out!

The Little Girl stops in front of one of her playmates and gestures for her to leave the circle. (The child leaves the circle and the game continues.) Pregnant Woman Will you stop singing that awful song . . .?! (But the chanting continues.)7

Despite all the unpleasant reminders contemporary spectators might have, Beckert was not presented as a copy of the above-mentioned murderers’ stern portraits known from the papers. Rather, outer inoffensiveness was highlighted in different ways. With his big, innocent eyes and rounded cheeks, Hans Beckert seemed more like an infantile adult, supposedly harmful to no one and thus virtually impossible to detect (Figure 7.3). By giving the murderer an innocent appearance, Lang suggests that criminals may well look like ordinary people – human evil may not always be expressed through a human being’s exterior. Yet the murderer’s childish looks also suggest an uncomfortable connection with his child targets. Mentally he is himself a child, and adults acting like children may prove to be dangerous. Even between the name Beckert and the last name of his victim Elsie Beckmann, there is a disturbing correlation, which signals both the girl’s destiny and the yet unknown fate of her murderer. These insidious traits of Hans Beckert, built on connotations with sadistic real-life murderers hidden behind a childlike appearance, are further increased by the murderer’s fascination for knives. In one scene he is looking at an array of sharp objects in a shop window, reminiscent of a child standing in front of a sweet shop. He is also openly presenting his sharp knife as he is innocently peeling an orange. On several occasions the murderer is seen chewing or putting something into his mouth, appearing as a disquieting combination of selfcomforting child and appalling devourer. Contrary to the views on Beckert, murder topicalities and societal relevance, the use of Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ seems to have gone quite unnoticed by contemporary critics. One reason may be that the tune tended to be overshadowed by the movie’s immediate actuality and severe up-to-date message. Yet the failure to mention the music should also be regarded in the light of the state and status of sound in film at the time. Sound in film was a brand-new attraction in itself, and a close interpretation of particular sound effects was not yet a common issue among film critics. The closest one critic seems to come is in an article by Hans Feld, film critic and editor of the journal Film-Kurier. On 12 May 1931, the day after the premiere, he published a comprehensive review.8 First, Feld mentions the elements of actuality

114

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

(b)

(a)

(c) Figure 7.3 Hans Beckert [Peter Lorre] in M. Stills by permission from Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.

central to the movie’s reception history as discussed above. He continues by suggesting that the numbers of such atrocities of murder are linked to the structure of the times in which they appear and that they are impossible to eradicate. This observation corresponds with the common view of crime as an increasing threat in contemporary Weimar society. After these considerations, Feld’s text, contrary to most of the reviews at the time, touches upon the Grieg whistling, albeit without discussing the decisive role of that particular tune. His mind is rather set on the technical side of early sound film: he briefly mentions ‘the Columbus’-egg-whistling by the murderer; a banal Grieg phrase, dynamically balanced [i.e. balanced in relation to the other sound elements of the movie]’.9 To understand the early reception history of M and Lang’s dramaturgical use of Grieg, one needs to take a closer look at Lang’s ideas, the role of Edvard Grieg in film history and, not least, the initial context of Grieg’s piece in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. In the silent movie era – which ended more or less in the period when M was made – music had been the responsibility of the film theatre in which a movie was shown,

Compulsions of Wildness: On Grieg’s Trolls in Lang’s

115

not of the film company. Yet a company might distribute musical suggestions together with their movies. In film journals successful movie-theatre conductors might also publish their own lists of music regarded as suitable for a new film. In the rather few cases when a score was written for a certain movie it was mainly meant for the premiere. Such scores could also be printed for different ensembles and offered as material for rent. However, in addition to sheer improvisation performed by one musician, any composed score or cue sheet might be replaced by music more readily at hand. This was the rule rather than the exception. German film journals from the silent era document that pieces by Edvard Grieg were frequently used as movie accompaniment. Repeated mention is made of music from works such as the Peer Gynt suites I and II , the stage music for Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s play Sigurd Jorsalfar and movements from the string suite From Holberg’s Times. In the United States, a paradigmatic use of ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ in film was heard in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), set during and after the American Civil War. The original music for this movie consisted of a score by Joseph Carl Breil with inclusions of folk songs and previously composed concert music.10 Grieg’s piece accompanied the Union’s attack on Atlanta. The simple fact that the music was so well known from films at the time may have been a reason for both contemporary critics and spectators of M to regard ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ as just some familiar tune that was as good as any. But these were also the times when Grieg’s troll music from Peer Gynt started to become part of popular culture. It began accumulating layers of signification recognized by what was uncanny and scary, wild and dangerously inevitable. One may ask why this particular piece of music achieved such an interpretative position. The main answer is probably inherent in the musical structure itself. Grieg builds his music as one long, gradual musical expansion of sounding forces that ends with an exploding climax. The main device is a repeated rhythmic-melodic pattern which generates musical form through a continuous increase in dynamics and tempo. Dynamically it starts very soft (pp) and ends very loud (ff ), as if something is approaching from afar until it comes disturbingly close and finally overthrows everything. A gradual increase in tempo supports this effect. The characteristics of the melodic gesture are an ascending, minor diatonic scale to the fifth in m. 2, followed by a chromatic, descending motion in m. 3: The melodic progression in mm. 2–4 gives the impression of something pressing forward from the dark and then temporarily withdrawing again to darkness.11 The constant, dynamically increasing repetitions throughout the piece gradually make it all the more wild and threatening as it seems to be unstoppable. Harmonically, a characteristic progression is heard from m. 2 to m. 3, as the chords are moving

Ex. 7.1 Edvard Grieg, ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, op. 46/4, piano reduction, mm. 1–5.

116

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Ex. 7.2 Edvard Grieg, ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, op. 46/4, piano reduction, mm. 86–88.

chromatically from the tonic in m. 2 to the dominant of the dominant. The expected resolution to the dominant is not put through, and the progression descends further into the dark.12 The irrevocable intensity of an ever-repeated rhythmical pattern is reinforced by an ostinato motion based on primitive, ‘empty’ fifths, as seen in the bass line of mm. 2–5. The last eighteen measures contain scaring gestures and accents divided by threatening pauses alternating with swiftly ‘running’ eighth notes and accentuated fourth notes with percussive appoggiaturas. It all culminates in an exploding climax abruptly introduced by threatening tremolo and a violent crescendo: These main characteristics of Grieg’s music may be described as in the left column in Table 7.1. The descriptions to the right suggest extra-musical connotations to the musical progression. The musical traits mentioned above may well have influenced Lang’s choice. To this writer’s knowledge he never explained his choice of tune – a fact which does not imply that his choice was arbitrary or had no deeper meaning. In the light of Lang’s thorough work as one of the most prominent film directors of all time, one should rather suppose the opposite. In the silent movie era it was commonly acknowledged by film directors as well as by ordinary moviegoers that music might represent a fair half of the cinematic

Table 7.1 ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, musical structure and extra-musical connotations ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’:

Extra-musical connotations:

Music begins softly:

Something creepily starts moving from some point afar. Something is advancing. Something is pressing forward from the dark. Something is temporarily withdrawing to the dark, just to immediately be pressing forward again. Something is persistently focused on a fixed purpose. Something is gradually coming in your direction, finally drawing dangerously near – forces of primitive wildness seem inexorable. Something suddenly attacks, fiercely and with decisive results.

Steady, repetitive rhythmical pattern: Ascending, forward motion: Descending motion: A constantly repeated melodic motive: Increasing crescendo:

Irregular, musical explosions:

Compulsions of Wildness: On Grieg’s Trolls in Lang’s

117

experience. As already mentioned, before 1931 Lang had made silent films supported by brilliant scores. Gottfried Huppertz, the composer of Nibelungen and Metropolis, was among his close friends. Despite such affiliations, Lang biographer Patrick McGilligan maintains that the director was not particularly interested in music. In his discussion of M, the author notes that ‘Lang, with his dislike of music, ruled out any conventional soundtrack. The only music would be the “Hall of the Mountain King” theme from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt, as whistled recurrently by the killer’.13 The author obviously leaves out the diegetic use of a street organ. Yet the more relevant question pertaining to McGilligan’s observation is what a ‘conventional soundtrack’ might mean in 1931. The thrill of sound film was still new, and its further development debated. Two years later, in 1933, composer Max Steiner wrote the path-breaking music for King Kong, applying underscoring techniques which would become a trademark for Hollywood movies of the golden age up to about 1950. But in the early 1930s several prominent directors maintained that if music were heard in a sound film the spectators would immediately ask where it came from. In order to be musically acceptable, the source of the music had to be visible or in some other way justified on the screen. The underlying idea was that sound film induced a brand-new level of realism into the movies, not least through the personal intimacy and the self-referential faculties of the human voice. This situation also implies that a ‘conventional soundtrack’ did not yet exist when Lang made M. Rather, he had to decide how the sound elements of his movie could work together and play a productive role in combination with the visual narrative. At the early stages of sound film there were also discussions on the artistic functions of diegetic sound effects. Path-breaking Soviet directors at the time, such as Sergej Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov, argued that sound should be used as a counterpoint; it should not be synchronous, rather it ought to complete the visual impression of a scene by adding the sound of something which was not seen in the picture frame.14 The self-referentiality of sounds uttered by a human being, combined with sound’s general capacity of opening up to ‘something which is not seen’, is the precondition for Lang’s use of the Grieg tune in M. In 1926, Lang had characterized the first gift for which film should be thanked as ‘the rediscovery of the human face’, continuing: ‘Film has revealed to us the human face with unexampled clarity in its tragic as well as grotesque, threatening as well as blessed expression.’15 In M, Lang combines the vast possibilities of the human face with the potential of non-verbal sounds emerging from its lips. Lang often presented the faces of new actors in his films. In M, the role of Hans Beckert was played by the then-unknown Austrian-Hungarian Peter Lorre, who gained international fame through this role. One of the many anecdotes associated with Lang is that Lorre’s ingenious acting capacities did not include whistling in the required outof-tune manner. Consequently, Lang applied himself to the task. The small motif – in Lang’s own words ‘the unmelodic, incessantly recurring whistling by the child murderer, which gives his instincts wordless expression’16 – represents the complex compulsions intrinsic to the murderer’s disturbed condition. Hence, to define the use of Grieg’s tune as music is highly questionable. In this movie Grieg’s tune has rather ceased to be

118

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

music, it has been transformed into an expression emptied of words, sounding from the darkest realms of a human being. Curiously enough, the tune is not expressed by the murderer’s vocal cords, as one might expect from a person in Beckert’s mental state. The tune comes from the act of whistling, technically from air pressed through a human being’s intentionally rounded lips. A sound uttered by the voice may come quite involuntarily and be produced without any conscious purpose. Whistling, on the contrary, requires an acquired skill based on more preparation and deliberate operation than just spontaneously voicing a sound. The whistling might, for instance, have been understood as a fictional film character’s warning, not so much aimed at his fictional victims as at the movie spectators – a device famously used many years later with the shark theme in Jaws (Steven Spielberg/John Williams, 1976). However, Beckert’s urge to whistle is definitely of another kind. It is in fact so strong that he is unable to stop it even if he wants to. On several occasions he is seen covering his lips as if trying to stop it from coming. Beckert’s whistling clearly acts as an indispensable valve for his pressing compulsions. His inner anxiety is so high that he even seeks relief by playing hide-and-seek with the police and the press by anonymously revealing his plans. And he whistles not just when he is about to commit a murder. He also does it in situations where he is just mentally preoccupied with his purposes (Table 7.2). Discussions on Lang’s use of Grieg in M may serve as a case demonstrating how complementary interpretations of an artwork may develop over the years. To a movieviewing public of today, the cases of actual serial killers in the 1920s and 1930s have mostly vanished into oblivion. Now, M is seen more as a landmark in the history of German film containing lasting impressions provided by the murderer’s childlike face, his whistling and the iconic image of him discovering the letter M applied to his back. Over the years the study of film music has developed into an important branch of musicology. Consequently, in the case of M, a more sophisticated trait in Lang’s construction of Hans Beckert’s character has increased in importance: over the years a more concentrated focus has been put on the use of Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’. Most film- and film-music researchers of today would consider that a movie Table 7.2 Whistling ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’: occurrences in Fritz Lang’s M17 Scene:

Timeline:

Murderer buys a balloon for his new victim from a blind balloon seller. Murderer writes a letter to the police describing his further plans. Murderer detects another victim as he is looking into a shop window containing sharp objects and cutlery, before starting to follow a possible victim. The murderer’s whistling is heard off-screen as he is approaching. Intentions fail, victim is collected by her mother, murderer tries to calm down behind the foliage of a sidewalk restaurant. He whistles twice, yet tries to protect himself from it by covering his own mouth and ears. Murderer leaves the restaurant, whistling. Murderer buys a balloon for a new victim from the same balloon seller as above, whistling both on- and off-screen.

0.06ʹ 42ʺ 0.09ʹ 49ʺ 0.53ʹ 18ʺ

0.53ʹ 46ʺ 0.55ʹ 15ʺ

0.56ʹ 37ʺ 0.57ʹ 54ʺ

Compulsions of Wildness: On Grieg’s Trolls in Lang’s

119

character repeatedly whistling a few bars from a particular piece of music would automatically be expected to have a sounding image of the whole piece in his or her head. Hence it will also be taken for granted that the film director has consciously made the choice of a melody opening up a specific space of interpretation. Accordingly, in the case of M, Beckert’s whistling might rightly encourage interpretations of extramusical connotations of the music’s original context in Ibsen’s play. Kristi A. Brown’s inclusion of M, together with two other films using Grieg, in her insightful article ‘The Troll Among Us’ in Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film, is one of them.18 The introduction chapter in Goldmark, Kramer and Leppert’s anthology, Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema,19 is another example of such attention. In his book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), Siegfried Kracauer lets Beckert’s whistling pass with the notion of ‘a melody by Grieg’.20 However, in the 1950s, when M was sporadically reappearing in movie theatres and film clubs, one may find forerunners to a more profound analysis of the use of Grieg. In the 1950s, a significant development in the quality of music and sound in the movies was taking place. At that point the use of Grieg’s tune seems to have increased its importance by being highlighted both as ‘music’ and as ‘leitmotif ’. In Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 20 December 1956, Kurt Honollied writes about the use of Grieg as a brilliant example of condensed film music of multi-layered importance: ‘and equally exemplary is how the music plays along with the movie’s dramaturgy: it has been condensed to a few measures having a thousand times more to say than the schmaltzy violin choirs of today’s routine’. 21 In Hamburger Echo, 2 March 1959, the signature L.P. draws parallels to the use of Grieg as monothematic film music, exemplified by the famous ‘Harry Lime Theme’ by Anton Karas in The Third Man (1949): ‘Almost incidentally, one discovers here that even Carol Reed’s directorial gimmick, marked as a completely new idea, with which the culprit is characterized by a musical theme in the “Third Man,” was already anticipated in 1930 by Fritz Lang.’22 Here, Lang is seen as being far ahead of his time when including a concentrated piece of music as a tool for a movie-character depiction, interwoven with his overall dramaturgical procedures. Yet any reference to the original context of Grieg’s music is not being made by any of these critics. This fact invites the question of how well the Grieg–Ibsen connection was actually known in Germany at the time. From the early twentieth century, Ibsen’s play was often performed on the German stage. The rhymed Peer Gynt, written in 1867, was termed ‘a dramatic poem’, thus originally meant for reading. Yet, after almost ten years, on 24 February 1876, the work was premiered as a stage play at Christiania Theatre.23 It was for this event that Grieg wrote his extensive score of incidental music. The music sounding in the Hall of the Mountain King scene had been composed in 1874. The original music included a choir; the version most commonly known today is the orchestral piece from Peer Gynt Suite I (1887–1888). A German silent movie of the play had been made already in 1919.24 In 1930, the year when Lang started working on M, one could, under the FilmKurier heading ‘Griegs Musik im Kino. “Peer Gynt” als Tonfilm’, read that Tankred (sic) Ibsen ‘was planning to make a movie on his grandfather’s play’.25 Grieg’s Peer Gynt suites were popular in Germany then as now, and the wording in the note above shows

120

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

that the combination of Grieg’s music and Ibsen’s play was common knowledge. To Lang, a thorough awareness of Peer Gynt was obviously so self-evident that he could even use it as a description of a minor character in his Drehbuch for Nibelungen I, Siegfrieds Tod (1924). One of the weird human beings in front of Mime’s forge gives the impression of ‘an age-old, filthy Peer Gynt’.26 This observation does not prove that Lang deliberately used Grieg as a link between M and Ibsen’s play. Yet, in addition to the intrinsic characteristics of Grieg’s piece, circumstantial evidence may be found in the fact that instances in Lang’s movie seem to mirror particular scenes in Ibsen’s play. This trait justifies a level of interpretation which survived the timebound associations with Haarmann and Kürten, Denke and Grossmann. When using music as an intertextual grip of combined aspects expressed in two works in different kinds of artistic media, the careful selection of a particular musical piece is of pivotal importance. The wrong choice may lead to unintentional results, to say the least. A couple of film critics from German papers unknowingly demonstrate this indisputable fact. In Kölnische Rundschau, 7 November 1953, the signature Bb believes the tune to be ‘Anitra’s Dance’ (another piece from Peer Gynt Suite I) when writing: ‘Uncanny [is] also Grieg’s ‘Per [sic] Gynt’-hit for the dancing Anitra, a melody that nags the child-murdering Lorre agonizingly in the ears.’27 The same misunderstanding is found in Werner Fiedler, Der Tag (Berlin), 19 March 1960: ‘At that time [i.e. when M was made] the film fanatics were still honestly concerned about the new possibilities of the sounding film, the world of sounds, acoustic leitmotifs. Oppressive is the false-whistled melody of Anitra’s dance that accompanies the killer on a gloomy road.’28 If Fritz Lang had indeed chosen ‘Anitra’s Dance’ instead of ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ as his dramaturgical vehicle, he would have changed not only the murderer’s character but also the whole narrative. Anitra, met in Peer Gynt act 4 scene 6, is an Arabian belly-dancing temptress who claims she has no soul – and does not want to achieve any. She is a gold digger who only has an eye on utilizing Peer’s weaker qualities as a man for her own good. If it had indeed been used in M, whistling ‘Anitra’s Dance’ would have portrayed the murderer as a man exhibiting sexual inclinations that his targets wished to exploit. As a result, the child victims would then be regarded as deliberately seducing the murderer; hence they would also have to suffer the consequences of their own behaviour. The endangered would consciously cause the danger – the guilt would be placed on the victims instead of on the murderer. Beckert’s persona and the whole plot would be turned upside down. In other words, such a choice of a tune would have run contrary to Lang’s fundamental intentions. Hans Beckert is definitely not situated in the realms of Anitra. His jurisdictions are that of the Dovre King, where ‘troll’ is the keyword. This assertion requires both a closer look at Ibsen’s trolls and at a couple of scenes from Peer Gynt. Grieg’s and Ibsen’s concepts of trolls are rooted in Norwegian folklore. They embody the wild and untamed forces of nature; the habitats of trolls are the impenetrable forests, bare mountains, wild waterfalls, treacherous ponds, dark barns or the roaring seas. Their external characteristics are tailored to the particular landscapes and environments to which they belong, thus securing their veiled yet persistent omnipresence. Hence, a troll may appear in different guises; human beings are never

Compulsions of Wildness: On Grieg’s Trolls in Lang’s

121

safe, however independent, self-confident or innocent they may be. These traits are essential to the recognition of movie character Hans Beckert as a ‘troll’ in the modern society of 1931. Due to his childish, anonymous looks he is perfectly adapted to the crowded environments in which he operates. Driven by the mighty forces of evil, trolls – like Hans Beckert – are a constant threat to any proper prey coming in their way. This trait seems to be the core inspiration for Edvard Grieg. As described above, the character of Grieg’s trolls is musically described as a wildly progressing force approaching from silent darkness into a concluding explosion.29 When searching for the original impression of trolls as dangerous forces ready to molest and destroy, one has to discard anything reminiscent of the rubber troll mascots found on Norwegian souvenir stands. Trolls in this context should be seen and experienced as more ‘real’ than anything, overpowering, both literally and figuratively. They do not always have just one head but occasionally the profaned version of sacred numbers like three, six or nine. Elsie Beckmann is presented as Hans Beckert’s victim number nine, proving to be his last. A most certain way of exterminating a troll is to cut off its heads with an enchanted sword (Figure 7.4). As already suggested, Beckert’s exterior creates a link between himself and his child victims. Similar connections may also exist between mythical trolls and human beings since trolls may be situated in a peculiar symbiosis with people inhabiting common

Figure 7.4 Erik Werenskiold (1855–1938): ‘Ugh! Ugh! Here I smell the Blood of a Christian Man!’ roared the Troll. 1884. Drawing, (310 × 232 mm). Photo: Nasjonalmuseet/Dag Andre Ivarsøy. CC-BY https://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/collection/object/NG.K_H.B.05123.

122

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

environments. Even the most inoffensive and timid human being may thus have a touch of ‘troll’. Such ideas afford a wide scope for evil ranging from mischievous acts to violent murder. Although trolls are imagined as massive and threatening, in battle with humans they may also come forward as dumb, clumsy and easy to fool. Their mental capacity may be obviously limited; hence their animalistic character can be outwitted by the human mind. Beckert’s appearance as a childish and even slightly retarded person ties in with such features. The associations between Hans Beckert and the trolls in Peer Gynt are further reinforced by Ibsen expanding on the idea of a noticeably close co-existence of trolls and human beings. This is particularly evident in the second act, where Peer is confronted with the mighty troll Dovregubben – the Dovre King – and his court. This incident in Ibsen’s play promotes the previously mentioned view of a relationship between the minds and mentalities of trolls and human beings. While Grieg musically explores the physical compulsions of trolls, Ibsen uncovers the connections of such compulsions with the true nature of human beings. The view provides another insight into Beckert’s twisted persona: trolls mirror the dark side of human nature; they are embedded in people’s animalistic instincts, blind urges and restless cravings. To Ibsen, these traits also include selfish weakness and narrowminded cowardice, characteristics that may well apply to a murderer attacking only defenceless children and no adults. The location of this scene from Peer Gynt is a court of trolls within the Dovre mountain-massive, geographically situated in the heart of Norway. Related to Ibsen’s play, the English title, ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, which is commonly used as translation of the Norwegian ‘I Dovregubbens hall’, is imprecise, since the concept of ‘Dovre’ is essential to the understanding of Ibsen’s Dovregubben character.30 A better translation would be ‘In the Hall of the Dovre King’. Dovre is regarded as the Norwegian bedrock per se; it cannot be destroyed and it will never perish. Ibsen sees the unmovable Dovre as a symbol of the Norwegian national soul in which a troll king lives with his royal household. In the play, Peer is locked in together with the mighty sovereign surrounded by a variety of dangerous and weird creatures, all appearing to be suspiciously human (Plate 3).31 Protagonist Peer is led into these realms after having been seduced by the female creature Den Grønnkledte (The Green-clad One), the Dovre King’s daughter. A dangerous threshold has been passed, a fatal sexual attraction between a human being and the forbidden ‘other’ has been taking place. In modern society, children are commonly regarded as the most forbidden objects of sexual desire. In Ibsen’s play, the situation twists Peer’s mind into seeing the world through a troll’s eye: The Green-Clad One Black it seems white, and ugly seems fair. Peer Big it seems little, and dirty seems clean. The Green-Clad One (falling on his neck) Ay, Peer, now I see that we fit, you and I!32

Compulsions of Wildness: On Grieg’s Trolls in Lang’s

123

Associated with Hans Beckert, an encounter of a corresponding kind is a paedophile’s attempt at the rationalization of intolerable sexual transgressions. An inborn capacity of trading right with wrong may justify even a child murderer’s malevolent acts. Peer’s encounter with the residents of the mountain proves to be not only menacing but also utterly dangerous and severely fateful, since his future as either a human or a troll is determined through this incident. The transformation from a human being to a troll may produce a deeply rooted change of identity. Ibsen’s Dovre King wants to make sure that Peer will permanently stay a troll by twisting his sight through scratching his eye once and for all: Peer What will you do? The Dovre King In your left eye, first, I’ll scratch you a bit, till you see awry; but all that you see will seem fine and brave. And then I’ll just cut your right window-pane out — Peer Are you drunk? The Dovre King (lays a number of sharp instruments on the table) See, here are the glazier’s tools. Blinkers you’ll wear, like a raging bull. Then you’ll recognise that your bride is lovely — and ne’er will your vision be troubled, as now, with bell-cows harping and sows that dance. Peer This is madman’s talk! The Oldest Courtier It’s the Dovre-King speaking; it’s he that is wise, and it’s you that are crazy!

The trading and twisting of true humanness versus the dark forces inhabiting a human are a common trait between Hans Beckert and Peer Gynt. Peer barely escapes the Dovre realms. He does not, however, escape the attitudes and cravings governing the ‘troll’ abiding in his own nature. Hans Beckert meets his Dovre in a cellar in Berlin. This is, however, a Dovre which proves to be inescapable. As already noted, a breakthrough in the desperate chase of the murderer is caused by the blind balloon seller who hears a man whistling a tune and remembers that the same melody was heard the day Elsie Beckmann was killed. The beggar from his block trails Beckert, who is leading a little girl into a sweet shop. When Beckert makes the mistake of throwing his orange peel on the sidewalk, the beggar pretends to slip on it and, while clutching Beckert for support, transfers onto the back

124

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 7.5 The stigmatized child murderer [Peter Lorre] in Fritz Lang’s M. Still by permission from Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.

of Beckert’s shoulder a big ‘M’ that he has previously chalked on his palm (Figure 7.5). The beggars are now able to follow the man with the M on his coat. This is the decisive shift in the chase of the killer: The anonymous Beckert has now both been identified and stigmatized as a murderer. A corresponding situation is found in Peer Gynt, act 2 scene 6, where the Dovre King intends to stigmatize Peer as a troll by attaching to him a tail, a sign that would, like Beckert’s M, forever be following him from behind his back: Dovre King And next you must throw off your Christian-man’s garb; for this you must know to our Dovre’s renown: here all things are mountain-made, nought’s from the dale, except the silk bow at the end of your tail. Peer (indignant) I haven’t a tail! Dovre King Then of course you must get one. See my Sunday-tail, chamberlain, fastened to him. Peer I’ll be hanged if you do! Would you make me a fool! Dovre King None comes courting my child with no tail at his rear. Peer

Compulsions of Wildness: On Grieg’s Trolls in Lang’s

125

Make a beast of a man!

The troll’s tail might have branded Peer’s identity as a beast; the M applied to Beckert’s back gives him the official status as a beastly killer who will soon be facing his judge. He is visually defined as a monster even out in the open, a situation that Peer barely avoids. And from now on Beckert is the haunted prey. In the dramatic last section of M the little girl that Beckert is with picks up the sharp knife which the kind ‘uncle’ has lost while peeling an orange. Suddenly she notices the denouncing M on his shoulder and offers to wipe it off. The distance between herself and death is precariously close, yet she is unable to perceive it due to the murderer’s deceptive kindness. Certain that he has been revealed and may soon be caught, Beckert runs into an office building. A group of gangsters examines the building and captures the child killer. However, the night watchman sounds an alarm alerting the police. In the minutes before the police arrive, the gangsters find Beckert, and everyone, except for burglar Franz, manages to get out before the police arrive. To make Franz speak, detective Lohmann [Otto Wernicke] lies to him that the night watchman at the building was killed during the gangsters’ raid. The strategy has the desired effect: fearing that he is going to face a murder rap, Franz tells how the gangsters have captured the child killer and taken him to an abandoned distillery to stand trial. Meanwhile, in the solid basement of the distillery, a kangaroo court consisting of the leaders and members of various criminal denominations is in session. The child murderer is going to be judged by other persons situated on the wrong side of the law. The atmosphere is bristling with hostility, hate and loud demands of lynching. The threatening atmosphere equals Peer Gynt’s situation as he has been entrapped in the mountain ‘basement’ of Dovre (Table 7.3). In Peer Gynt, this is exactly where Grieg’s piece is sounding. The words to the right are even included in the original stage version of the music. In the case of Beckert, the murderer’s whistling has both contained the compulsions leading to his fatal actions and at the same time suggested his own destiny. At this point a surprising shift in Lang’s presentation occurs. As the murderer finds himself trapped in the basement, he sobs with fear and delivers a touching speech in his defence. Although a focus on sexual liberation was current in the Weimar Republic, to allow a paedophile serial killer to

Table 7.3 People in M and trolls in Peer Gynt People in Lang’s M:

Trolls in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt:

Kill him, the monster! Crush him, the brute! Kill him. Bleed the beast! Hang him. Beat him down! To the gallows! Finish him. Kill him! Kill him!

Kill him! The son of a Christian has raped the heart of the Dovre-King’s daughter! Can I cut one of his fingers off? Can I pull his hair? Let me bite his crutch! Render him down to make a soup! A roast on a spit, or stew in a pot!

126

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

present an apologetical monologue in a film of 1931 may seem rather unexpected. Then, as now, a child murderer was commonly regarded as the lowest of criminals, and the question of whether paedophilia should be seen as a mental disorder or a sexual preference is being discussed even today. The decisive point for Hans Beckert is that the outlaws present in the kangaroo court are criminals according to their own free will, while he himself has no free will due to his constantly being driven by restless, inner terrors: Murderer (interrupted by mocking laughter and scorning comments) What do you know about it? What are you saying? If it comes to that, who are you? What right have you to speak? Who are you? . . . All of you? . . . Criminals! Perhaps you’re even proud of yourselves? Proud of being able to break safes, to climb into buildings or cheat at cards . . . Things you could just as well keep your fingers off . . . You wouldn’t need to do all that if you had learnt a proper trade . . . or if you worked. If you weren’t a bunch of lazy bastards . . . But I . . . I can’t help myself! I haven’t any control over this evil thing that’s inside me – the fire, the voices, the torment. Always . . . always, there’s this evil force inside me . . . It’s there all the time, driving me out to wander through the streets . . . following me . . . silently, but I can feel it there . . . it’s me, pursuing myself, because . . . I want to escape . . . to escape from myself! . . . but it’s impossible. I can’t. I can’t escape. I have to obey it. I have to run . . . run . . . streets . . . endless streets. I want to escape. I want to get away. And I am pursued by ghosts. Ghosts of mothers. And of those children . . . They never leave me. They are there, there, always, always! Always . . . except . . .! . . . except when I do it . . . when I . . . Then I can’t remember anything . . .

According to the murderer, inescapable demons are driving him to do his atrocious deeds, and when the demons have taken their tolls, the ghosts of his victims and their mothers join in with his inner torments. This is the point where the real, oppressive foundation of his whistling Grieg is articulated in words. The tune proves not just to

Compulsions of Wildness: On Grieg’s Trolls in Lang’s

127

represent the voice of Beckert’s immediate thoughts and deeds but also the voice of the evil powers that are totally possessing him and restlessly commanding him to action. Furthermore, the tune also gives voice to his bad conscience, to ‘the ghosts’ of his victims who continuously haunt him and combines with his inner demons. The fatal consequence of this evil circle is that the only way of temporarily muting the victim ghosts is to commit another gruesome deed. Beckert’s acts are thus driven by two main forces: that of his dangerous compulsions combining with the ghosts of the endangered, a combination which can only be silenced by another atrocious act. Grieg’s tune thus embodies untameable forces that go full circle with a mentally disturbed child murderer as their catalyst. It even combines with the M on Beckert’s back, proving to be not only a stigma for his status as a murderer but also a symbol of the persistent forces by which he is both followed and driven, and from which he is constantly trying to escape. The French title of the movie, M. Le maudit (M. The Damned) suggests this point of incidence to the work, as opposed to, say, the Argentinian M. El vampiro negro (M. The Black Vampire). Lang’s main focus is children, ‘the weakest among us’, as vulnerable victims of this circle of inexplicable cruelty.33 His message is that when malevolent powers are sufficiently evil, they may seem impossible to defeat. The solution does not always lie in the attempt at conquering evil but rather in the protection from it. This is Lang’s ‘logical conclusion’ as seen in his aforementioned ‘factual report’.34 His fundamental idea is reflected in the seemingly simple concluding line of the film. The words are uttered by Elsie Beckmann’s mother [Ellen Widmann]. Before the trial is about to start, Mrs Beckmann sits among sobbing women. Through the last line she is, on behalf of herself and other parents, taking on the responsibility of preventing the undetectable luring dangers from devouring the most vulnerable members of society. ‘This won’t bring our children back,’ she says, ‘We, too, should keep a closer watch on our children.’ By placing responsibility on the persons standing closest to the endangered, her observation shifts the attention from the duty of police authorities and legal courts to the obligation of every individual human being. Consequently, this attitude also represents Lang’s answer to the question posed in the introduction above, concerning how an exposed group of people, even a whole society, may guard itself against invisible forces aimed at restless destruction: if death-bringing compulsions of wildness are recognized as omnipresent yet impossible to detect, the only way to encounter them is to shield the endangered through continuous care.

Notes 1 2

Director: Fritz Lang. Screenwriters: Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang. Producer: Seymor Nebenzal. Year of release: 1931. ‘Kann dieser Film der Tatsachenberichte dazu beitragen, wie eine mahnend und warnend erhobene Hand auf die unbekannte Lauernde Gefahr hinzuweisen, auf die chronische Gefahr, die im ständigen Vorhandensein krankhaft veranlagter oder kriminell belasteter Menschen als gewissermaßen Brandherd unser Dasein – besonders aber das Dasein der Hilflosesten unter uns, der Kinder – bedroht, und kann der Film ferner dazu beitragen, vielleicht sogar dieser Gefahr vorzubeugen, so hat er

128

3

4 5

6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered damit seine beste Aufgabe erfüllt und aus der Quintessenz der in ihm zusammengetragenen Tatsachen die logische Folgerung gezogen.’ Fritz Lang, ‘Mein Film “M”, – ein Tatsachenbericht’, Filmwoche (Berlin) 21 (1931). 20 May 1931. (Original German text translated to English by the author.) For further reading, see [S.F.?], ‘In Venedig gefunden und fürs Filmmuseum erworben: Rares Fritz-Lang Plakat’, Rheinische Post, 25 November 1993. Düsseldorf, 25 November 1993, by the signature S.F./pld. A German Kulturfilm would today be categorized as a documentary. English translations from the script are based on the entry M (unspecified draft) at http://www.script-o-rama.com/snazzy/table3.html http://web.archive.org/ web/20030211010748/http://www.geocities.com/emruf/M.html (accessed 24 April 2020). The ‘Fritz Haarmann song’: ‘Warte, warte nur ein Weilchen, / bald kommt Haarmann auch zu dir, / mit dem kleinen Hackebeilchen, / macht er Schabefleisch [or Hackefleisch] aus dir. Aus den Augen macht er Sülze, / aus dem Hintern macht er Speck, /aus den Därmen macht er Würste / und den Rest, den schmeißt er weg.’ (Author’s translation: ‘Just you wait a little while, Haarmann soon will come to you too,/ With the tiny little chopper/ He makes minced meat from you,/ From the eyes comes jellied meat,/ From the butt he meat can cut,/ From the intestines comes sausage,/ What is left he throws away.’) See http://www.songtextemania.com/das_fritz_ haarmann_lied_songtext_giez.html (accessed 24 April 2020). The Haarmann song was made as a parody on a hit song from a popular operetta Marietta (1923) by Walter Kollo: ‘Warte warte nu rein Weilchen/bald kommt auch das Glück zu dir!/Mit den ersten blauen Veilchen/klopft es leis’ an deine Tür’ (‘Just you wait a little while/soon comes happiness to you too!/Bringing the first blue violets it knocks softly on your door’). See Christina Gules, ‘Killerschlager. Wenn aus Gewalt durch Schlagermusik Spass wird’, Gera. Germanistische Magazine 1 (2014), http://gema.hu/2014/03/ killerschlager. (Accessed 13 May 2020). The ‘Haarman Lied’, which is a grotesque parody of the romantic Kollo song mentioned above, was part of the German vernacular and characteristic of genre called ‘killer songs’. Many versions emerged in the wake of the Haarman trial in the 1920s, and the originator of neither a first version nor of any of the variants is known. (In the German society of the late 1920s and early 1930s ‘everybody’ would know the Haarmann song through oral transmission.) See M (unspecified draft) at http://www.script-o-rama.com/snazzy/table3.html http:// web.archive.org/web/20030211010748/http://www.geocities.com:80/emruf/M.html (accessed 24 April 2020). Hans Feld, ‘Fritz Lang’s Tonfilm “M”,’ Film-Kurier, 12 May 1931. Ibid., ‘[. . .] der Kolumbusei-Pfiff des Mörders; eine banale Grieg-Phrase, dynamisch abgestuft’. (Original German text translated to English by the author.) Please note that DVD versions of this film may use different scores. (A progression from the tonic, reaching the fifth and then returning chromatically to the tonic again.) In technical terms, the music is rather progressing chromatically to a harmony based on the so-called Neapolitan sixth chord. Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 107. For instance, gun shots heard and terrified people seen. See Sergej Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigorij Alexandrov, ‘A Statement’, in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 83–85.

Compulsions of Wildness: On Grieg’s Trolls in Lang’s

129

15 Fritz Lang, ‘The Future of the Feature Film in Germany. First published as “Wege des großen Spielfilms in Deutschland.” Die literarische Welt 2 (1 October 1926)’, in The Weimar Republic Source Book, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 622–623. 16 ‘das unmelodische, immer wiederkehrende Pfeifen des Kindermörders, das seinen Triebgefühlen wortlos Ausdruck gibt’. Quoted from an interview with Lang referred to in Michael Töteberg, Fritz Lang (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 71. (Original German text translated to English by the author.) 17 Timeline markings are referring to the DVD version of M published by Scantrade entertainment: Art. nr 11004X. 18 Kristi A. Brown, ‘The Troll Among Us’, in Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film, ed. Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 74–87. 19 Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, eds., Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 20 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1947), 220. 21 ‘[. . .] und ebenso vorbildlich, wie die Musik filmdramaturgisch mitspielt: sie ist auf wenige Takte zusammengeschrumpft und hat doch tausendmal mehr zu sagen als die Schnulzen-Geigenchöre der heutigen Routine’. Kurt Honollied, ‘Wiedersehen mit “M,” Fritz Lang’s Meisterfilm in Stuttgart’, Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 20 December 1956. (Original German text translated to English by the author.) 22 ‘Fast nebenbei entdeckt man hier, dass sogar Carol Reeds als gänzlich neue Idee gekennzeichneter Regiekniff, mit dem im “Dritten Mann” den Übeltäter durch ein musikalisches Thema kennzeichnet, schon 1930 von Fritz Lang vorweggenommen wurde’. [L.P.?], ‘Fast ein historischer Film’, Hamburger Echo, 2 March 1959. (Original German text translated to English by the author.) 23 Christiania was the name of the Norwegian capital Oslo from 1624 to 1924. 24 A silent film based on the escapades of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt character had been made in the United States already in 1915. 25 [NN?], ‘Griegs Musik im Kino. “Peer Gynt” als Tonfilm’, Beiblatt to the Film-Kurier, ‘Die Film-Musik’, 25 September 1930. This film project never came off. 26 Microfilm script contained in the library holdings of Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin. 27 ‘Unheimlich dazu Griegs ‘Per [sic] Gynt’ – Schlager für die tanzende Anitra, eine Melodie, die dem kindermordenden Lorre quälend in den Ohren sitzt.’ [B.b ?], ‘Fritz Langs “M” im Filmklub’, Kölnische Rundschau, 7 November 1953. (Original German text translated to English by the author.) 28 ‘Damals bemühten sich die Filmfanatiker noch ehrlich um die neuen Möglichkeiten des tönenden Films, um die Welt der Geräusche, um akustische Leitmotive. Beklemmend ist die falsch gepfiffene Melodie von Anitras Tanz, die den Mörder auf einem düsteren Weg begleitet [. . .].’ Werner Fiedler, ‘M’, Der Tag (Berlin), 19 March 1960. (Original German text translated to English by the author.) 29 One may find such musical representations in other ‘troll pieces’ by Grieg as well. Two other famous examples are found in his collection of Lyriske stykker (Lyric Pieces), ten volumes of piano music composed during the years 1867–1901. One of them is named ‘Trolltog’ (‘Procession of Trolls’) op. 54/3 (1889–1891) and the other one ‘Småtroll’ (‘Little Trolls’) op. 71/3 (1891). 30 Although the Norwegian noun ‘gubbe’ always denotes some kind of a male, the word may be used in so many different contexts that an English equivalent is hard to find.

130

31 32

33 34

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered ‘Old man’, ‘greybeard’, ‘elder’ do not quite cover it. Yet the combination of ‘oldest’ and ‘king’ may be somewhat closer to Ibsen’s concept. In English translations of the play, ‘Troll King’ or ‘Dovre King’ are frequently used as the name of this character. The English translations from Ibsen’s play are based on Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, ed. James W. McFarlane, trans. Christopher Fry and Johan Fillinger (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), and Peer Gynt, trans. William and Charles Archer (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, updated 27 March 2016), eBook. Cf. note 5. Cf. note 2.

Literature [B.b ?]. ‘Fritz Langs “M” im Filmklub’. Kölnische Rundschau, 7 November 1953. [L.P.?]. ‘Fast ein historischer Film’. 1 [NN?]. ‘Griegs Musik im Kino. “Peer Gynt” als Tonfilm’. Beiblatt to the Film-Kurier, ‘Die Film-Musik’, 25 September 1930. [S.F.?]. ‘In Venedig gefunden und fürs Filmmuseum erworben: Rares Fritz-Lang Plakat’. Rheinische Post, 25 November 1993. Brown, Kristi A. ‘The troll among us’. In Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film, edited by Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell. Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. Eisenstein, Sergej, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigorij Alexandrov. ‘A statement’. In Film Sound: Theory and Practice, edited by Elisabeth Weis and John Belton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Feld, Hans. ‘Fritz Lang’s Tonfilm “M” ’. Film-Kurier, 12 May 1931. Fiedler, Werner. ‘M’. Der Tag (Berlin), 19 March 1960. Goldmark, Daniel, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, eds. Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2007. Gules, Christina. ‘Killerschlager. Wenn aus Gewalt durch Schlagermusik Spass wird’ Gera. Germanistische Magazine 1 (2014). http://gema.hu/2014/03/killerschlager. Honollied, Kurt. ‘Wiedersehen mit “M” ’, Fritz Lang’s Meisterfilm in Stuttgart’. Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 20 December 1956. Ibsen, Henrik. Peer Gynt. Translated by Christopher Fry and Johan Fillinger. Edited by James W. McFarlane. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. Ibsen, Henrik. Peer Gynt. Translated by William and Charles Archer. Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 27 March 2016. eBook. Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1947. Lang, Fritz. ‘The Future of the Feature Film in Germany. First published as “Wege des großen Spielfilms in Deutschland” ’. Die literarische Welt 2 (1 October 1926)’. Translated by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg. In The Weimar Republic Source Book, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Lang, Fritz. ‘Mein Film “M”, – ein Tatsachenbericht’. Filmwoche (Berlin) 21 (20 May 1931). McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Töteberg, Michael. Fritz Lang. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985.

8

The Kalevala and Finnish Rune Songs – Wild Impressions in the Music of Sibelius Reidar Bakke

Wild nature is untamed, boundless and unpredictable, and can be experienced in many ways, even through literature and music. The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865– 1957) loved wild nature. He built his house Ainola far away from urban life in Helsinki, where he composed his music. Sibelius was not the only composer who wanted to live close to wild nature. Edvard Grieg built his composing hut far out in Hardanger, and Gustav Mahler had his composing hut up in the Alps. Maybe they all were inspired by philosophers like Rousseau, Herder and Schelling and general romantic tendences of the nineteenth century with a ‘back to nature’ thinking and a longing for authenticity, truth and meaning, seeking for a more natural way of living closer to wild nature and creating national identity in their art with roots in folk cultures of their home countries. As artists they took inspiration in folk music and folk literature, searching for what they meant to be more real, wild and unique expressions of their nations’ true heritage. Around 1900, many composers wrote tone poems based on literature and folk poems. Inspired by the poems of Mallarmé, Claude Debussy wrote his Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun in 1894. Richard Strauss composed his Don Juan in 1889 and Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks in 1895, and both of these works take inspiration from the well-known legends with the same names. Mahler derived inspiration for many of his works from German folk poem collections such as Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Sibelius was inspired not only by real nature but also from experiences of wildlife as given in rune songs and in the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. One of the pieces inspired by wild nature and folk literature is The Swan of Tuonela. This is one of four parts of the Lemminkäinen Suite, opus 22. The suite, composed during the years 1893–1896, received the name ‘Four Legends for Orchestra’. When Sibelius wrote his Lemminkäinen Suite inspired by the Kalevala, he had written Kullervo in 1892 with the same inspiration, and the Kalevala even inspired many of his later works. The following text aims to see his piece The Swan of Tuonela in the light of the Kalevala and the Finnish rune singing tradition, and thereby address the theme of wild nature, and the taming of the wild through music. The Kalevala is an extensive collection of rune songs, narrating poems and stories from old Finland including the old Finns’ way of living and thinking, and their creation 131

132

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Ex. 8.1 The Kalevala metre in two-time and five-time metre.

story. Rune songs are the Finns’ answer to Edda poems in the Norse tradition. Here we can find legends, ballads, epics, lyrical poems, shamanistic poems, etc. The songs existed as an oral tradition for hundreds of years. It is not easy to say exactly how old the songs are, but the oldest of them could be more than a thousand years old.1 During the first part of the nineteenth century, the songs were collected in the Finnish countryside. While Scandinavian folk songs and European lyrical poems usually have rhymes organized in stanzas, most of the Finnish rune songs make use of alliteration and parallelism, and have no common stanza dividing. The melodies often are variations of a little melodic theme, and every line always has the same rhythm, with eight syllables organized as four consecutive trochees. Rune songs from northern parts of Finland often have five-time metre, while songs from the south often have two-time metre. Music Ex. 8.1 shows the Kalevala metre organized in two-time and five time-metre with the text ‘Then the lively Lemminkäinen’.2 The Kalevala line in Ex. 8.1 shows the special rhythm consisting of four consecutive trochees – the mentioned Lemminkäinen is one of the great heroes of the Kalevala. Every verse of the Kalevala epic and rune songs has this rhythm, and the repeated rhythm has a hypnotizing or magical effect on the listener. It is quite unique to Finnish traditions and named the ‘Kalevala metre’. Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884) was central in the great work of collecting rune songs going on mostly in the first part of the nineteenth century. He was a gifted person, working as medical doctor, philologist and folklorist. During the years 1828–1845, he travelled around in Finland, especially in the region of Karelia in the eastern part of Finland. He collected a great number of songs and combined them together by giving the material an epic thread, and he named the big epic the Kalevala. The first edition was published in 1835, and the second and extended version we use today in 1849. The epic represents unique Finnish cultural traditions, which have been very important to the development of the Finnish language and the Finnish identity. In fact, the Kalevala has inspired not only music as art but also literature, fine arts, handicrafts, architecture, etc. We can especially see this inspiration during the decades around the liberation of Finland in 1917. Finland is relatively young as a free nation. For hundreds of years, the country was part of Sweden, before it became a Russian grand duchy in 1809. During the Russian years, with efforts to make the people Russian, the need for liberation grew among the Finns;

The Kalevala and Finnish Rune Songs

133

and in 1917, Finland proclaimed the liberation. In the years before and after the liberation, it was important to uphold and strengthen the Finnish identity of the population, and in this building of this nation process, the Kalevala had an important role. In a liberation process, we can find that language, faith and culture traditions are three important factors. The Kalevala is essential to all three factors. The epic expresses its stories through the Finnish language – the language spoken by ordinary Finnish men and woman – which had survived for hundreds of years through oppression, first by the Swedes, and later by the Russians. Besides the language, the epic illustrates different kinds of Finnish mythology, faith and religiosity. Not least, the epic reflects different ways of Finnish living and Finnish culture, including many descriptions of wild and dangerous Finnish nature, and these are all old cultural traditions, which resisted urbanity into the twentieth century. The mentioned factors mean that all the Finns could – and still can – recognize themselves in the epic. Sibelius derived inspiration from the Kalevala in several ways. Due to his Finnish– Swedish background, he could not read the original Finnish Kalevala texts until he was twenty-five years old, but when he had learnt the Finnish language, he could easily pick up stories by reading Lönnrot’s original texts.3 He was interested not only in texts of the epic but also in melodies of the original rune songs, which the epic is based on. In the 1890s, it was not so easy to find persons who could sing the rune melodies, because the tradition was dying. Luckily, a few of the singers were still living, and Sibelius got the chance to meet some of them on his honeymoon to Karelia in the summer of 1892. One of the singers was the famous Petri Shemeikka (1821/1825–1915). He sang a great many songs to Sibelius, and the composer described their meeting with these words: ‘Pedri Shemeikka, 80 years old and living at Mysysvaara (Korpiselkä), was singing rune songs to me through a whole day. His rune melody is the oldest I have ever heard. All my transcriptions of rune melodies do have their roots here.’4 Shemeikka (with first name written Pedri in Sibelius’ writings) was not eighty years old as Sibelius wrote, but around seventy when he met the composer out in the countryside. He had an extensive repertoire and was a very good singer, and Sibelius could never forget their meeting, as Shemeikka’s songs must have been very typical of the tradition. Some years later, around 1920, Sibelius mentioned his former meeting with Shemeikka in a conversation with the musicologist A. O. Vaisainen: ‘I also met the old Pedri Shemeikka. He looked great when meeting me outside his little dark house. Among many rune songs, I heard the pike’s creation story (. . .). Through this travel, I had a feeling of great love, and still I have the same strong feeling.’5 In the text above, Sibelius comments on the pike story, which is one of the many funny and interesting Kalevala stories. The Finnish national instrument, the kantele, is supposed to have a mythic origin, being created from a pike bone. According to the Kalevala, Väinämöinen made the very first kantele with the cheekbone of a magnum pike. Väinämöinen is one of the great heroes in the Kalevala. He is a fantastic musician and singer, and when he is singing, many supernatural things can happen. Fighting with a man in a forest, he can sing the man down into a bog, and if he needs a boat at the seashore, he can construct it by singing it, etc. Concerning the pike story, we can only imagine the wild fight between Väinämöinen and the magnum pike, before the hero wins at last and draws the big and terrifying fish with its enormous gaping mouth

134

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

up from the water and prepares it for cooking. Väinämöinen is a real hero when he manages to beat the very gigantic and ferocious fish that inhabits the wild and raging waters. And after the meal, he constructs the first kantele from the pike’s cheekbone. In the following text, we will see what happens when Väinämöinen starts playing the kantele for the very first time. Kalevala, song 41 (Kirby 1907): ‘Come ye now to listen to me, Ye before who never heard me, Hear with joy my songs primeval, While the kantele is sounding.’ Then the aged Vainamoinen Quick commenced his skilful playing On the instrument of pikebone, On the kantele of fishbone. (. . .) Played the aged Vainamoinen. Nothing was there in the forest, Which upon four feet was running, Or upon their legs were hopping, And which came not near to listen, Came not to rejoice and wonder. Gathered round him all the squirrels, As from branch to branch they clambered, And the ermines flocked around him, Laid them down against the fences, (. . .) In the swamp each wolf awakened, From the heath the bear aroused him, From his lair among the fir-trees, And the thickly growing pine-trees, And the wolves ran lengthy journeys, And the bears came through the heather, Till they sat upon the fences, Side by side against the gateway. On the rocks the fence fell over, On the field the gate fell over, Then they climbed upon the pine-trees, And they ran around the fir-trees, Just to listen to the music, All rejoicing, and in wonder.6

The Kalevala and Finnish Rune Songs

135

After having cooked the fish and eaten it, Väinämöinen constructs the very first kantele – the national instrument of Finland – from the pike’s cheekbone, and then he starts playing on his new instrument. At this point, many strange and magical things happen around him. Wild animals such as squirrels, ermines, wolves and bears stop acting as they usually do in their wild lives. Instead of fighting, they sit down peacefully side by side without eating each other and start listening to the fantastic music Väinämöinen is creating on his kantele. How can such a thing happen to wild animals? The reason is the beautiful music and the fantastic sound from Väinämöinen’s kantele and voice, a parallel to the legend of Orpheus and his irresistible playing and singing in Greek mythology. Music has magic power, making wild animals forget their wild instincts and act like they are peaceful brothers and sisters and really good friends. When Väinämöinen, one of the great heroes of the Kalevala, is a fantastic singer who can do a lot of magical things with his singing and playing, and the epic emanates from a song tradition, this really shows that the Finns are a singing people. Referring to the meeting between Sibelius and Shemeikka in 1892 mentioned above (see note 4), Sibelius talked about ‘great love’ and good experiences in Karelia on his honeymoon, but summer 1892 was not the first time that Sibelius had listened to rune songs. One year before, he had met the legendary singer Larin Paraske (1833–1904), one of the most famous rune singers ever. She had a big repertoire and was a very good performer, and many people came to listen to her singing.7 In the summer of 1891, Sibelius went to Porvoo to listen to Paraske’s singing. His friend, the literature historian Yrjö Hirn (1870–1952), followed the composer to Porvoo, and he described their meeting: Above all, we were surprised by the very dramatic way the old woman was singing, and by the great sensitivity in her laments (. . .), at the very beginning of her singing, she was fully into her role, and when she came to the laments, she was the mother, wife or daughter who claimed in the poems. Her great rugged face showed an overwhelming sorrow, and tears poured down like floods in her cheeks.8

Paraske was singing with deep sensitivity and presenting her songs just like an actor in the theatre performs his or her scripts. When singing her laments, she had no problem crying, and if the text was describing something brutal, for example the wildness of nature, Paraske’s voice, eyes and body would express the dramatic sides of the story in a very appropriate way. Sibelius was fascinated by her and could never forget Paraske’s eyes – ‘deep as the well of a myth’.9 Some artists of her time, among them Albert Edelfeldt (1854–1905), painted her, and we can recognize her striking eyes in his painting. It is not easy to say exactly what the meeting with Paraske meant to the composer, but his friend Hirn described Sibelius’ reaction in Porvoo in the following words: My five years older comrade (. . .) was eager to listen to how an original Karelian rune sounded, performed by an authentic singer, and I was of course happy to be at this meeting between old and new. I dare not say how much Paraske’s singing may have influenced the master’s compositions inspired by Kalevala motifs. I only

136

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

remember he attentively followed the singing, and he was taking notes about the melodies and rhythms.10

Sibelius had great experiences when meeting rune singers in 1891 and in 1892, but we do not know which melodies he heard when meeting Paraske, Shemeikka and other rune singers. Neither do we know what he transcribed from this rustic tradition, because his transcriptions of rune melodies and texts are lost. But what is for sure is that he, in the following years, composed many works inspired by the Kalevala stories and rune songs. Kullervo came in 1892, Karelia Suite in 1893, and Lemminkäinen Suite was composed in the years 1893–1896. Sibelius probably kept the wildness of Shemeikka’s and Paraske’s rune singing stories in mind when composing his music. When Sibelius published his first version of The Swan of Tuonela inspired by the Kalevala and rune songs, he printed a certain text in the score.11 The text describes Tuonela – the Finns’ answer to Hell – in a very dramatic way. The water is black and raging with a wildness which only can be found in a place like Hell. In this wild and furious atmosphere, the swan of Tuonela is swimming on the raging water and singing. It seems a bit astonishing and contradictory with this beautiful white bird floating and singing on the raging black water, but in Tuonela it seems that anything can happen. In later versions of the score, the text was not printed. Related to the text, we could ask if Sibelius wrote programme music. This actually was discussed when the composer wrote his works inspired by the Kalevala, and later also it has been focused on.12 However, both when living and after his death, it has been a common way of thinking that Sibelius did not write programme music but sought inspiration from the text. Sibelius himself did not talk much about his music. Instead, he could say ‘my music is speaking for itself ’.13 However, about his symphonies, he once commented: ‘My symphonies are music – thought about and worked through like music expressions, and without any literary platform. I am no literary musician; to me music starts when the word stops. A symphony first and all is music.’14 Even if the musical atmosphere can relate to texts in The Swan of Tuonela and other literary inspired works, it is not a good idea to give literary interpretations of the music. Sibelius as a composer represents the idea of absolute music where music has its autonomy and speaks for itself in a language beyond words, and therefore there should be no reason to give literary interpretations or analyses of his works. Sibelius uses a swan motif in his The Swan of Tuonela. The swan motif in myths and legends symbolizes a wild bird known as the bird of gods, often living in the kingdoms of gods. Zeus in an old Greek myth becomes a swan to become acquainted with the beautiful Leda. We can also find the swan motif used in Wagner’s operas Lohengrin and Parsifal and in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko. Well-known compositions such as SaintSaëns’ The Swan and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake also have the swan motif. Sibelius found his own way to use the swan motif. He took inspiration from one of the Kalevala stories. The Kalevala texts consist of fifty parts called songs, and The Swan of Tuonela is taken from the fourteenth song called ‘The Death of Lemminkäinen’. Tuoni, with the genitive Tuonela, in Finnish mythology is the kingdom of death, and Lemminkäinen, who has given the name to the Sibelius suite, is one of the Kalevala’s great heroes. He is

The Kalevala and Finnish Rune Songs

137

a real Don Juan, living south in the land of Kalevala, and like the formerly mentioned hero Väinämöinen, Lemminkäinen is also a fantastic singer. While heroes of other countries often are great warriors, Finnish heroes often are great singers. Maybe this tells us that the Finns are calm and peaceful people, wanting to live in peace and stability with all their neighbours. The texts tell us about Lemminkäinen’s courting trip to the wild land Pohjola up in the north, where the mighty mistress Louhi is the chief. Louhi will not give her young daughter to the persistent suitor Lemminkäinen and offers him many trials. After having passed several difficult trials, the final trial remains: Lemminkäinen must go to Tuonela to shoot the beautiful swan swimming in the Tuonela River, which surrounds the kingdom of death, and he has this one and only chance. The following text is from the Kalevala’s fourteenth song, where Louhi says: I will only give my daughter, give the youthful bride you seek for, if the river-swan you shoot me, shoot the great bird on the river. There on Tuoni’s murky river, in the sacred river’s whirlpool, only at a single trial, using but a single arrow.15

The Kalevala text is dramatic, with the hostile message from Louhi, and the description of a rather dark and mysterious atmosphere at the river surrounding Tuonela. The river is wild and fearful, with black raging water and a dangerous whirlpool. Louhi’s trial for Lemminkäinen leaves him this one and only chance, and if he fails, he will die. This part of the text, with its thrilling atmosphere, symbolizes the fight between the good and the bad, or between life and death. The white swan and the love between Louhi and her daughter may symbolize the good, with the dark raging river, the whirlpool and Tuonela symbolizing the wild or the bad. Actually, the fight between the good and the bad is an eternal theme existing in art through the ages. Wagner’s opera Parsifal, with the fight for the Holy Grail, is one example of this. In the years before he wrote his Lemminkäinen Suite, Sibelius eagerly studied the scores of Wagner’s operas. He also watched many of the operas live in Bayreuth, and Parsifal was among his favourites.16 Maybe the sacral theme of this opera interested him. Of course, the epic Kalevala is not a Christian text, but it has some elements of Christianity and religiosity, which can correspond to the history from Parsifal. At least it seems that Sibelius learnt something from his study of Wagner opera scores, which he brought with him into his Lemminkäinen Suite.17 The colours of the orchestra and the harmonic development in the opening of The Swan of Tuonela seem to be inspired by the music of Parsifal. An example of this is the transformations of both orchestral colours and harmonic chords from dark to bright in the opening of The Swan of Tuonela, which is very close to what we can find in parts of Wagner’s opera Parsifal as well. The wild and dramatic atmosphere of Tuonela seems to have inspired Sibelius when choosing instruments for his work. He composed his music without any flute or trumpet, resulting in a lack of the usual bright orchestral sounds created by these two instruments.

138

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Additionally, we can find only bass clarinet from the clarinet group, and timpani and bass drum; all in all, these deep-sounding instruments give the music a rather dark and mysterious sound, and create an atmosphere that matches well that supposed to be in the kingdom of death, which Tuonela should symbolize. English horn as a solo instrument has a special sound with its rather darker tone compared with the oboe; also, the instrument looks somewhat strange with its long neck and a ball at the end, which visually can bring to mind a swan’s head and neck. And Sibelius knew the famous English horn solo of the third act in Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde when he chose the solo instrument. He had studied the score of this opera well, and had discovered the beautiful English horn solo in it. All strings in The Swan of Tuonela are muted and produce a soft and woollen sound, so this is an example of the broad and compact string sound found in many of Sibelius’ works; almost a kind of the composer’s trademark. Concerning form, the music has a three-part scheme, making a bar form.18 In general, the bar form is a common one in Finnish melody traditions. An example is the many Finnish hymns in the choral book of the Finnish church, which have this specific form. We therefore can say the bar form in The Swan of Tuonela is based on good Finnish traditions. The opening chord of the piece expresses a kind of calmness and stability, which we also can find in the very last static chord at the end of the piece, creating a kind of symmetry to the piece. However, the sound of the opening chord does not represent something static, but instead something dynamic, because the orchestra sound is transforming, starting from a rather dark colour and ending up with a bright and shining colour. After the opening chord of the strings, the English horn presents its beautiful solo. This is one of the great solos of music history, often played by symphony orchestras all over the world, and has a real melancholic atmosphere. In general, Finnish melody traditions often seem to be a bit melancholic, because of the common use of minor keys. Sibelius commented on this aspect like this: ‘The sonorous and strange monotony of all Finnish melodies, even if it is wrong, is characteristic.’19 Besides the melancholic impression, in Finnish melody traditions we can also find much modality, especially the Dorian mode. The Swan of Tuonela is written in minor keys, and with some Dorian melodies as well we can conclude that Sibelius in this piece has chosen melodies and harmonies corresponding to typically Finnish traditions – a little of minor keys and a little of Dorian modality. The climax of the piece happens to be in bars 75–81, where a variation of the English horn solo is played by all strings in unison. The melody is accompanied by a rather heavy minor chord played three times each bar and lasting for almost the rest of the piece. As mentioned earlier, the special Kalevala metre has four consecutive trochees, while the rhythm of the accompanying chord does not remind us of the Kalevala metre at all. In this piece of Sibelius, it is not the Kalevala metre – which here is totally missing – but repetition as a phenomenon in itself, and the relation to one specific rhythm, which is repeated, that can remind us of something like the hypnotizing rhythm of the national epic the Kalevala. Also, it can remind us of the repetitive rhythms of nature, with the always-repeating changes of night and day, high and low tide, changing seasons, birth and death, etc. – stable changing rhythmic elements of nature and life in general which always are repeated.

The Kalevala and Finnish Rune Songs

139

In religion, folklore and folk literature, the figure three has a holy or magical function – it is a symbol of something perfect. Concerning religion, just think about the holy Trinity of Christianity with Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In folklore, many folk dances and folk songs have a three-part scheme, and in fairy tales of folk literature something often has to be figured out at least three times. Sibelius’ orchestral work The Swan of Tuonela has many relations to the figure three. The heavy minor chord of the last part is played three times each bar. Three squared gives us nine, which is the metre of the piece, and a piece written in 9/4-time signature can give us associations of something rolling like a seesaw movement, almost like a visualization of the wild and rolling water in which the beautiful swan is swimming at the Tuonela River. When Sibelius wrote The Swan of Tuonela in 9/4-time signature, it seemed he wanted to make it part of something elevated and in a religious context like the kingdom of death, which Tuonela should symbolize. The form scheme of the music is a three-part scheme. Looking at the beautiful English horn solo at the beginning of the piece, this has six different tones, which is the double of three, and it includes a characteristic triplet. All in all, Sibelius, in his orchestral piece The Swan of Tuonela, creates many associations to the figure. Examining the texts from the Kalevala, we will find the figure has a unique position in the epic, as many rites and magic happenings can relate to it. While having different relations from the figure three in The Swan of Tuonela, the orchestral piece seems to have a context and uses composing effects based on old Finnish cultural traditions, which Finnish rune songs and the Kalevala represent. Sibelius was influenced by tendencies of his time, and wanted to express his roots in his art. The heritage from the old rune singing tradition and the national epic, the Kalevala, with its wild, unique and real rustic stories of the true Finnish culture seems to be conscious, and in a way pervades the music of Sibelius. His composing choices concerning form, rhythm, melody, harmony and orchestration reflect Finnish mythology and folklore, with the overwhelming wild and pure Finnish nature experienced in real life and through folk literature such as rune songs and the Kalevala as a constructive force to his composing process.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9

Anneli Asplund, ‘Runometriska sånger’ in Sumlen (Stockholm: Samfundet för visforskning, 1985), 25. Elias Lönnrot, Kalevala, transl. W. F. Kirby (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1907), vol. I, 146. Karl Ekman, Jean Sibelius och hans verk (Stockholm: Forum, 1956), 91. Erik Tawaststjerna, Jean Sibelius (Stockholm: Atlantis, 1993–97), vol. I, 231. Tawaststjerna 1993–97, vol. I, 232. Lönnrot, vol. II, 161–162. See e.g. Senni Timonen, ‘Thick Corpus and a Singer’s Poetics’ in Thick Corpus, Organic Variation and Textuality in Oral Tradition (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2000), 633. Yrjö Hirn, Lärt folk och landstrykare (Porvoo: Holger Schildts förlag, 1939), 243. Tawaststjerna 1993–97, vol. V, 30.

140

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

10 Hirn 1939, 243. 11 Jean Sibelius, Der Schwan von Tuonela (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1987), 5. 12 See e.g. Erik Tawaststjerna, Sibelius (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1968), 240, and Ernst Tanzberger, Jean Sibelius (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1962), 9. 13 Tanzberger 1962, 258. 14 Ibid., 9. 15 Lönnrot 1907, vol. I, 146. 16 Tawaststjerna 1993–97, vol. II, 26. 17 Ibid. 27. 18 Barform: AAB. 19 Tawaststjerna 1968, 141.

Literature Asplund, Anneli. ‘Runometriska sånger’. In Sumlen. Stockholm: Samfundet för visforskning, 1985. Ekman, Karl. Jean Sibelius och hans verk. Stockholm: Forum, 1956. Hirn, Yrjö. Lärt folk och landstrykare. Porvoo: Holger Schildts forlag, 1939. Lönnrot, Elias. Kalevala, transl. W. F. Kirby. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1907. Sibelius, Jean. Der Schwan von Tuonela, Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1987. Tanzberger, Ernst. Jean Sibelius. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1962. Tawaststjerna, Erik. Sibelius. Stockholm: Bonnier, Stockholm, 1968. Tawaststjerna, Erik. Jean Sibelius, vol. I–V. Stockholm: Atlantis, 1993–1997. Timonen, Senni. ‘Thick corpus and a singer’s poetics’. In Thick Corpus, Organic Variation and Textuality in Oral Tradition, edited by Lauri Honko. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2000.

9

Dangerous and Endangered Nature: Art as a Way of Seeing Hege Charlotte Faber

Introduction: Four works of art The aim of this chapter is to explore four highly different contemporary works of art in light of a notion of wild nature as both dangerous and endangered. In recent years, we have seen an increasing tendency to explore and analyse artistic expressions in relation to the concept of the Anthropocene,1 denoting human impact on the environment, and especially focusing on the current climate and ecological crisis we face today, brought about by human beings. In accordance with this perspective, artworks may be experienced not only as beautiful or sublime, ugly, repulsing, or aesthetically pleasing, but as something essential in our life, as art may raise important questions regarding our existence on the planet. The four works in question are the site-specific Shark-CowBathtub (1993)2 by the Irish artist Dorothy Cross (*1956), the site-integrated Opus for Heaven and Earth (1993)3 by the Norwegian artist Oddvar I. N. (*1953), the huge sculpture group Salamander Night (1989) by the Norwegian artist Kjell Erik Killi Olsen (*1952) and the photo series The Prophecy (2013–2015) by the Belgian–Beninese artist and photographer Fabrice Monteiro (*1972). The Prophecy, which raises questions on man-made disasters by depicting humanlike djinns clad in costumes made out of rubbish (Plates 8, 9 and 10), and Shark-CowBathtub, with the bronze shark with human breasts (Plates 4 and 5), different as the two works might be, could both be interpreted by using a concept of the liminal. I think that the concepts of transformation, of being on a threshold and of an in-between-ness, are useful in the context of vulnerable and endangered nature. The djinn is a kind of spirit indicating a mess we have created ourselves, but it is also pointing to possible ways out, while the shark as a beast of raw nature can be seen as a specimen captured on the shore, in between human and beast, and in between something extremely dangerous and something vulnerable. Oddvar I. N.’s Opus for Heaven and Earth (Plate 7 and Figures 9.3 and 9.4), a 75-square-metre circle carved into the slope of a mountainside, may be interpreted as reminder of mankind’s expansion across the earth, or as a ‘door’ opening up to the inside of the mountain, and thus getting us to imagine a threshold, while Killi Olsen’s sculptures in a way are distorted creatures 141

142

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

captured in a transformation between seemingly fragile human beings and damaged trees. The works of both Cross and Oddvar I. N. are left to the forces of nature and the harsh weather in the northern parts of Norway and will slowly transform in time. Thus, one might say that the works in question in different ways are exploring a space between wild nature, our relation to nature, and the vulnerability of the wild. The intention of the four artists is not necessarily to highlight the vulnerability of nature, even if the intention of Killi Olsen is to direct our attention to the devastation of rain forests, and Monteiro calls our attention to specific natural disasters. As other works of art, they are open to different ways of seeing, interpreting and appreciating them. The works of Cross and Oddvar I. N. are both placed in northern Norwegian wild nature as part of the outdoor art project Artscape Nordland, and thus they point to the state of nature in a distant area, if not directly to specific challenges. Artscape Nordland was initiated by the Norwegian artist A. K. Dolven in 1992, curated by Finnish Maaretta Jaukkuri, and mainly developed in the period 1993–1998.4 Nordland county is an area of over 40,000 square metres, so it would be a long journey to get to know all the works, as some of those works, like much of the land art or earth art of the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the United States, are installations situated in a remote and/or almost inaccessible area.5 By comparison, even if most of the land or earth artworks in the United States are far more remote, extremely huge, and even more inaccessible than the artworks in the northern parts of Norway, one could think of magnificent – in literally all senses of the word – works by land artists like Walter de Maria’s (1935–2013) The Lightning Field (1977)6 in New Mexico, Nancy Holt’s (1938–2014) Sun Tunnels (1973–1976)7 in Utah, Michael Heizer’s (*1944) Double Negative (1969)8 in the Nevada desert, some of Robert Smithson’s (1938–1973) works where the most well-known one may be Spiral Jetty (1970)9 in Utah and works by others, most of them exploring our relationship with our planet, the passage of time and, not least, expanding the boundaries of art and its audience.

Shark-Cow-Bathtub (1993) Dorothy Cross’ work Shark-Cow-Bathtub relates to the theme ‘wild’ from different perspectives, in exploring complex and difficult aesthetic categories like the ugly and repulsive, and even the sublime, in the sense of something terrifying, still fascinating. In his introduction to the work, Patrick T. Murphy indicates that ‘Dorothy Cross’ art is as beautiful as it is dreadful. Beautiful in its ability to aesthetically resolve formal issues, and dreadful in its embrace of the more terrifying characteristics of nature’.10 The work can also be related to the term liminal. According to Robin Lydenberg, Cross’ interest always lies in obliterating or transforming, and in her book (Gone) Site-specific Works by Dorothy Cross, she points out that the site-specific work Shark-Cow-Bathtub is unique because even if it is meant to be permanent, Cross allows mutability to unsettle permanence.11 Shark-Cow-Bathtub is divided into three parts, as the title indicates. The three parts consist of a bronze shark (Plates 4 and 5), cow udders carved in pink stone (Plates 5 and 6), turned upside down and ‘placed’ on a fitted ‘podium’, and a ‘found object’, a rusty,

Dangerous and Endangered Nature: Art as a Way of Seeing

143

cast iron bathtub. The shark is approx. 250 cm long, and cast in bronze. The first version of the shark was equipped with human breasts.12 Thereby it was pointing to art movements like surrealism, as well as referring to works further back in art history, for instance to the strange visions of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516), especially the triptych Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1495–1505), where one can be mesmerized by all kinds of strange creatures and weird scenery. The large bronze shark also gives associations to and literally explores the wild and monstrous by displaying such a grotesque, primitive and dangerous being. The upside-down cow udders in Cross’ work, and the podium, are carved in local granite. The bathtub is a readymade left to decay in the harsh climate, referring to Marcel Duchamp’s well-known found pissoir (Fountain, 1917), and initially placed on the seashore, halfway between high tide and low water, where it would be emptied and filled by the ebbs and flows of the tidal water. Cross’ work is thus very complex; it reflects and refers to manifold different art historical directions and movements, like the already-mentioned surrealism and readymades, land art and earth art. The work even refers to mythology, and to literature from classical antiquity like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or Books of Transformations, especially in the shark, captured and situated as it is between woman and cartilaginous fish, representing a kind of terrifying beauty. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, monsters and other creatures mentioned are vulnerable, from time to time, as well as dangerous creatures, like for instance the Gorgon maiden monster Medusa, and as such they might be seen as wild (nature) which at the same time is vulnerable.

In-between-ness Shark-Cow-Bathtub is placed in nature, as part of the nature, as something between man and beast, on the border between sea and shore, where land and water meet, as Róisín O’Gorman puts it in her chapter ‘Caught in the Liminal’: ‘The shark and “cow” are left stranded . . . the cow’s udder rises up like a shark’s fin and the shark is vulnerably exposed . . . indeterminacy and boundary-blurring . . . on the edge of elements where land and water meet.’13 To see something as liminal, on the threshold of something else, brings us to the ancient myths of transformations. Cross’ monstrous and dangerous shark may as mentioned be seen as something transforming from a woman to a shark, or vice versa, being on a threshold, captured in an in-between. The in-between-ness is letting us see close interdependences between (wo-)man and sea, fish and nature. One could ask, is the work of Cross somehow pointing at a tension between nature as dangerous and nature as endangered at the same time, by blurring the borders between man and beast, in this case woman and fish, without leaping into the more familiar images of selkies or mermaids in folklore? Are we as human beings beasts, and part of nature too? Is this the insight we can extract from myths and folklore? We have met nature as a dangerous place many times through the history of art, but how is nature as endangered addressed in art? The first version of the Shark-Cow-Bathtub piece became more or less destroyed, partly due to harsh weather and partly due to some vandalism. The shark lost a fin, the

144

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

udder was partly destroyed by vandalism – but restored, and the bathtub, the readymade which was expected to disappear little by little through corrosion caused by tidal waters, disappeared entirely during a winter storm after a couple of years. The bathtub is replaced by another one today. The first version of the shark, as it is depicted in this chapter, possesses a certain vulnerability. It is found out of place, out of its own element, stranded in the harsh environment of the Nordland coast, like one shipwrecked, a castaway. The shark is a wild and dangerous being, but in the present situation it is fatally endangered, vulnerable. Scary, brutish and primitive as they might be, even sharks may be endangered species in our time.14 Cross has used parts of cows’ hide and cows’ udders several times in her artistic work, especially in her Udder series (completed 1990–1994);15 however, the cow’s udder in the particular work Shark-Cow-Bathtub also refers to the history of local households and traditional food culture in the northern parts of Norway. Róisín O’Gorman says that ‘[in] her Udder series, Cross uses discarded parts of cows, their udders and hides, to unmask the hidden or naturalized associations between woman, land and animal’.16 As the udder in the artwork is made of stone (granite), it no longer possesses either the softness of the hide, or the possibility of cooking and making food of it – it has become a monument.17 Thus, Cross’ cow udders gives a twist to the classic notion of a monument by placing an udder on a podium where we would expect to find a person (Plates 5 and 6). Some writers place Cross’ work in a surrealist tradition. To briefly trace the theme in surrealism, one could mention that women surrealist artists were occupied by myths and mythology, and mother-, creation- and death goddesses from Celtic, Greek, Egyptian and other traditions were sources of inspiration. Surrealist women artists refer to goddesses to relate to their role as creative persons and as artists.18 For instance, one could mention Leonora Carrington’s The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg, 1947),19 which may be seen as a monster inspired not only by certain deities but also by artworks like the earlier-mentioned triptych Garden of Earthly Delights. Carrington’s paintings could be said to be ‘filled with eccentric characters which shift between plant, animal, human, objects and everything in between’.20 The in-between-ness is again interesting, in this case to see a close relation between man (or woman), and nature – and perhaps the Giantess is a ‘good monster’, a sort of ancient mythological creature, a mother deity. The cow’s udders in Dorothy Cross’ work could – in addition to the food made from udders – thus refer to ancient goddesses like the Egyptian goddesses Hathor and Nut, both of whom often were depicted as cows. Hathor could be depicted as a cow with the sun disc between her horns, or as a woman with a headdress of cow horns together with a sun disk on her head – in both cases symbolizing both the celestial and the maternal aspects of the deity, as well as the associations to nutrition (agriculture – milk and meat).

The mythological monster Medusa It is tempting to relate the work of Cross to ancient Greek mythology, and literature from classical antiquity like Ovid. At the core of some of the well-known myths in

Dangerous and Endangered Nature: Art as a Way of Seeing

145

Ovid’s version, it is a main insight that it would be fatal to draw the attention of a god, as in the cases of Medusa, Arachne or Marsyas. In the Metamorphoses, Medusa was originally a ravishingly beautiful girl, ‘to gain her love a rival crowd of envious lovers strove’,21 but because Poseidon (Neptune) had raped her in Athena’s (Minerva’s) temple, the enraged goddess, who obviously sided with the rapist, not the raped one, transformed Medusa’s beautiful hair to serpents (‘hissing snakes’) and made her face so terrible that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone. Medusa is transformed into a wild monster. Monsters can be dangerous but still vulnerable. Throughout the history of art, and in different versions of the myth, one finds Medusa as a motif, as for instance in a pediment from Corfu. In this shape, almost bursting the frame surrounding her, she appears both as a protective monster and as a fertility goddess, the latter because of a snake belt she is wearing. For the surrealist women artists, Medusa became a symbol of creativity, especially poetry, because of the white stallion Pegasus, son of Poseidon (Neptune), springing from the blood gushing out from her throat after she was killed by the hero Perseus. At the same time, Medusa, with her gaze which could turn men into stone, and her ringlets of snakes, was a symbol of something threatening, something possessing a great power of destruction.

Figure 9.1 Archaic Medusa. Around 580 BC. West pediment of the temple of Artemis, Corfu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medusa#/media/File:Close_up_of_Gorgon_at_the_ pediment_of_Artemis_temple_in_Corfu.jpg. CC BY-SA 3.0.

146

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 9.2 Caravaggio: Medusa 1597–1598 (60 × 55 cm, oil on canvas). Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

There are of course other perspectives on Medusa through history, and different versions of the myth. For instance, in Caravaggio’s (1571–1610) painting (Figure 9.2), Medusa’s face expresses fear and anger and horror; still, she also appears as a victim where her face is almost reduced to a tragedy mask. As Vittorio Sgarbi puts it in his book on Caravaggio, ‘the head is still shaken by the last spasm of life while blood gushes copiously from the wound (from which Pegasus will be born), her muscles contract, and her mouth gapes open in a cry of pain – but also of incredibility’.22 Dorothy Cross and her marine zoologist brother Tom Cross, in their joint work Medusae (Latin for jellyfish), explored a species of extremely dangerous and deadly Box jellyfish which produces a venom that can be fatal to humans.23 As Marina Warner writes, this is a ‘creature that provokes horror and fear’.24 But not only horror and fear: according to Warner, the jellyfish are also creatures that ‘exist in harmony with the sea, almost [as] emanations of its currents and eddies. They embody contingency and interdependence, announcing the reciprocity of our relations as living creatures with the stuff in which we survive’.25 Thus, the venomous jellyfish is sort of a monster, capable of hurting us as human beings, giving us pain, or in the worst-case scenario death, but the ‘jellyfish monster’ is itself vulnerable, as a symbol of the ecological crisis we are in the midst of.26 It is possible to draw a line from Cross’ works on sharks and udders to her work on jellyfish and other themes. In the article ‘Contemporary Irish Art on the Move’, Robin Lydenberg writes that Cross ‘never seeks to resolve the differences

Dangerous and Endangered Nature: Art as a Way of Seeing

147

between margin and center, . . ., self and other, but to stage ongoing and transformative encounters across differences’.27

Opus for Heaven and Earth (1993) Opus for Heaven and Earth, created by the Norwegian artist Oddvar I. N., is a circular, 75-square-metre negative polished relief on a mountain slope, carved into the very mountain (see Plate 7 and Figures 9.3 and 9.4). Thus, in literally disclosing what was hidden in the mountainside, the work is not only site-specific, but site-integrated. Regarding the process, the artist commented that Grinding down and polishing an area this big is primarily a question of time and manpower. The grinding process itself is simple, using pneumatic angle grinders and water cooling. First, a rough grind with diamond discs is completed, and then a five-stage polishing process. The rock itself is relatively plane and ‘smooth’; the grinding will follow the contours of the rock along the plane and not cut into it. Smaller depressions and pores will not be polished.28

Figure 9.3 Oddvar I. N.: Opus for Heaven and Earth. 1993, Vevelstad, Nordland, commissioned by Artscape Nordland / Nordland County. Photo: Vegar Moen. Engraved into the mountain. Diameter of the circle 980 cm, area 75m².

148

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 9.4 Oddvar I. N.: Opus for Heaven and Earth 1993, Vevelstad, Nordland, commissioned by Artscape Nordland / Nordland County. Photo: Vegar Moen.

The circle has a diameter of 980 cm and can easily be seen from afar, from the nearby highway, or even from the air. Pilots can point out the artwork for air passengers, and this has become a popular event. Due to changing weather, the circle may sparkle like a diamond, and if the sun is in a favourable position, the circle may radiate the rainbow colours.29 Even if the sun is behind clouds, the circle is clearly visible. Opus for Heaven and Earth is revealing what is inherent in the local stone, and as a shining mirror, the circle might be perceived as a symbol of eternity, perfection and beauty: it reflects light and mirrors the sky. The working title was Sky Mirror (Norwegian: Himmelspeil). According to the artist himself, the sculpture refers to mankind’s expansion across the earth.30 In his description of his work, Oddvar I. N. says that Through my work with landscapes, I have tried to create artworks that are distinctly local, endemic, dependent on the landscape surrounding them, so that they draw strength from and enhance the qualities of their environment. That is, I don’t want to use the landscape as the staging for the sculpture; I want it to be an active and integral part of it.31

In his essay ‘Et eventyr i berget’ [‘A Fairy Tale in the Mountains’, HCF],32 Jan Brockmann describes the beautiful northern Norwegian scenery in detail, including sounds and odours, and asks if art may be unnecessary in scenery as beautiful as this. Would not an artwork be perceived only as an annoyance and nothing more? According to Brockmann, the artist has found a way to make a work which is both minimal and monumental, subtle and at the same time sublime. The circle is a gesture that marks a Here, a presence, and it forms a sculpture in the original sense of the word, where nothing is added, but

Dangerous and Endangered Nature: Art as a Way of Seeing

149

where something is removed from the stone so that something else may appear. In Brockmann’s description, the artist has achieved a lens-like, smooth surface that allows the grey stone to display in countless reddish and blue-grey shades. The work possesses a double character of mirroring the sky, and at the same time opening a door into the mountains, into a fairy tale.33 And who knows who – or what – is hiding behind the ‘door’? If the work relates to the expansion of mankind across the earth, as the artist suggests, one could say that in our time, and more now than back in 1993, it might refer to overpopulation, and thus to the vulnerability of nature against human expansion. Oddvar I. N. has made a lot of other works pointing to mankind’s relation to and use of nature through his artistic work (performance, film, sculpture and site-specific art). For instance, in the work Measuring the Depth of the Snow (1981, Figure 9.5), he uses his own body to show what was and what becomes hidden in the depths of snow. While the human body, which functions as a scale, disappears little by little, and the pile of snow cubes is correspondingly expanding, it is shown how deep the snow really is. This is an event happening out in (wild) nature; nature is measured by the human body, and we get the impression that the human body is exposed to nature, while at the same time being an intrinsic part of it. The work not least questions the vulnerability of mankind towards nature.

Short on beauty, ugliness and the sublime The beautiful, the ugly and the sublime are all ambiguous as historical concepts, in art history, aesthetics and philosophy. According to Umberto Eco, the word ‘beautiful’, as well as all synonyms for ‘beautiful’, could be conceived as a reaction of disinterested appreciation, while ugliness and its synonyms as a rule contain a reaction of disgust, horror or fear.34 Following the notion of ugliness, he states that ugliness could be identified as ugliness in itself, formal ugliness, or the artistic portrayal of both abovementioned kinds of ugliness. Regarding ugliness, Eco says that ‘in almost all aesthetic theories, at least from ancient Greece to modern times, it has been recognized that any form of ugliness can be redeemed by a faithful and efficacious artistic portrayal’.35 Notions on the sublime likewise span from antiquity to the present. In visual arts from the 1600s onwards, an example of the sublime in art is the paintings of Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), as described in art historian Helen Langdon’s essay, where she

Figure 9.5 Oddvar I. N.: Measuring the Depth of the Snow [Måling av snødybde], 1981 Photograph. The measure of the photograph varies. Height up to c. 2 metres. © Oddvar I. N. Daren / BONO 2021.

150

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

compares Rosa’s paintings from the 1650s and 1660s with (among others) the paintings of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), who ‘in a remarkable series of landscapes . . . was exploring the concepts of the sublime, and themes of death and terror’.36 In art history, one could follow the painterly and other artistic explorations on the sublime further, with a special weight on landscape painters in Romanticism in the late 1700s and early 1800s, represented by artists like Caspar David Friedrich, I. C. Dahl, Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, J. M. W. Turner and others. Thus, artists have drawn on the concept, visualizing and theorizing, from depictions of dramatic volcano eruptions and shipwrecks on rough seas (Friedrich, Dahl, Géricault and others), and lonely wanderers in the mountains (Friedrich and others), to the expressive works of contemporary abstract painters. In his short essay ‘The Sublime Is Now’ (1948), the artist Barnett Newman (1905–1970) relates the sublime to presence, to a now, a Here, a sense of beyond. What then, is the ‘sense of beyond’?37 In the words of Philip Shaw, it is nothing other than an effect of oil on canvas.38 Similar, as Brockmann relates Oddvar I. N.’s work to the sublime, Opus for Heaven and Earth could be said to be an effect of polishing the mountainside. The sublime for Newman has to do with a creative intensity, a certain attentiveness towards our own time. So would it also be for Oddvar I. N. In the essay ‘Staring into the Contemporary Abyss’, Simon Morley suggests an interpretation of the sublime relating to a certain selection of contemporary works of art, mainly huge installations. However, as Morley suggests that the sublime in our time not least may be found in the infinite spaces created by digitalization, and that it is ‘technology rather than nature that provides us with our strongest sense of the sublime’,39 it does not seem that the concept of the sublime is that relevant when it comes to contemporary art in relation to the wild nature, or to the vulnerability of nature. Regarding the artworks I have talked about thus far, Shark-Cow-Bathtub and Opus for Heaven and Earth, the concept of the liminal might provide a (more) relevant perspective. But if the artistic sublime connects to disasters (like in Romanticism), both Killi Olsen’s and Monteiro’s works could be interpreted as sublime in that sense, even if they also point to a certain in-between-ness, related to the liminal, and rooted in mythology (metamorphoses, beings that are both human-like and tree-like, djinns).

A group of monsters – or a group of damaged trees? Salamander Night (1989) Regarding the ecological crisis, one of the most intriguing artworks I have experienced is the huge sculpture installation Salamandernatten (Salamander Night, Figure 9.6)40 by Kjell Erik Killi Olsen. The installation consists of a group of seventy-two sculptures, all of them over three metres high, which is way above human size. The sculptures are human-like, long limbed, and with features that may remind us of artworks from German expressionism, and also of gothic sculptures, as well as of what Western art history has tended to call exotic or primitive art.41 They are not least reminding us of a crossing between human beings and trees with the thin, long limbs of the creatures, their arms and fingers stretched, twisted and bent so that they resemble branches and twigs. The figures are darkened, covered with sand from certain streets in Brazil, almost

Dangerous and Endangered Nature: Art as a Way of Seeing

151

giving the impression of something that is burnt or charred. The original theme for the artwork was ecological issues, with the severe exploitation and deforestation of the rain forest, and the uncertain future of some of the Latin American native populations. Thus, the work articulates the vulnerability of nature. As spectator, you enter a large unlit room in a basement, where you suddenly find yourself alone in the dark, in an ambient – or uncanny – atmosphere, encircled by the huge, tacit figures, experiencing an uncertain feeling of being gazed at by a big group of unknown monsters, or troll-like creatures. Of course, even if you manage to pick out the strange central figure of a woman nursing a salamander, you would not think of the vanishing of the rain forest immediately, or of ecological issues at all. Not even if you realize that the salamander, as Killi Olsen points out in an interview,42 is an animal that has survived the longest, a vulnerable animal that is also endangered.43 If anything, you may think of the role of the salamander in mythology and folklore, which may add some layers to possible interpretations of the work as a whole. In the same interview, the artist says that the figures may be reminiscent of burnt-out trees, which in turn could remind us of the burnt-out jungle.44 Thus, Salamander Night is an example – one of many – of an artwork where the intention of the artist is important for the interpretation and appreciation of it. Despite what Wimsatt and Beardsley claimed in their well-known essay concerning the intentional fallacy,45 the intention of the artist could be of importance, especially in contemporary art raising difficult questions. It is tempting to relate Killi Olsen’s work to a notion of the sublime, understood as something both terrifying and fascinating at the same time, like Burke imagined, or

Figure 9.6 Kjell Erik Killi Olsen: Salamander Night [Salamandernatten], 1989. Group of 72 sculptures, permanently placed in the basement of SpareBank 1, Trondheim, Norway. Courtesy of SpareBank 1. Photo: © Dag Asle Langø/ Multifoto.

152

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

reminding us of examples of landscape paintings from Romanticism, depicting certain catastrophes. However, if we relate the work to the concept of the liminal, again, we could say that the perspective changes slightly to strange beings resembling something in between man and tree, a group of figures standing on a threshold between catastrophe and hope, opening up for questions.

A foreshadowed catastrophe? Fabrice Monteiro and The Prophecy At this point, it is apposite to have a look on The Prophecy (2013–2015, Plates 8, 9 and 10), a series of nine photographs showing oversized, somehow supernatural female figures (djinns) in nine different environments and settings, each of them thematizing certain aspects of environmental devastation in Senegal.46 Even if the setting for the photographs in each case is local, we would easily interpret them as of global interest. The photo series was made by Fabrice Monteiro in cooperation with the Senegalese fashion designer Doulsy (Jah Gal), who created costumes of rubbish and waste, which are worn by the figures.47 The costumes make the figures look like they emerge from their environment, that the figures are inseparably connected with their environment. In an interview with Christian Niedan, Monteiro talks about his intention with the project, which to begin with was educational: I realized that Africa had a serious, serious issue with environmental problems. So I thought I could do something, being a photographer, and I came up with the idea of mixing art and culture. Because to me, the mistake of a lot of NGOs that try to make Africans aware, they don’t consider the culture. They come with ideas that are already all made, and the people there don’t get it, because it doesn’t talk to them. But using animism, the whole of West Africa believes in the spirits, and the idea was to use those spirits to deliver a message, instead of just saying, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t do this’ or ‘You shouldn’t do that.’48

The project also consists of a narrative, in that it relates to Greek mythology, and especially the Earth goddess Gaia. In bringing in certain elements from mythology, like mother goddesses, we could even draw a parallel to the work of Cross. In the article ‘Afrofuturist Photos Transform Senegal’s Trash into Haute Couture’, Priscilla Frank says that The photographs chronicle Gaia, the ancient Greek personification of Mother Earth, who is exhausted by the prospect of maintaining the natural cycles in lieu of the contemporary habits of over-consumption. She sends djinns – supernatural genies – to deliver humans a message, a message, according to the artist, ‘of warning and empowerment.’49

The supernatural genies would go beyond the common Greek myths, and bring in an element of African myths, and traditional belief in spirits. In that sense, Gaia as Mother Earth would represent a point of departure.

Dangerous and Endangered Nature: Art as a Way of Seeing

153

In her essay ‘Disposable Objects: Ethecology, Waste, and Maternal Afterlives’, Julietta Singh questions relations between humans and our coveted and discarded objects. Following Frank’s comprehension of Gaia’s djinns, she sees the figures in Monteiro’s photographs as ‘powerful, more-than-human maternal figures, each of whom appear to emerge from the excessive refuse and devastated geographies produced through modern life in Senegal’.50 Singh introduces the concept ethecology,51 as something considering both ethics and ecology, in relation both to Monteiro’s The Prophecy and to artworks made by other artists, all of whom point to the present ecological crisis in one way or other. Monteiro’s images – grounded in Senegal and its particular environmental devastations – should not in this light be read merely as a symbol of Senegalese failure but rather as signs and symptoms of (global) modernity and its ruinous trajectories. Monteiro’s . . . images tell us about ourselves, about what it is we have laid to waste and about what the present-futures of our waste might be. In this sense, they perform what I am calling ethecology — the suturing of ethics to ecologically grounded living. Ethecology is earthed in the recognition that one cannot think an environmentally sound relation to place, to human ways of relating to the material world, as distinct from the inextricably adjacent ethical considerations of intrahuman relations.52

To bring in ethical issues does not mean that Monteiro’s art is reduced to only something outside art, that is, only to ethical or educational purposes or the like – the artworks (or the artists) are not raising a warning finger; they are not teaching us how to behave, how to address severe problems, or how to face important tasks to save the future. Rather, works such as Salamander Night or The Prophecy can make us think and reflect; they are thought-provoking, use strong visual means and, as such, they are good examples of artistic works which may be interpreted in relation to the contemporary challenges and crises we face. The rain forests of the world are in severe danger, as are a plethora of species. There are also many other issues at stake in our time. In addition to the thought-provoking aspects, they are of course interesting as artworks. The Prophecy must be said to put special focus on the vulnerability and endangeredness of nature. The first photo of the selection in this chapter shows a djinn wearing a beautiful, haute couture dress made of plastic bags and other kinds of brightly coloured garbage (see Plate 8); she is emerging from a mountain of plastic, thus pointing to the plastic-waste challenges we face not only on a local African level,53 but on a global level. As Monteiro puts it in the interview with Niedan, ‘I think the African continent has a serious issue with plastic bags. That’s the first thing that Africa should get rid of. The problem of the plastic bags – we were in Burkina Faso and Cameroon two months ago, and I realized it’s all over the continent.’54 At first gaze, the image is just beautiful, as it has a classic composition; the majestic figure is standing to the right, leaning towards the centre, with her right arm and hand slightly raised. But as soon as you have a closer look, you realize the motif, namely a female figure which is almost sprouting up from a huge heap of plastic, almost a plastic mountain, even holding a plastic doll in her right hand, ready to throw it away (or perhaps she has just picked it up, to protect it?), and you will find this photo disturbing

154

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

– or even terrifying. Even more terrifying is that the plastic mountain (as well as other mountains of garbage) really exist. The sky is dramatic, there is smoke all over the place, the figure appears as haunting. And her beautiful dress is nothing but garbage. An interesting fact about the scene, which Isadora Italia points out in the essay ‘Enacting Gaia and Slow Violence in Fabrice Monteiro’s The Prophecy Series’, is that the costume skirt made of trash (particularly plastic) is purposely organized to reflect the time it takes the material to disintegrate.55 The next photo in the selection in this chapter shows a djinn clad in a costume that reminds us of a burnt tree, placed in front of ongoing bush fires (see Plate 9), and thus in a sense echoing Salamander Night, created approximately twenty-five years before. However, while Salamander Night in an allusive way thematizes the devastation of Latin American rain forests, this photograph thematizes fires in a more direct way. The fires are ongoing, surrounding the djinn. In the Senegalese area Tambacounda, bush fires are a recurring problem, as they are destroying huge areas of woodland and pasture each year. However, the liminal could be a relevant concept to use when we have a closer look at this work: one gets the feeling that the djinn is emerging from the ground, and it is difficult to tell where the ground ends, and where the roots and the stock of the tree begin, and not least to differentiate between woman and (damaged) tree. The daughter of Gaia is also pointing out something – perhaps she is pointing at different directions it is possible to choose, or to different perspectives – as she is holding some intensely green, living foliage high in her left hand, maybe to protect it, while her right hand seems withered. The female figure from the last photograph in the selection from The Prophecy (see Plate 10) wears a collection of old and polluted fish nets as a dress,56 together with certain reminiscences of fish and marine animals, and thus points out how the remains of fishing equipment could cause problems for a lot of species if they are lost – or thrown – into the sea. This djinn is depicted with a shield and some armament: her attitude is the attitude of a warrior; she is protecting us – or maybe she is trying to protect the marine environment from us. Clad in her fish net, she may be collecting all the plastic garbage in the sea in her net, even if this of course is a Sisyphean task. Isadora Italia stresses the importance of Monteiro’s use of Gaia as the organizing framework for his project: Monteiro’s invocation of Gaia is at its core an attempt to instill a feeling of responsibility in viewers. He connects the nine disasters through the central figure of Gaia so viewers can consider the seemingly disparate ecological concerns as examples of a larger truth: as a collective, humans are threatening Gaia in multiple ways.57

The djinns are nine58 protecting monsters showing us nine different disasters or troubled areas; it is in a way contemporary art taking responsibility for asking important questions regarding our future: ‘By making the ugly so beautiful, we are compelled to look at it and forced to confront the reality of our present-day conundrum,’ Italia says.59 When art makes us reflect over the severe issues we are facing in our time, empowerment is an important concept as well. However, as pointed out in connection with a recent exhibition of Monteiro’s work, art is not giving the solutions, just raising the questions:

Dangerous and Endangered Nature: Art as a Way of Seeing

155

At once beautiful and horrifying, the djinns offer no solutions. As in African masquerade culture, their evocative costumes make present an otherwise invisible force with which we can engage. The djinns conjure the souls of landscapes altered and erased by humans, but in so doing also embody the unseen, transformative effects of those environmental changes on the people who survive there.60

A few closing remarks In this chapter, I have tried to read the four selected works of art through the lenses of the liminal: I think that the concepts of transformation, of being on a threshold, and of an in-between-ness are useful in the context of vulnerable and endangered nature. The four works are highly different from each other; however, all of them can in different ways be said to hold poetic and beautiful qualities, even if in some cases these may express a kind of terrifying beauty. Cross’ shark is dangerous and at the same time vulnerable, as it is captured on the shore, even in an in-between state of woman and fish. Oddvar I. N.’s work discloses the hidden secrets of the mountain. Killi Olsen draws our attention to devastated rain forests as well as to endangered species, while Monteiro’s dystopia may show ways of coping with both the foreshadowed catastrophes and the disasters we already face via the djinns. In Monteiro’s work, we are standing at the threshold of a catastrophe, but standing at a threshold also means that it is possible to make choices. All four works may be contextualized with mythological issues as well, in a way that points to metamorphoses: certain beings captured in between, like being in between tree and human, or woman and shark. Questions raised by art regarding ecological issues, aspects of the wild, the vulnerable and the endangered differ, and span from the local to the global, from the small to the big.

Notes 1

2

3 4

The Anthropocene is not an unambiguous concept; however, it denotes an epoch where human impact is notable. It is discussed, though, if this (geological) period which could (might) be differentiated from the Holocene, spans from early Stone Age, from the Industrial Revolution, from the start of the Agricultural Revolution, or let’s say from the 1950s. See, for instance, Meera Subramanian, ‘Humans Versus Earth: The Quest to Define the Anthropocene’, Nature 572 (2019), https://www.nature.com/ articles/d41586-019-02381-2. See http://www.skulpturlandskap.no/artwork/shark-cow-bathtub/. Accessed 10 February 2021. Unfortunately, the Artscape Nordland website (skulpturlandskap.no) is no longer available. See http://www.skulpturlandskap.no/artwork/opus-for-heaven-and-earth/. Accessed 10 February 2021. See http://www.skulpturlandskap.no/project/. Accessed 10 February 2021. The idea of Artscape Nordland was that all municipalities in the county should get a site-specific work of art created by an international artist and situated in the wilderness, placed in

156

5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

15

16 17

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered beautiful scenery, an ‘ugly’ place, or a built-up area. To begin with, there was a lot of discussion about this project, and some of the local people were not happy to have international art in their local community. However, today (2021), there are thirty-six artworks by thirty-six artists in Artscape Nordland. Art historian Cher Krause Knight describes one of many approaches to having an encounter with difficult-to-access public art as a pilgrimage, a description which would suit the site-specific works in Artscape Nordland well, in addition to the mentioned land art. See Cher Krause Knight, Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), 41. The Lightning Field consists of 400 polished stainless steel poles, placed in a grid over an area of one mile by one kilometre, inviting the audience to walk in between the poles and spend an extended period of time experiencing the work, especially during sunset and sunrise. The work was commissioned and maintained by Dia Art Foundation. See https://www.diaart.org/collection/collection/de-maria-walter-thelightning-field-1977-1977-003-1-400/. Accessed 16 April 2020. See also https://www. diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/walter-de-maria-the-lightning-field/. See photos by Walter de Maria of this installation on Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/ photos/92912701@N07/8487789984/in/set-72157632978689248. Accessed 16 April 2020. See Nancy Holt: Sun Tunnels, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nancy_Holt,_ Sun_Tunnels,_1973-1976_(7841426122).jpg. Accessed 7 March 2022. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Double_Negative_Artwork.jpg. Accessed 15 February 2020. See Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Jetty#/media/ File:Spiral-jetty-from-rozel-point.png. Accessed 15 February 2020. Patrick T. Murphy, ‘A Terrible Beauty’, Artscape Nordland, http://www. skulpturlandskap.no/artwork/shark-cow-bathtub/review/. Robin Lydenberg, (Gone): Site-Specific Works by Dorothy Cross (Boston College: McMullen Museum of Art, 2005), 8. The first version was destroyed and is now replaced by a version without human breasts. Róisín O’Gorman, ‘Caught in the Liminal: Dorothy Cross’ Udder Series and Marina Carr’s by the Bog of Cats . . .’ in Liminal Borderlands in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Elin Holmsten, Reimagining Ireland, Volume 9 (Oxford: Lang, Peter, AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2011), 121. The new version of the shark is just a – shark, this time without breasts. Still terrifying, still beautiful in its monstrosity, and still showing both brutishness and vulnerability – but perhaps without the connotations of mythology and surrealism and women. She has also used the shark and the bathtub themes in other works; see, for instance, https://www.kerlingallery.com/artists/dorothy-cross#tab:thumbnails;tab1:slideshow;tab-2:slideshow. Accessed 7 March 2022. O’Gorman, ‘Caught in the Liminal: Dorothy Cross’ Udder Series and Marina Carr’s by the Bog of Cats . . .’, 107. As a work of art, it refers to the long tradition of monuments, like equestrian statues, and other monuments depicting a hero, a king, or another renowned person. At this point, we could also remind ourselves of the essay by art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field,’ October 8 (1979). Here, the very category of sculpture is discussed thoroughly, and Krauss shows that at the time (by 1979), it is stretched and kneaded so that even a hole in the ground, monitors in a corridor,

Dangerous and Endangered Nature: Art as a Way of Seeing

18 19

20

21

22 23

24

25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

157

documentary photos from country hikes, or lines cut in the floor of the desert would be categorized as sculpture, and not only the classic monuments with a hero placed on a podium. Sissel Lie, Kvinners surrealisme: Hyener og nattsommerfugler (Trondheim: Tapir akademisk forlag, 2011), 41. Carrington’s work The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg), c. 1947, 120 × 69.2 cm, can be seen in a thumbnail version on Wikimedia Commons; see https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/File:The_Giantess_(The_Guardian_of_the_Egg).jpg. Accessed 10 January 2021. See Leonora Carrington. 6 March–31 May 2015 Tate Liverpool, https://www.tate.org. uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/leonora-carrington. Accessed 20 November 2020. Ovid, Metamorphoses, in Fifteen Books, trans. Mr. Dryden. Mr. Addison. Dr. Garth. Mr. Mainwaring. Mr. Congreve. Mr. Rowe. Mr. Pope. Mr. Gay. Mr. Eusden. Mr. Croxall. And other eminent hands. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale ed., 2 vols., vol. 1 (Dublin: Sir Samuel Garth, M.D., 1727), 159. Vittorio Sgarbi, Caravaggio (Milano: Skira, 2007), 78. Dorothy Cross and Tom Cross, Medusae (2000–2003). See https://publicart.ie/main/ directory/directory/view/medusae/5da05703f73bd73b4afe35a59322d3ea/ for more information. Accessed 16 April 2020. Marina Warner, ‘Satyrs, Spiders, Jellyfish, and Mutants: Ovidian Metamorphosis in Contemporary Art’, in The Body and the Arts, ed. Corinne Saunders, Ulrika Maude, and Jane Macnaughton (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 202. Ibid., 203. Jellyfish species can be seen as symbols of the ecological crisis in several ways. For instance, as described by Rapp et al. in the evidence-based study ‘Microplastic Ingestion in Jellyfish Pelagia Noctiluca (Forsskal, 1775) in the North Atlantic Ocean’, microplastic was found in the gastrovascular cavity of most of the jellyfish analysed. This shows that jellyfish are highly exposed to marine pollution and microdebris, and that jellyfish can be a clear bio-indicator of plastic contamination. Another example investigates how recent jellyfish blooms may be promoted by habitat eutrophication and climate change (see Goldstein and Steiner, ‘Ecological Drivers of Jellyfish Blooms – The Complex History of a “Well-Known” Medusa (Aurelia Aurita)’). Robin Lydenberg, ‘Contemporary Irish Art on the Move: At Home and Abroad with Dorothy Cross’, Éire-Ireland 39, no. 3 (2004): 148. http://www.skulpturlandskap.no/artwork/opus-for-heaven-and-earth/process/ See ‘Vevelstads skulptur en turistattraksjon’, Nordlandsposten, 31 August 1993 (in Norwegian). See http://www.skulpturlandskap.no/artwork/opus-for-heaven-and-earth/oddvar-i-n/. Accessed 10 February 2021. http://www.skulpturlandskap.no/artwork/opus-for-heaven-and-earth/oddvar-i-n/. Accessed 10 February 2021. See Jan Brockmann, ‘Et eventyr i berget’, Artscape Nordland, http://www. skulpturlandskap.no/artwork/opus-for-heaven-and-earth/process/?sprak=1 (in Norwegian). Accessed 10 February 2021. See ibid. See Umberto Eco, ed. On Ugliness, Storia Della Bruttezza (New York: Rizzoli, 2007), 16. Ibid., 19. Helen Langdon, ‘The Demosthenes of Painting. Salvator Rosa and the 17th Century Sublime’, in Translations of the Sublime: The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination

158

37 38 39 40 41

42 43

44 45 46 47

48

49

50 51

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered of Longinus’ Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre, ed. Caroline van Eck et al., Intersections (Boston: Brill, 2012), 168. Barnett Newman, ‘The Sublime Is Now’, in Art in Theory, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 [1948]), 572–574. Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London: Routledge, 2006), 7. Simon Morley, ‘Staring into the Contemporary Abyss’, Tate Etc no. 20 (2010): 76. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXXZzLzzoAI for a video of the work with music added: Nordvargr/Drakh – Northern Dark Supremacy. Accessed 1 March 2020. The sculpture group was originally made for the 1989 Sao Paulo art biennial and is now a permanent installation in the basement of the bank SpareBank 1 in Trondheim, Norway, donated by the artist to the municipality of Trondheim. See https://www. fineart.no/doc/2011_killi_olsen, accessed 10 May 2019 and https://www.trondheim. com/art-salamandernatten, accessed 10 May 2019 (no longer available). See Torill S. Kojan, ‘Kjell Erik Killi Olsen – Salamandernatten’, https://www.fineart.no/ doc/2011_killi_olsen. Accessed 10 May 2019. To get an idea of the situation of the different salamander species, and to check if they are extinct, critically endangered and so forth, see the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, https://www. iucnredlist.org/search?query=salamander&searchType=species. Accessed 20 May 2020. See Kojan, ‘Kjell Erik Killi Olsen – Salamandernatten’. William K. Wimsatt Jr, and Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, The Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 (1946). www.jstor.org/stable/27537676. See https://fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com/ for the whole series. The project was crowd-funded by Ecofund. See https://www.ecofund.org/project/ prophecy.html: Ecofund is a collaborative adventure combining scientific research, arts, corporate social responsibility and the collective potential offered by web-based social networks and crowdfunding. ‘At Ecofund, we believe preserving our planet is not impossible, but a challenge within everyone’s reach. Each and every one of us, according to her or his budget, talent and expertise, can contribute to the protection of nature. Together each of our small efforts equals a big impact on our ecosystems.’ Christian Niedan, ‘The Photographic Confrontations of Fabrice Monteiro – an Interview’, The Mantle, https://www.themantle.com/arts-and-culture/photographicconfrontations-fabrice-monteiro-interview. Accessed 20 March 2020. Priscilla Frank, ‘Afrofuturist Photos Transform Senegal’s Trash into Haute Couture’, Huffington Post, May 1, 2015. Updated 6 October 2015 https://www.huffpost.com/ entry/fabrice-monteiro-senegal-trash_n_560f1262e4b0af3706e0fbf4 Julietta Singh, ‘Disposable Objects: Ethecology, Waste, and Maternal Afterlives’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality 19, no. 1 (2018): 50–51. It might be relevant to relate Singh’s concept of ethecology to the late Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss’ (1912–2009) concept of deep ecology (1973). A core point in Næss’ thinking was to combine ecology and environmental ethics, and the view would be eco-centric rather than anthropo-centric. As Næss puts it himself: ‘The deep ecology movement is a total view. It covers our basic assumptions, our life philosophy, and our decisions in everyday life. I have also called the total view an “ecosophy” in order to distinguish it from ecology as a science.’ Arne Næss, ‘The Basics of Deep Ecology’, in The Selected Works of Arne Naess: Volumes 1–10, Volume Ten – Deep Ecology of Wisdom: Explorations in Unities of Nature and Cultures, ed. Alan Drengson

Dangerous and Endangered Nature: Art as a Way of Seeing

52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60

159

(Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2005), 17 (2274). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-14020-4519-6_86. Singh, ‘Disposable Objects: Ethecology, Waste, and Maternal Afterlives’, 52. The photo was taken at the huge garbage dump Mbeubeuss, created in 1968 on a drying lake outside Dakar, close to the sea. Niedan, ‘The Photographic Confrontations of Fabrice Monteiro – an Interview’. Isadora Italia, ‘Enacting Gaia and Slow Violence in Fabrice Monteiro’s the Prophecy Series’, CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal 1, no. 7 (2019): 10. This figure could even be interpreted as a strange reminder of the Norwegian personification of the raw powers of the sea, the sea goddess Rán, who was often imagined with a fishing net where she could capture the seamen who did not survive. Italia, ‘Enacting Gaia and Slow Violence in Fabrice Monteiro’s the Prophecy Series’, 2. There are some more images in the series now, also from some other parts of the world. Italia, ‘Enacting Gaia and Slow Violence in Fabrice Monteiro’s the Prophecy Series’, 9. The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG), https://www.aamg-us. org/fabrice-monteiro-the-prophecy/ 14 November 2019. Accessed 20 March 2020.

Literature Artscape Nordland (Skulpturlandskap Nordland). ‘Shark-Cow-Bathtub’. http://www. skulpturlandskap.no/artwork/shark-cow-bathtub. Accessed 10 February 2021. Artscape Nordland (Skulpturlandskap Nordland). ‘Opus for Heaven and Earth’. http:// www.skulpturlandskap.no/artwork/opus-for-heaven-and-earth/. Accessed 10 February 2021. Artscape Nordland (Skulpturlandskap Nordland). ‘Project’. http://www.skulpturlandskap. no/project. Accessed 10 February 2021. The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, AAMG . ‘Fabrice Monteiro: The Prophecy’. https://www.aamg-us.org/fabrice-monteiro-the-prophecy. Accessed 20 March 2020. Brockmann, Jan. ‘Et eventyr i berget’. Artscape Nordland, http://www.skulpturlandskap.no/ artwork/opus-for-heaven-and-earth/process/?sprak=1. Accessed 10 February 2021. Eco, Umberto, ed. On Ugliness, Storia Della Bruttezza. New York: Rizzoli, 2007. Ecofund. Our future is green. ‘The Prophecy, Senegal’. https://www.ecofund.org/project/ prophecy.html. Accessed 19 March 2021. Frank, Priscilla. ‘Afrofuturist photos transform Senegal’s trash into haute couture’. Huffington Post, 1 May 2015. Goldstein, Josephine and Ulrich K. Steiner. ‘Ecological drivers of jellyfish blooms – the complex life history of a “well-known” medusa (Aurelia Aurita)’. Journal of Animal Ecology 89, no. 3 (2020): 910–920. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. https://www.iucnredlist.org/. Italia, Isadora. ‘Enacting Gaia and slow violence in Fabrice Monteiro’s the Prophecy series’. CLAMA NTIS: The MALS Journal 1, no. 7 (2019): 1–20. https://digitalcommons. dartmouth.edu/clamantis/vol1/iss7/16 Knight, Cher Krause. Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008.

160

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Kojan, Torill S. ‘Kjell Erik Killi Olsen – Salamandernatten’. https://www.fineart.no/ doc/2011_killi_olsen. Accessed 10 May 2019. Krauss, Rosalind. ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’. October 8 (1979): 31–44. Langdon, Helen. ‘The Demosthenes of painting. Salvator Rosa and the 17th century sublime’. In Translations of the Sublime: The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of Longinus’ Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre, edited by Caroline van Eck, Stijn Bussels, Maarten Delbeke, and Jürgen Pieters. Intersections, 163–185. Boston: Brill, 2012. Lie, Sissel. Kvinners surrealisme: Hyener og nattsommerfugler. Trondheim: Tapir akademisk forlag, 2011. Lydenberg, Robin. ‘Contemporary Irish art on the move: At home and abroad with Dorothy Cross’. Éire-Ireland 39, no. 3 (2004): 144–166. Lydenberg, Robin. (Gone): Site-Specific Works by Dorothy Cross. Boston College: McMullen Museum of Art, 2005. Monteiro, Fabrice. ‘Photography’. https://fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com/. Accessed 9 May 2020. Morley, Simon. ‘Staring into the contemporary abyss’. Tate Etc no. 20 (2010): 70–77. Murphy, Patrick T. ‘A terrible beauty’. Artscape Nordland, http://www.skulpturlandskap.no/ artwork/shark-cow-bathtub/review/. Accessed 10 February 2021. Newman, Barnett. ‘The sublime is now’. In Art in Theory, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 572–574. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 [1948]. Niedan, Christian. ‘The photographic confrontations of Fabrice Monteiro – an interview’. The Mantle, https://www.themantle.com/arts-and-culture/photographicconfrontations-fabrice-monteiro-interview. Accessed 20 March 2020. Næss, Arne. ‘The basics of deep ecology’. In The Selected Works of Arne Naess: Volumes 1–10, Volume Ten – Deep Ecology of Wisdom: Explorations in Unities of Nature and Cultures, edited by Alan Drengson, 2270–2278. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4519-6_86. O’Gorman, Róisín. ‘Caught in the liminal: Dorothy Cross’ Udder Series and Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats . . .’. In Liminal Borderlands in Irish Literature and Culture, edited by Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Elin Holmsten. Reimagining Ireland, Volume 9, 103–127. Oxford: Lang, Peter, AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2011. Ovid. Metamorphoses, in Fifteen Books. Translated by Mr. Dryden. Mr. Addison. Dr. Garth. Mr. Mainwaring. Mr. Congreve. Mr. Rowe. Mr. Pope. Mr. Gay. Mr. Eusden. Mr. Croxall. And other eminent hands. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale ed. 2 vols. Vol. 1, Dublin: Sir Samuel Garth, M.D., 1727. Publicart.ie. ‘Medusae’. https://publicart.ie/main/directory/directory/view/medusae/5da05 703f73bd73b4afe35a59322d3ea. Accessed 16 April 2020. Rapp, Jorge, Alicia Herrera, Daniel R. Bondyale-Juez, Miguel González-Pleiter, Stefanie Reinold, Maite Asensio, Ico Martínez, and May Gómez. ‘Microplastic Ingestion in Jellyfish Pelagia Noctiluca (Forsskal, 1775) in the North Atlantic Ocean’. Marine Pollution Bulletin 166 (May 2021): 112266-66. Sgarbi, Vittorio. Caravaggio. Milano: Skira, 2007. Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. London: Routledge, 2006. Singh, Julietta. ‘Disposable objects: Ethecology, waste, and maternal afterlives’. Studies in Gender and Sexuality 19, no. 1 (2018): 48–54. Subramanian, Meera. ‘Humans versus earth: The quest to define the Anthropocene’. Nature 572 (2019): 168–171. Published electronically 6 August, corrected 2 October. https:// www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02381-2.

Dangerous and Endangered Nature: Art as a Way of Seeing

161

‘Vevelstads skulptur en turistattraksjon’. Nordlandsposten, 31 August 1993. Warner, Marina. ‘Satyrs, spiders, jellyfish, and mutants: Ovidian metamorphosis in contemporary art’. In The Body and the Arts, edited by Corinne Saunders, Ulrika Maude, and Jane Macnaughton, 186–208. Basingstoke, UK : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Wimsatt Jr, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. ‘The intentional fallacy’. The Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 (1946): 468–488.

162

10

Wild Weather: Modes of Being at the Mercy in Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, Turner’s Snowstorm and the Fiji House of the Spirits Sigurd Bergmann

The wild ‘bog in our brain and bowels’ Dreams of wilderness have impacted on human images of nature significantly throughout modernity. During the beginnings of environmentalism in the early twentieth century, the wilderness offered a product of desire and a cultural construction of meaning. According to Simon Schama, the wild was imagined as some kind of antidote and alternative place. In the wilderness, one could be healed from the poisons of modern industrialization and environmental degradation. According to the founding fathers of North American environmentalism – Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh and John Muir – the wilderness provided ‘an antidote for the poisons of industrial society’.1 The contrast and often opposition of the modern man-made on the one side and the wild on the other has since then characterized the history of environmentalism; for better or for worse, it has nurtured the vision of an ecological utopia and produced eschatological power to imagine and strive for an exodus out of unsustainable modes of existence. At the same time it maintained and deepened a fatal split between human and natural, tamed and untamed, artefacted and untouched. The wild has in this sense offered a central counter-image to the social; wilderness and society oppose each other.2 Nevertheless, even if the vision of the pioneering environmentalists was driven by the contrast between tamed and untamed, wild and social, their socio-ecologic vision was obviously striving for a synthesis, the wild within us. Schama ends his comprehensive work about the power of human imagination in relation to nature, and also its adoration as something sacred, by quoting Thoreau: ‘It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us that inspires that dream.’3 Further on, I will not uphold the tension between the antagonism of wild and social on the one side and the vision of merging tamed and untamed on the other. Rather, I will follow Thoreau and trace the ‘primitive vigor of Nature in us’ and explore what might ‘inspire that dream’. 163

164

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

On this path, Johann Wolfgang Goethe can also offer valuable guidance in his wisdom about how intimately knowledge of the human being and knowledge of the world are interwoven: ‘The human being only knows herself as far as she knows the world, which she only becomes aware of in herself, and only in the world she becomes aware of herself.’4 Applying this to our theme of the wild, we can deduce that only in the wild world can we become aware of the wild bog within ourselves. And only by becoming aware of the wild within us can we become conscious of the wild world. Consequently, in such an exploration we must constantly remain aware of the ambivalence in our human perception of nature. Wilderness mirrors society’s ambivalent relation to nature, as environmental artist George Steinmann aptly reminds us: ‘It does not exist, the objective, undistorted view of wilderness.’5 For Steinmann, wilderness offers ‘Suchraum, Freiraum und Ort der Selbsterfahrung zugleich’ (search space, free space and a place of self-experience at the same time).6 Suppositiously, in the following, I will not look for the wilderness as an alternative place but will see what happens if we regard weather, and especially wild weather, as such a Suchraum (search space) where the wild bog in us can flourish. Hereby we will not investigate the atmosphere and its altering weather as such, but will explore experiences and images of the wild wind in poetry, painting and vernacular architecture’s encountering of the Pacific storms. How might weather, and especially wild winds, provide an open, free search space, and a place of self-experience? This chapter will avoid, and try to overcome, the fatal split of tamed and untamed by exploring modes of being at the mercy of the assumed wild by departing from the overwhelming power that is continuously experienced in the flux of weather.7 In analogy to ‘The Raw Within’, my former contribution to a book about the Raw,8 this chapter and its three artwork interpretations will emphasize the within in connection to the surrounding in its reflecting weather in the lens of the wild. Its title ‘wild weather’ should be taken with a grain of salt, as what one circumscribes and experiences as weather, both in its comfortable and uncomfortable forms, continuously offers an overwhelming and overpowering wild force that humans cannot manage but can only adapt to. Three examples of poetic, visual and architectural expressions of adapting to wild weather, all three from the early nineteenth century, will be mined deeper in this text: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘Ode to the West Wind’, Joseph Mallord William Turner’s painting Snowstorm – Steam-boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead (Plate 11), and the traditional bure and House of the Spirits on the Fiji Islands (Figure 10.1). The interpretation of these three will hopefully encourage the reader to approach the wild as something within and around rather than something opposed to the human. Conceivably one can become aware of the liberating power of being alive and at the mercy of wild weather lands.

Wild West Wind – Wild Spirit Far away from the strong and cold wind blowing over the British islands from the West in autumn, Shelley composed his ode in the woods on the bank of the Arno River near

Wild Weather

165

Florence.9 He wrote the poem on 25 October 1819 in one single sitting. Its composition consists of five sonnets written in ‘terza rima’, in iambic pentameter. While the first three sections depict what the wind does to land, air and water (and not fire as expected), the poet speaks directly to the wind in the last two sections. Together with many other texts, this one deepens a central theme in Shelley’s work that is poetry’s and the poet’s moral and political commitment and power. The wind in all its uncontrollable and unpredictable strength becomes herein a metaphor for spreading the prophetpoet’s message about change, reform and revolution. Shelley’s well-known, widespread poem has been interpreted by many in all its multidimensional layers of meaning (for example with regard to Dante, ancient Greek mythology and William Godwin’s revolutionary politics), and its masterly composition deserves suitably high-quality approval, which I only approximately am capable of. In the context of this book, I wish to focus solely on three selected themes. In what sense is the West Wind wild? How can the wild West Wind offer a Suchraum and a place of self-experience? How does the wild Spirit take place within the wind? Shelley contrasts the winds in autumn and spring as siblings. While ‘Thine azure sister of the Spring’ blows her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill:

the wild West Wind appears as Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

The wild in the wind is identified by Shelley as a contrasting, conflicting capacity of both destroying and preserving. On the one hand, the ‘breath of Autumn’s being’ brings the leaves’ death and buries the seeds in their ‘dark wintry bed’ ‘like a corpse within its grave’. On the other hand, it preserves their life ‘until’ the warm spring wind from the East, ‘azure Sister’ awakens them to life again. In analogy to the tension between death and life, destruction and preservation, also the poet himself locates his work: Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

In dialogue with the wind, Shelley prays to become the voice of prophecy all over the whole unawakened earth for a turn from winter to spring, from death to life, and for flourishing freedom to come. The wild, one might conclude, represents a necessary condition for change, life and liberation. Shelley’s convergence of the wind and the Spirit, where both appear wild, anchors hereby in a deep theological and biblical understanding of the Spirit. According to the

166

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Creed she acts as Giver of Life and the one who brings the new time. According to the Eastern theologians, she is the Spirit who liberates nature,10 and according to Hildegard von Bingen, the Spirit is the force of greening, viriditas.11 One should of course not impose such a theological interpretation explicitly on Shelley and his Ode, but the similarities are obvious and reveal plainly the depth of the ancient connection of the Spirit breathing life, and the wind as a central metaphor for the Spirit’s free-blowing mobility, the Spirit ‘moving everywhere’. The wild on the one hand and flowing, moving, blowing on the other are deeply entangled with each other. The wild is in motion. For Shelley, poetry (and thus the wild) is ‘the influence which is moved not, but moves’.12 The wind in Shelley’s poem is an ‘unseen presence’, which we can also apply to the Holy Spirit, where humans only can become aware of her work but never grasp her nature. Much more could be said about Shelley’s profound search for the Wild in the wind, but I content myself here to detect what we can learn from the Autumn’s West Wind in our Northern European hemisphere: the wild is in motion, it is destroying and preserving.13 The wild entangles death and life, drives ‘dead thoughts’ over the universe and ‘quickens new birth’. The wild is uncontrollable, ‘tameless, and swift, and proud’; it shakes and it can surge and dirge. In his Ode ‘Mont Blanc’, which would be tempting to compare, Shelley compresses the ambiguous and contrastive power of nature even more: The wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, So solemn, so serene, that man may be But for such faith with nature reconciled.14

In analogy to the wind here, in the valley of Chamonix, also the mountain,‘preeminently as a locus of ambiguity’,15 teaches us about nature. With its mysterious and inexplicable tongue, it makes us aware of the interwoven benevolence and malevolence of wilderness, but also about the power of poetry, imagination and faith that can lead us to a state ‘with nature reconciled’.16 Masterfully applying what I depicted above as Goethe’s valuable wisdom where one only in the world can find oneself, Shelley never observes both the mountain and the wind at distance but all the way through in a close, deep relation and communion. His view of nature can without doubt be characterized as a proto-ecological impulse where the romantic artists were able to intuit the connectedness of different life forms.17 Sympathetic interactions between different organisms at land, in the sea, and in the air take place also in this Ode. The first three sections of the Ode to the West Wind address the wind as ‘thou’ and end with ‘hear, oh hear!’. In the final sections, the poet’s own voice sounds clearly. Obviously, Shelley intended hereby to ‘destabilize the authority of the speaker in favour of the reader’, a method that was well in line with his political vision where he efficiently refused to ‘monumentalize a single vision’.18 For Shelley, the experience of the wind offers a significant free Suchraum and place of poetic experience.19 Wind is here not just simply a metaphor but a complex space in motion. Wind, and likewise the Spirit, is blowing through and within us; it changes and

Wild Weather

167

destroys life as well as giving and preserving it. The world is not mechanistic but inspirited. For Shelley, the West Wind represents ‘that animate universe’.20 The wild West Wind, furthermore, is taking place in between the times, or better still, it changes and transform the times, brings one season into the other, preparing at the same time for the next coming one. The wild in the wind allows the experience of a time to come; it makes the future present and turns past into future. The wild in the wind in this way is offering some kind of eschatological experience: that what is not yet is coming closer. Imagining the end allows the already here and now to become aware of an ongoing renewal and movement toward the not yet seen.21 It is therefore important to remind oneself that Shelley does not know any final end but regards mutability as central and eternal.22 Poets are for Shelley ‘the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present’,23 an understanding of arts that also underlies the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and in an exciting way anticipates Herbert Marcuse’s ideas about art’s authentic utopia.24 Futurity is guaranteed for Shelley who efficiently destabilizes the binary opposition of life and death so that death loses its radicality.25 The wild in the wind is all the way through and always a deep and tameless power within poetry. Our self-consciousness acts in the same way as unpredictable wild weather, and according to Shelley one can trust these forces. Wild and art belong together in one common motion. The moral and political forces herein are not simply applied ideological values but forces at depth, driving forces in the analogy of the West Wind driving the leaves and seeds, ‘the tumult of thy mighty harmonies’. The wild serves as a Suchraum for the self-experience of being a voice and prophet to meet the ‘unawaken’d earth’. The wild sounds as ‘the trumpet of a prophecy’.26 It makes possible a promise of ‘Creation set free’, a spring not ‘far behind’. Shelley’s ode offers us one single prayer: Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!27

Wind and Spirit are impetuous, tameless driving forces. Natural and social change is interwoven in the wild. Wild weather catalyses wild thinking. Wind and Spirit are the forces of the wild that drive the atmosphere, weather and season change, and at the same time they are forces that drive our hope from the past into the future, wild breathing blows of life-giving quickening new birth.

Wild-running machines in steam and storm While Shelley in his warm and comfortable Italian surroundings mobilized all of his skills of remembrance to depict the wild West Wind in his home country, twenty-three years later, Turner drew on his own experience of an even more dramatic wind in a snowstorm out on the Atlantic. His famous painting Snowstorm (Plate 11) is anchored in a deep personal experience. The painter reports himself how he asked the sailors to lash him to the mast of the boat Ariel as it was leaving Harwich, laying out in a

168

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

snowstorm for four hours, in order ‘to observe it’ and ‘to record it’;28 and he explicitly completes the painting’s title with details about it. In the catalogue text he described himself as the picture’s ‘author’. One can scarcely come closer to being exposed to the force of wild weather. Due to his impressive skill of remembrance, Turner could afterwards express and paint what he saw and felt; on the canvas he shared the feeling of being totally dependent on the awful and wild weather. One is tempted to compare his experience to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’ and ask if Turner continuously explores in his paintings what it means to be alive and totally dependent on the forces of nature manifested in the atmospheres of weather.29 Eberhard Roters strikingly states that in this painting Turner moves the acting God, who earlier has intervened in nature from without, now directly into the power of the elements. The divine omnipotence embodies in weather itself.30

A central interest in the agenda beyond this painting appears to lie in the conflictive contradiction of wild weather and technology. Does the painter want to make us aware of the demon spirits of technology moving through the locomotive power of the steamer into our horizon? Or should we interpret the sailing trip in such demanding weather as some kind of victory of the man-made machine over nature? A technical capture of the wild? One should be very careful with all too quickly and simply identifying the relation of technology and nature as an either-or in Turner’s work. It is not the power of technology itself that keeps Turner busy, but rather it is the encounter between the wild and manmade that attracts him. Brian Lukacher clearly describes how ‘the fluid simultaneity of the visionary and the phenomenal’ operates within this painting, and how elements of ‘spectral fantasy and poetical allusion’ are at work.31 Turner’s pictorial treatment of technology is as central within this work as the phenomenal experience of nature. Turner explicitly referred to himself as the picture’s ‘author’ and emphasized the artist’s own responsiveness to the scene. The steam machine in the snowstorm is somehow a wild encounter of its own. Wild weather is capturing, shaking and swaying the vulnerable man-made boat. To be exposed to wild weather in this context also means to be exposed to the machine. Two different powers are struggling with each other. The painting indeed struggles with the significance of technology, here the steamboat, and its movement through the storm where the boat intensely, for example through its soot, affects the colour and atmosphere of the seascape. Alluding in the full title of the piece to Ariel, the demon spirit in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Turner furthermore leads us to the question of how technology and the machinery, both of technology and of his own painting, are interconnected with the spiritual forces of life. How can wild weather inspire ‘wild painting’, and what role will the machine be given in this process? Even if the steamboat does not sink but ploughs its way through the rough and tough sea, it can never conquer the forces of weather and its wildness. Where is the role of the human painter in this struggle? Turner masterfully explores the synergy of sea, wind, light, boat, steam and sky, and he remains by no means just an observer. The painter, in particular, and art in general become an integral part of the

Wild Weather

169

weather itself. Wild weather embraces the boat, the painter, the painting and art. The uncontrollable, tameless, swift and proud, to use Shelley’s words, hold control. One does not need to subject oneself to it but to face up to it with a consciousness of being at its mercy. In this way, Turner’s painting can encourage us to rethink what technology does to nature and to us within it. In his time, one was naturally not very conscious of the impact of fossil energy and the steam machine’s fatal consequences for what we nowadays characterize as ‘the great acceleration’ (of the essential driving forces behind climate change).32 Nevertheless, Turner’s intuition was right that the encounter of nature and the machine, of weather and technology, of two forces and energies combatting each other, takes us to the depth of an existential challenge. Wild weather is one thing, a machine going wild is another. In Turner’s and Shelley’s times, machines still contented themselves to work at the mercy of stronger forces. Today wild machines, in the continuity of steam engines, are running wild in another sense; that is, they are ‘eating up’ species, ecosystems and conditions for human survival in a process of accelerating global warming. Weather is herein definitively running wilder and wilder, and extends into what we describe as disaster. Turner, lashed to the mast of Ariel, experienced the forces at work in such a process. What demons did we invoke and what spirits or Spirit should we call on? At the same time as Britain praised enthusiastically the progress of mechanization as a way out of the economic crisis, the burning question that arose was what did technology mean for, and do to, the spirituality and morality of men and women? Snowstorm mines this challenge deeply and offers a subtle exploration of it by contrasting the rhythmic motion of the sea with the mechanized locomotive power of the steamer. The agencies of art, nature and technology are masterfully visualized in the work, and one can wonder if the steam engine also becomes a model for Turner’s own painting machine. If interpreted in this way, Turner’s Snowstorm formulates deeply challenging questions also for our time. Are the ghosts haunting the machine on the conditions of mechanics, or are the human-made but now-released machine demons rather occupying our social world and transforming nature into one gigantic artefact?33 Has the wild been tamed or has it just taken another form and course as technically wild weather and climate? What kind of fetishization takes place in technology, and what kinds of demon spirits are emerging?34

From natural to anthropogenic wild in the House of the Spirits While Shelley turned wild wind into wild poetry and Turner explored the snowstorm and wild sea through paintings, we will finally set forth on a journey to the Fiji Islands in order to expose ourselves to wind in architecture. In the traditional House of the Spirits we can find a representative example for coping with the wild in weather, and for encountering nature that is embracing human life also in its most threatening raw wild strength. Usually, the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific offer a land where alleged paradisiac weather conditions exist with a comfortable uniform average temperature of 20–30°C.

170

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

In contrast, this picture of paradise on Earth is disturbed by life-threatening storms and hurricanes, floods, and also droughts. The people who inhabit the Fijian villages differentiate strictly between land and weather. Through their farming practices they interact with the forces that are active on land, while the weather is outside of their influence and power and therefore needs to be approached ritually. The village’s agricultural practices follow directly from a deeply held belief that people exert control over land. The weather, however, is up to God.35

Fiji inhabitants experience being at the mercy, as the weather at and around the islands can quickly shift from life-enhancing to life-threatening. While the land belongs to the people, or better, while the people belong to the land, the weather belongs to the Divine. God impacts on the human ecology of the humans through weather that affects the agricultural fertility of the soil. Humans can execute power over land, but only God can manage rains, droughts and storms. Therefore, good usage of the land also necessarily includes prayers and rituals for weather that enhances the community’s life and survival. Wild weather lies in the Creator’s hands. The flux of weather lies in the hands of God. Faith is an integral part of the human ecology. Weather affects land, land affects people, and people praying to God affect weather that again affects land and people. God, weather, land and people have come full circle. Ongoing climate change crucially disturbs and even damages this circle;36 it threatens not only the weather islands of Oceania but also the spiritual universe of its inhabitants. Is the full circle disorganized when men/women take the place of God and impact on the weather? Rituals and prayers represented a mode of communication between the God of Weather and the humans on Earth, but to whom should one pray now and for what? While prayer in the older weather (is)lands of Fiji was able to regulate symbolically the interaction of land, agriculture and weather flux, and also to assist the constructive adaptation of the farming villages to the continuous flow of weather variation, climate change today not only disorders the physical pattern of variation but impacts radically on the cultural and spiritual perception of the environment and oneself within it. Climate change science and the related national as well as international geopolitics are at present entering arenas that earlier were manifested by festivals, rituals and prayers. Ancient religion in Fiji conducted prayers and rituals, and also sacrifices, in order to prevent storms and droughts. It interpreted the failure of annual rain and floods as punishment for sins, and hereby also apportioned considerable significance to the role of the shaman earlier and the priest later as mediator. Although mainly relying on the rituals, societies might also have included individuals who possessed specific magical powers to command the weather.37 Together with the above-described full circle of weather, land, people and God, such a traditional image of weather and the response to it scarcely makes sense anymore. Regarding weather through the lens of climate science does not make it possible to simply regard weather as ‘an act of God’ (a term that is still used in the language of modern insurance companies!), but makes it necessary to explore the conflict between

Wild Weather

171

traditional religious views of weather and dramatic sea level rise, increasingly strong storms and challenging droughts and floods caused by anthropogenic economic activity in other parts of the world. Does this mean that God, the Creator, has lost control of the weather? Or the opposite: is God angry with humans and influencing the weather as a punishment? Neither of these two paths seems to really fit well into traditional beliefs or Christian faith. A third path is taken by the Pacific Church leaders in the Moana declaration from 2009 where the issue of resettlement is taken seriously, and the rights of the populations are claimed to be ensured. For the church this leads to the following: Reaffirm the prophetic role of the church and its responsibility to recognize and speak out against the injustices wrought on by climate change and call on all persons, communities and states to act now.38

Weather, and especially wild weather, thereby moves from the hands of God into the hand of humans, and the ritual care for the environment turns into a prophetic commitment to act in synergy with God for social and environmental justice, both on the local and the geopolitical global scenes. Weather atmospheres in between land and sky and responses to weather flux are turning into political negotiations between nations, companies and the populace, which again are divided between rich and poor, protected and suffering parts of the world population. Weather is no longer in the hands of God or praying local people, so in whose hands is it? The quality of the wild as tameless, uncontrollable and unpredictable, mirroring the being at the mercy of humans is herein radically changed. Now it is man-made weather taking its incalculable course in climatic change that produces a new quality of wildness. Should we conceivably depict this as ‘anthropogenic wild’ (in opposition to the former ‘natural wild’)? According to John D’Arcy May, the religious centre of the whole of Pacific culture is the all-embracing life.39 The central spiritual force is the breath of life, and social order mirrors cosmic order. Social relations and cosmic relations are entangled, and potential disharmony with the forces of nature always has a personal or social root. That is also why weather has to be approached in a religious way. Analytically, D’Arcy May differentiates between ‘biocosmic’ and ‘metacosmic’ religion in the Pacific. While metacosmic religion offers salvation and a way out of suffering and the conditions of transient life, biocosmic religion is centred on the cosmos and the life that emerges from it.40 In the traditional worldview, one does not differentiate between religious and non-religious experience but rather views oneself in relation with the forces of a vibrant universe.41 Wild weather is just one integral part of this, even if the anthropogenic wild transforms the strength and scale of weather impacts significantly. Just a few years ago, in 2016, the Fijians were hit by the strongest storm in their history. Tropical cyclone ‘Winston’ smashed into the islands on 20 February 2016, killed forty-three people and levelled entire communities. Tens of thousands of people were lacking food, water and shelter. Villages were wiped out, crops were raised out of the grounds, and infrastructure lay in ruins. Around 40 per cent of Fiji’s population, 347,000 people, was affected, of which 120,000 were children, according to Unicef. It is

172

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

regarded to be the most powerful storm to make landfall in the southern hemisphere. In the context of global warming and the widespread effects of El Niño, one might expect further similar disasters in the future. Cyclone Winston and its comprehensive nationwide destruction might serve other nations as a harbinger for what climate change might bring in ‘our common future’. For faith communities and religion, it might serve as an even stronger catalyst to pray, hope and act politically for global climate justice. One can only wonder what happens in a future of global warming at ‘hothouse earth’42 where humans have let the genie of natural wild weather out of the bottle and where forces of natural and anthropogenic wild unfold their power in synergy. Finally, a look at the art of traditional building on the Fijis where one builds not against but with the weather, not regarding the wild as a threat but as a gift. Storms and hurricanes will belong to the natural weather variation on the islands even if their strength and damaging capacity are increasing in the context of global warming. Traditional architecture here and in the whole Pacific therefore has had to adapt to highly difficult conditions, where houses have often needed to be rebuilt after storms, and where attempts have even been made to build in a way that might minimize the destructive effects of a storm. Traditional houses were therefore constructed without walls but with woven blinds that could be lowered for harsher weather. It is for the same reason that Fijian houses often have walls and roofs of reeds or woven palms. For religious and social purposes, every village had a common meeting house and a ‘spirit house’. Before the arrival of Christianity each post of a bure that was raised demanded human sacrifices, sometimes even the lives of the craftsmen. Large ceremonial buildings for religious functions are still constructed in this traditional weather-appropriate fashion. Architecture, we can say, cooperates fruitfully with culture and religion in a specific life-enhancing synergy in the Fiji weather (is)lands. Wild weather is taken into architecture as a natural integral element. With high probability the vitalization and reconstruction of vernacular architecture where building styles are able to adapt to environmental hazards can offer an important strategy for coping with the effects of dangerous and increasing climate change. This might also act as a reminder for sacred architecture, where Christian churches rather are stone-built in massive European and colonial styles, while, for example, Hindu temples, although also built in stone, more explicitly draw on local vernacular architecture.43 What the missionary once perceived as a lack of building skills along the view cited by Thomas Williams in 1858 – ‘In architecture the Fijians have made no mean progress’44 – the progressive architecture for the future might precisely be of this style, that is, vernacular and soundly weather-land-adapted architecture. The traditional Fiji house is the bure, which the missionary in the early 1800s mistakably did not regard as advanced architecture. It is often rectangular in shape and made of tightly woven bamboo walls with a thatched roof. The doors are low and usually only a few windows are built in. Curtains can separate rooms indoors and it is quite dark inside. Furniture is rare as one sits and sleeps on the earth-packed floor. Bure building is a traditional skill where sons learn from their fathers. The building is cheaply made and can easily be built and also re-built after a storm. Due to its natural

Wild Weather

173

Figure 10.1 Bure of Na Ututu, a sketch done in the early 1800s, in: Thomas Williams, James Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, edited by George Stringer Rowe, Boston: Congregational publishing society, 1871, 158. Public domain, https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Bure_of_Na_Utuutu_(Boston._Congregational_Publishing_Society,_1871). jpg, 20 May 2019.

materials, the house is strong and can withstand hurricanes. The method is not to totally protect the inner from the outer but to rather filter and minimize the winds so that they blow mildly through the building. The tameless rough wild storm is received and accepted. The wild becomes a bit less wild indoors than outdoors. The Fiji bure reminds us of the most essential architecture in general. The beginnings of all human architecture are closely linked to weather. The deepest driving force to build is obviously to establish a shelter from the changing forces of weather. Architecture aims at building environments that can cope with the wild. Buildings achieve an environment in which the human body is able to dwell, in balance with the changing and sometimes threatening forces of nature. Weather therefore is at the original core of architecture. ‘Every constructed structure that serves the protection from weather is architecture,’ Heinrich Klotz strikingly formulates.45 The oldest forms of architecture have probably been a kind of weather roof in the Stone Age where one raised a tent with branches, which were created to find shelter from rain and storm. The origin of architecture thus lies in the need to afford the

174

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 10.2 Reconstructed Mesolithic round-house. A replica of a 10,000-year-old round-house which was excavated from a cliff-top site near Howick, Northumberland, UK. Photo © Andrew Curtis, 2005. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Licence. To view a copy of this licence, visit https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.

human body and community shelter from weather conditions in the environment. And as Stone Age populations most likely lived in a spiritual universe where weather alteration was connected to the power of spiritual forces, we can in all probability also regard the oldest vernacular architecture as a human activity that is at its core connected to both weather and religion.46

Wild weather wisdom Coping with the wild, both the natural and anthropogenic wild, seems to have become one of the most challenging demands in a future characterized by climatic change, global warming, unpredictable wild weather and states of disaster. Poetizing, painting and building in synergy with the wild appear hereby as a significantly promising mode of creative adaptation. Religious and spiritual support to accept the wild forces of altering weather in the atmosphere might catalyse such a strategy in fruitful ways. Regarding wild weather rather as a gift might become a forceful method of culturally encountering the demands of our common future on our common Earth.

Wild Weather

175

Continuing our introductory reflection on the wild as an open Suchraum and place of self-experience in the mirror of the world, nature, weather and especially wild weather can offer, as we have seen, boundless possibilities. The mystery of the power of atmospheric alteration and weather’s near total unpredictability exposes the human being to a state of being far away from the modern technical makeability of everything. Wild West Winds, either from the North Atlantic in autumn, snowstorms at sea, or the Pacific hurricane, assist to make us aware of life’s vulnerability. Confronting one’s body and soul to these forces allows a kind of catharsis but also a kind of essential consciousness about what being alive really means. It does not do much good perceiving the hurricane on the Fijis as an enemy to fight; rather, one should view the storm as a gift and a friend that will come and pass by. Not protecting from the wild but encountering the wild as a force within can make sense and assist survival. To what degree such wisdom and its appropriate practices can be sustained in the on-going transformation from modes of natural wild to anthropogenic wild weather has to be explored in an uncertain future. Our images of machine demons, weather spirits, God’s creative and redemptive power and the life-giving Spirit breathing all kinds of wind will undoubtedly play a larger role in our search for practices of creatively adapting to a changing climate. If reflecting and exploring wild weather – artistically, architecturally and spiritually – can enhance the reader’s openness to enter a new Suchraum for experiencing being at the mercy, I am satisfied as author. The wild bog within us might then create new possibilities and grow together with surrounding weather lands. The wild within us might then unfold in synergy with the wild surrounding us, in analogy to the storm blowing through the House of Spirits and thereby breathing new life and compassionate awareness. Might wild weather around and within us in such a view then assist us to reconcile tamed and untamed, becoming one with the vigour of life? How appears the life-giving Spirit, who brings new just and sustainable times, in the forces of such wild weather?

Notes 1 2

3

4

Simon Schama, Der Traum von der Wildnis: Natur als Imagination, München: Kindler 1996 (Landscape and Memory, 1995), 16. One should of course be aware of the difference between the wild and the wilderness, between a state of being and a place. Nevertheless, one can interpret the image of the wilderness as a place where one lives in the wild and wildly (free, untamed, fiercely, unordered). Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 30 August 1856, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. http://thoreau.library.ucsb.edu/writings_journals_pdfs/TMS21newTR.pdf. Cf. Schama op. cit., 618. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort, 1823, 306: ‘Der Mensch kennt nur sich selbst, insofern er die Welt kennt, die er nur in sich und sich nur in ihr gewahr wird’. In: Zur Naturwissenschaft überhaupt, besonders zur Morphologie: Erfahrung, Betrachtung, Folgerung, durch Lebensereignisse verbunden, Hanser: München 1989 (1817–1824), 306–309.

176 5

6 7

8

9

10

11

12 13

14

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered ‘Es gibt ihn nicht, den objektiven, unverfälschten Blick auf die Wildnis’. George Steinmann and Sarah Schmidt, Suchraum Wildnis: Positionsbestimmung künstlerischer Forschung, Ein integratives Forschungsprojekt in Kooperation mit der Hochschule der Künste Bern, Basel: Transfusionen 2013, 19. Ibid., 19. On the flux of wind and weather cf. Ingold who reminds us that we are alive in an open world: ‘In this mingling, as we live and breathe, the wind, light and moisture of the sky bind with the substances of the earth in the continual forging of a way through the tangle of lifelines that comprise the land’. Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, Abingdon: Routledge 2011, 115. Cf. Sigurd Bergmann, ‘The Raw Within: Tracing the Raw in Human Life through Bricks, Roy Andersson’s You, The Living and Ernst Barlach’s Beggar on Crutches’, in Solveig Bøe, Hege Charlotte Faber, and Brit Strandhagen (eds.), Raw: Architectural Engagements with Nature, Farnham: Ashgate, 167–183, and ‘With-In: Towards an aesth/ethics of prepositions’. In: Sigurd Bergmann and Forrest Clingerman (eds.), Arts, Religion and the Environment: Exploring Nature’s Texture, (Studies in Environmental Humanities Vol. 6), Leiden: Brill Rodopi 2018, 17–42. According to Shelley’s note, ‘this poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions’. In: The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume 3, London: E. Moxon, Son, and Co 1878, 53. Cf. Sigurd Bergmann, Creation Set Free: The Spirit as Liberator of Nature (Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age 4), Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 2005. Hildegard von Bingen talks in a rhetoric innovation about God’s greenness, viriditas, in order to depict the Life-Giver Spirit’s greening power as the power of life. The term is used frequently in Hildegard’s work, often to circumscribe and address God’s nature, for example as ‘O nobilissima viriditas’ (O noblest green viridity). In: ‘Responsory for Virgins’ (D 165r-v, R 471rb-va, Scivias III.13.7b), Scivias, Pars III, ed. by Adelgvndis Führkötter in cooperation with Angela Carlevaris, (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaeualis XLIII A), Turnhout. 1978. Cf. Mary Grey, ‘Creation and Salvation: Female Mediaeval Mystics’, 85. In: Ernst M. Conradie (ed.), Creation and Salvation: A Mosaic of Essays on Selected Classic Christian Theologians (Studies in Religion and the Environment/Studien zur Religion und Umwelt Vol. 5), BerlinMünster-Wien-Zürich-London: LIT 2012, 83–97. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821, published 1840. In: Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd ed. New York: Norton 2002, 535. Interpreters have sometimes associated to Shiva and Vishna in the Hindu triad, where Shelley’s wind unites both but not Brahma the Creator. Richard Harter Fogle, ‘The Imaginal Design of of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” ’. In: Shiv K. Kumar (ed.), British Romantic Poets: Critical Assessments, New Delhi: Atlantic 2002, 202–209, 208. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc, Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni’. In: The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (text derived from the Oxford Edition of 1914), edited with textual notes by Thomas Hutchinson, The University of Adelaide Library, Chapter 21 Poems Written in 2016. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/shelley/ percy_bysshe/s54cp/volume21.html#section110l, 20 May 2019.

Wild Weather

177

15 Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press 2004, 162. 16 ‘Faith’ should here by no means understood in the sense of natural theology. Rigby, 162, asserts that ‘to be truly reconciled with nature’ for Shelley ‘necessitates the abandonment of all assumptions about its divine origins, meaning, and destiny, in favor of an attitude of awe-filled uncertainty’. 17 Cf. Ashton Nichols, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 25–26. 18 Jennifer Wagner, ‘A Figure of Resistance: The Visionary Reader in Shelley’s Sonetts and the “West Wind” Ode’, Southwest Review 77, No. 1, Winter 1992, 109–111, quoted in: Harold Bloom (ed.) Percy Bysshe Shelley, New York: Infobase Publishing 2001, 58. 19 Tragically it was also a death place when Shelley drowned, only 30 years old, after his sailing boat overturned in a storm in the Gulf of La Spezia in 1822. 20 Ian Lancashire, ‘Commentary’: https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/ode-west-wind, 2 May 2019. 21 About the significance of imagining the end cf. Sigurd Bergmann (ed.), Eschatology as Imagining the End: Faith Between Hope and Despair (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies), London: Routledge 2018. 22 Luke Donahue, ‘Romantic Survival and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” ’, European Romantic Review 25, No. 2, 2014, 219–242, doi: 10.1080/10509585.2014.882051. 23 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821, published 1840. In: Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd ed. New York: Norton 2002, 535. 24 Cf. Sigurd Bergmann, ‘With-In: Towards an Aesth/ethics of Prepositions’, in: Sigurd Bergmann and Forrest Clingerman (eds.), Arts, Religion and the Environment: Exploring Nature’s Texture (Studies in Environmental Humanities Vol. 6), Leiden: Brill Rodopi 2018, 17–42. 25 Donahue op. cit., 221. 26 Cf. the opening of the Book of Revelation of St. John the Divine in the Bible, 1:3–18. 27 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc, Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni’, in: The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (text derived from the Oxford Edition of 1914), edited with textual notes by Thomas Hutchinson, The University of Adelaide Library, Chapter 21 Poems Written in 2016. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/shelley/ percy_bysshe/s54cp/volume21.html#section1101, 20 May 2019. 28 In Turner’s own words, according to Graham Reynolds, Turner, London: Thames & Hudson, 1969, reprint 2000, 190. In the catalogue for the Academy’s exhibition 1842 Turner wrote: ‘Snowstorm – steam-boat off a harbour’s mouth making signals in shallow water, and going by the lead. The author was in this storm on the night the Ariel left Harwich.’ 29 Cf. Seibold who analyses Turner’s navigating in between abstraction and naturalism considering the detailed weather phenomena depictured in his works. His meteorological observations, for example of volcanic dust in the stratosphere, are deeply integrated in his paintings’ iconography: Seibold’s circumscription of Turner therefore as painter of weather is striking. Ursula Seibold, ‘Meteorology in Turner’s Paintings’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 15, 1, 1990, 77–86, doi: 10.1179/030801890789797707. Large volcanic eruptions took place in Turner’s lifetime and might have impacted on his painting, especially through the experience of a specific twilight that was caused by the dust in the air. Cf. Götz Hoeppe, ‘Himmelslicht: Spiegelbild des Erdklimas’, fundiert: Das Wissenschaftsmagazin der FU Berlin, https:// www.fu-berlin.de/presse/publikationen/fundiert/archiv/2003_01/03_01_hoeppe/ index.html, 11 February 2015.

178

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

30 Roters, 64f.: ‘Die göttliche Allmacht verkörpert sich im Wetter selbst, an die Stelle der anekdotischen Schilderung vom Einwirken Gottes auf das Menschenschicksal ist die meteorologische getreten, in der das Wehen der Natur als der Mantel einer unbegreiflichen und unvorhersehbaren Schicksalsbewegung faßbar wird, der wir hilflos ausgeliefert sind’. Eberhard Roters, Jenseits von Arkadien: Die romantische Landschaft, Köln: DuMont 1995. 31 Brian Lukacher, ‘Turner’s ghost in the machine: technology, textuality, and the 1842 Snow Storm’, Word & Image 6, 2, 1990, 119–137, 120. 32 On ‘the great acceleration’ see Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney and Cornelia Ludwig, ‘The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1, 2015, 81–98. 33 On the history of demonic machines taking over the power of the world, see Szerszynski’s gripping and provocative narration. Bron Szerszynski, ‘The Twilight of the Machines’. In: Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann and Bronislaw Szerszynski (eds.), Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, Farnham: Ashgate 2015, 241–257. 34 Cf. Sigurd Bergmann, ‘“Millions of Machines Are Already Roaring”: Fetishized Technology Encountered By the Life-Giving Spirit’. In: Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred, 115–137. 35 Simon D. Donner, ‘Domain of the Gods: An Editorial Essay’, Climatic Change 85, 2007, 231–236, 231. 36 For a detailed analysis of ‘unusual weather’ in Fiji as an effect of El Nino 1982–1983 and the respones, see Tim Bayliss-Smith, Richard Bedford, Harold Brookfield, Marc Latham, Islands, Islanders and the World: The Colonial and Post-colonial Experience of Eastern Fiji, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006, 90–101. 37 Simon D. Donner, ‘Making the Climate a Part of the Human World’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 92, 10, 2011, 1297–1302, 1298. 38 https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/wcc-programmes/justicediakonia-and-responsibility-for-creation/climate-change-water/pacific-churchleaders-statement, 3 May 2019. 39 John D’Arcy May, Christus Initiator: Theologie im Pazifik (Theologie Interkulturell 4), Düsseldorf: Patmos 1990, 42. 40 Ibid., 96f. 41 Ibid., 104. 42 Cf. Will Steffen et al., ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene’, PNAS , 14 August 2018, 115 (33), 8252–8259. 43 UNESCO Office Apia, International Information and Networking Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region, Traditional Knowledge for Adapting to Climate Change: Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Pacific, UNESCO 2013, 16–17, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000225313, 3 May 2019. 44 Williams, op. cit., 84. 45 Heinrich Klotz, Von der Urhütte zum Wolkenkratzer, München: Prestel, 1991: 18. 46 Paul Oliver, Built to Meet Needs: Cultural Issues in Vernacular Architecture, Oxford and Burlington MA: Architectural Press, 2006.

Literature Bayliss-Smith, Tim, Richard Bedford, Harold Brookfield, and Marc Latham. Islands, Islanders and the World: The Colonial and Post-colonial Experience of Eastern Fiji. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Wild Weather

179

Bergmann, Sigurd. Creation Set Free: The Spirit as Liberator of Nature. Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age 4. Grand Rapids, MI : Eerdmans 2005. Bergmann, Sigurd. Eschatology as Imagining the End: Faith Between Hope and Despair. Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies. London: Routledge, 2018. Bergmann, Sigurd. ‘The raw within: Tracing the raw in human life through bricks, Roy Andersson’s You, The Living and Ernst Barlach’s Beggar on Crutches’. In Raw. Architectural Engagements with Nature, edited by Solveig Bøe, Hege Charlotte Faber and Brit Strandhagen, 167–183. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Bergmann, Sigurd. ‘With-in: Towards an aesth/ethics of prepositions’. In Arts, Religion and the Environment: Exploring Nature’s Texture, edited by Sigurd Bergmann and Forrest Clingerman. Studies in Environmental Humanities, Vol. 6. 17–42. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2018. Bloom, Harold. Percy Bysshe Shelley. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2001. Donahue, Luke. ‘Romantic survival and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” ’. European Romantic Review 25, no. 2 (2014). doi: 10.1080/10509585.2014.882051 Donner, Simon D. ‘Domain of the gods: An editorial essay’. Climatic Change 85 (2007): 231–236. Donner, Simon D. ‘Making the climate a part of the human world’. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 92, no. 10 (2011): 1297–1302. Fogle, Richard Harter. ‘The imaginal design of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” ’. In British Romantic Poets: Critical Assessments, edited by Shiv K. Kumar, 202–209. New Delhi: Atlantic 2002. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. ‘Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort’. In Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens: Zur Naturwissenschaft überhaupt, besonders zur Morphologie: Erfahrung, Betrachtung, Folgerung, durch Lebensereignisse verbunden, edited by Hans J. Becker, Karl Richter and Herbert Göpfert. München: Hanser, 1989. Grey, Mary. ‘Creation and salvation: Female mediaeval mystics’. In Creation and Salvation: A Mosaic of Essays on Selected Classic Christian Theologians, edited by Ernst M. Conradie. Studies in Religion and the Environment/ Studien zur Religion und Umwelt Vol. 5, 83–97. Berlin-Münster-Wien-Zürich-London: LIT, 2012. Hoeppe, Götz. ‘Himmelslicht: Spiegelbild des Erdklimas’. fundiert: Das Wissenschaftsmagazin der FU Berlin (2003). https://www.fu-berlin.de/presse/ publikationen/fundiert/archiv/2003_01/03_01_hoeppe/index.html Hildegard, Adelgundis Führkötter, and Angela Carlevaris, eds. Hildegardis Scivias. 3 3, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaeualis XLIII A. Turnhout: Brepols, 1978. Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Klotz, Heinrich. Von der Urhütte zum Wolkenkratzer. München: Prestel, 1991. Lukacher, Brian. ‘Turner’s ghost in the machine: Technology, textuality, and the 1842 snow storm’. Word & Image 6, no. 2 (1990): 119–137. May, John D’Arcy. Christus Initiator: Theologie im Pazifik. Theologie Interkulturell 4. Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1990. Nichols, Ashton. Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Oliver, Paul. Built to Meet Needs: Cultural Issues in Vernacular Architecture. Oxford and Burlington MA : Architectural Press, 2006. Reynolds, Graham. Turner. London: Thames & Hudson, 1969. 2000. Rigby, Kate. Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press 2004.

180

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Roters, Eberhard. Jenseits von Arkadien: Die romantische Landschaft. Köln: DuMont, 1995. Schama, Simon. Der Traum von der Wildnis: Natur als Imagination. [Landscape and Memory, 1995]. München: Kindler, 1996 Seibold, Ursula. ‘Meteorology in Turner’s paintings’. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 15, no. 1 (1990): 77–86. doi: 10.1179/030801890789797707. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. ‘A Defense of Poetry’. In Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2002. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. ‘Mont Blanc, lines written in the Vale of Chamouni’. In The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (text derived from the Oxford Edition of 1914), edited by Thomas Hutchinson. The University of Adelaide Library, 2016. https:// ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/shelley/percy_bysshe/s54cp/volume21.html#section110l. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ In The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: E. Moxon, Son, and Co, 1878. Steffen, Will, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diane Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes, et al. ‘Trajectories of the earth system in the Anthropocene’. PNAS 115, no. 33 (2018): 8252–8259. Steffen, Will, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney, and Cornelia Ludwig. ‘The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The great acceleration’. The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 81–98. Steinmann, George, and Sarah Schmidt. Suchraum Wildnis: Positionsbestimmung künstlerischer Forschung, Ein integratives Forschungsprojekt in Kooperation mit der Hochschule der Künste Bern. Basel: Transfusionen 2013. Szerszynski, Bron. ‘The twilight of the machines’. In Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann and Bronislav Szerszynski, 241–257. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Thoreau, Henry David. Journal, 30 August 1856. Princeton 1981. UNESCO Office Apia, International Information and Networking Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region. Traditional knowledge for adapting to climate change: safeguarding intangible cultural heritage in the Pacific. UNESCO, 2013. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000225313. Wagner, Jennifer. ‘A figure of resistance: The visionary reader in Shelley’s sonnets and the “West Wind” Ode’. Southwest Review 77, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 109–111. Williams, Thomas, and James Calvert. Fiji and the Fijians. Edited by George Stringer Rowe. Boston: Congregational publishing society, 1871.

11

Watery Wilds: Pond Swimming and Protest on Hampstead Heath Jessica J. Lee

Beyond a screen of trees on the eastern edge of Hampstead Heath in North London, the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond sits encircled by meadows. It is lined with clay and silt, with copper-toned water that feels like velvet in summer and cools like glass in winter. Oaks grow up from its edges, willows arch from the shore, and coots, mandarin ducks and kingfishers find a home near the water (Plate 12). Beneath the surface, pikes and eels dart unnoticed beneath the swimmers who have traced long circles through the pond since its opening as a bathing pond in 1926. In early 2015, the City of London Corporation (CoLC), which manages the Heath, began work on the ‘Hampstead Heath Ponds Project’, a multi-year dam renovation targeting dammed ponds across the site, intended to reduce the risk of flood damage to the areas surrounding the Heath.1 The project followed a hydrological assessment carried out in 2010 and subsequent years of consultation between CoLC and local community stakeholders, which resulted in no consensus on the extent of work to be carried out.2 As such, when the CoLC began clearance work prior to construction in January 2015, community protests were still ongoing. The same month, I began a three-month period of participant observation fieldwork with swimmers at the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond as part of my doctoral research into the Heath’s environmental history, aesthetics and centrality to debates around public space in Britain.3 The pond had recently seen a boost in attendance as the ‘wild swimming’ movement – advocating swimming in natural waters, typically lakes, rivers and seas – gained traction and popularity across the UK.4 As new swimmers ventured into the icy waters in winter, I carried out interviews with ten of the pond’s long-time swimmers, while taking regular dips alongside them myself. Through these interviews, archival research on the pond’s history, and through regular swimming myself, I built a picture of how local swimmers forged connections with the pond and Heath more widely, and how their aesthetic appreciation of the site and its perceived wildness remained central to their resistance against the Ponds Project. Drawing on the ethnographic work of Anna Tsing and the environmental aesthetic work of Arnold Berleant, among others, I will explore the ways in which the Ponds Project and the weight of its ecological, hydrological and engineering assessments 181

182

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

came to bear in a conflict with Ladies’ Pond swimmers’ aesthetic appreciation of the pond’s ‘wildness’. I situate the swimmers’ protests to the construction amidst historical conservation battles for the Heath’s preservation and within the Heath’s long history as a site of conflict over public space, in which ecological and aesthetic iterations of wildness and naturalness, too, come into conflict. Ultimately, I argue, it is through such ‘friction’, to borrow a term from Tsing, that visions for the site’s land management have historically emerged, and through such conflicts that notions of wildness, nature and public space are continually re-articulated and shaped.

History, aesthetics and the context of conservation battles on the Heath Hampstead Heath sits five miles north of the City of London, spanning over 800 acres and straddling the London Boroughs of Barnet and Camden. The hilly, northern stretches of the Heath sit atop a sandy ridge, while the eastern and southern fields rest on a bed of London clay.5 Though for many centuries the Heath was characterized by acidic grassland, bogs and rugged heathland, the cessation of agriculture and industry on the site, contemporary conservation measures, and its use as a recreation ground have enabled the encroachment of forest and hedgerows onto what was predominantly grassland.6 The River Fleet runs silently into London, now channelled beneath the ground, but on the Heath the two streams that mark its source can be seen bound within the Highgate and Hampstead pond chains (see Figure 11.1). The ponds were formed

Figure 11.1 Ponds on Hampstead Heath.

Watery Wilds: Pond Swimming and Protest on Hampstead Heath

183

between 1692 and 1704, when the Hampstead Water Company incorporated and developed the series of reservoirs to secure drinking water for the region.7 In the western Hampstead chain of ponds, the Mixed Bathing Pond has been used since at least the early nineteenth century. In the Highgate chain, the Highgate Men’s Pond officially opened for swimming in 1893 and became the site of regular conflict over access to swimming areas for men and women. In the early twentieth century, women seeking a modest site for swimming were granted access to the Men’s Pond one day per week, until demand led to the opening of the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond in 1926.8 While the Heath today is a valuable recreation site and green space for Londoners, its use over the past three centuries has varied dramatically, from estate land used for estovers (fuel and timber) by copyhold tenants nearby, as a site for washerwomen to lay Londoners’ laundry to dry (on the coconut-scented gorse once common across the hills), to a medicinal spa, public fairground, sandpit, claypit and brickyard, to agricultural grazing land and greenspace. Through those changes, aesthetic visions for the Heath have likewise shifted. Around the time the Fleet’s streams were channelled for the water supply, chalybeate springs – with iron-rich waters filtered through the Heath’s sand and clay – were discovered in the region, leading to the development of a local spa industry that saw its heyday in the decades after 1698, by which time Hampstead’s ‘therapeutic’ waters were being bottled and sold in flasks around London. While the spas at Bath and Tunbridge Wells rose in popularity, Hampstead too transformed from a sleepy agricultural village north of the city into a popular destination for ‘taking the waters’.9 Physicians advised fresh air and walks on the Heath as parallel treatments to the waters themselves.10 The quiet village began to be developed, with dance halls and villas springing up, until, by the mid-eighteenth century, the site’s reputation began to shift. The Heath’s popularity amongst its wealthy visitors had likewise attracted highwaymen, who preyed upon the carriages travelling the wooded roads to and from the Northern Heights, as the ridge between Hampstead and Highgate was commonly known.11 In the late eighteenth century, the Mansfield Estate at Kenwood was heavily redesigned by garden designer Humphry Repton, who envisioned the landscape as a picturesque idyll, complete with soft shrubbery and rolling hills tended by grazing sheep.12 This northern section of the present-day Heath – near which the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond is located – was planted heavily with ornamentals and screen trees with which the view towards London might be framed. As such, the working landscape of the Estate was put to purpose as aesthetic ornament. From the early nineteenth century in particular, the Heath likewise began to capture the imaginations of poets and painters, being a relatively pastoral landscape within reach of London. Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to live in Highgate in 1816, and regularly walked the Heath and the area around Millfield, on the eastern borders.13 Around 1819, John Constable began spending his time in Hampstead, painting the then-bare hillsides, ponds and clay soil.14 Leigh Hunt and his sister-in-law, the gardening writer Elizabeth Kent, lived at the Vale of Health, and throughout the 1820s gathered a range of Romantic poets, most of whom regularly walked the Heath.15 John Keats lived intermittently in Hampstead and Kentish Town, near to the Heath, in the years before his death.16 As London burst at its borders, the green and open spaces

184

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

of the Heath became central to artistic and literary visions of nature in proximity to the city. By the late-1820s, the demand for housing stock for the city came into conflict with the Heath’s rising popularity as a green space.17 The decades that followed would see the first major conflict to force an articulation of how the Heath ought to be managed, and would see it secured for the public after lengthy legal battles. In 1821, Thomas Maryon Wilson, the eighth Baronet of Hampstead, came into possession of much of the land presently known as East Heath, West Heath and Sandy Heath (see Figure 11.2). The terms of his inheritance stated that Wilson could neither build upon nor sell the land at Hampstead, which he deemed ideal for re-development as a complex of villas.18 In 1829, he sought legal recourse to change the terms of his inheritance, introducing a Bill to Parliament seeking to enclose the lands used in common by copyhold tenants and requesting permission to grant building leases of up to ninety years.19 Wilson also sought to grant licences for sand, gravel and clay extraction, to feed the city’s growing need for bricks and building materials. All would have progressed smoothly had Wilson not explicitly listed the Heath amongst the land he sought to redevelop.20 Copyholders and local residents rapidly raised opposition to Wilson’s claims, sparking outcry in the London newspapers, which accused him of ‘choking up and suffocating the prettiest, the healthiest, the most picturesque spot for miles about London, with a coarse, unsightly mass of bricks and mortar’.21 The battle carried on – with amendments and the introduction of new Bills to Parliament – over the course of the next thirty years, through a series of legal hearings,

Figure 11.2 Manor of Hampstead c. 1829 (solid line) with present-day Hampstead Heath borders (dotted lines).

Watery Wilds: Pond Swimming and Protest on Hampstead Heath

185

public campaigns and articles in the press. As it became clear to Wilson that his efforts to lease the land for redevelopment would be stalled, he sought to make use of it himself, attempting to despoil the land’s aesthetic value, on which much of the opposition to his Bill rested.22 Sandy Heath was excavated extensively, such that Lord Eversley, the Chairman of the Commons Preservation Society, would describe the extraction as intensive ‘to the extent of destroying its herbage and heather. This digging for sand was, in fact, being carried out to a degree that threatened to interfere with the natural features of Hampstead Heath. Dangerous pits appeared in all directions, and the surface of the Heath was most seriously injured’.23 East Heath was dug for gravel and bricks, and the foundations of a complex of villas – financed by Wilson himself – were erected. The despoliation of the Heath was likewise aided by the bank holiday fairs that took place on East Heath from the 1850s, themselves ‘turned to account’ by Wilson, who charged fairground tariffs. The popularity of this grassy stretch for fairs – attracting at times up to 100,000 visitors – meant this once rich in acidic grassland species and gorse became a vastly transformed landscape.24 As such, the pastoral Heath and much of its sparse grassland flora in the mid-nineteenth century was reshaped by a confluence of industry, redevelopment and enormous public use. But Wilson’s attempt to despoil the Heath backfired: the extent of sand digging, brick-making, and trampling of the fields only furthered the claims of copyholders and local residents, who argued that should Wilson be granted building leases, he would surely escalate the rapid destruction of the Heath. The Heath was thus central to early efforts to preserve common spaces in a rapidly industrializing Britain. J. C. Loudon’s foundational text, ‘Hints for Breathing Places’, which went on to spur the garden cities movement, was written in direct response to efforts to enclose the Heath and other common lands around London.25 Over the subsequent decades, as more and more commons came under threat, the opposition crystallized a wide range of actors in favour of the Heath’s preservation: from a government Select Committee on Open Spaces, through to Charles Dickens and other writers for Household Words who wrote regularly of the Heath’s demise, through to campaigners like Octavia Hill, John Stuart Mill, Robert Hunter and William Morris.26 The Commons Preservation Society (which went on to join with the National Footpaths Society to become the Open Spaces Society, still active today) formed in 1865, amidst campaigns for the Heath and other commons under threat, in an attempt to secure space for recreation for the growing urban population.27 Having spanned more than four decades, the struggle to protect and acquire Hampstead Heath was a landmark battle in Britain’s conservation history. In 1869, the case came to a fortuitous close when Wilson died, and his brother – widely seen to be more agreeable – negotiated the sale of Hampstead Heath to the Metropolitan Board of Works. In 1871, the Hampstead Heath Act was passed, and the public acquired the 220-acre swathe of land that would form the foundation of Hampstead Heath as we know it today. This nineteenth-century struggle to protect Hampstead Heath and the subsequent debates about how to manage the newly acquired open space – in opposition to sanddigging, brick-making, gardening and enclosure of the land – enrolled a particular aesthetic vision of the Heath’s landscape. As Octavia Hill put it in 1890, ‘not the formality of the London park, not the wide roads, not the kerbstones, not the

186

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

gas-lamps, not the levelled footpaths, but something of a freer space, where the wild flowers and meadow slopes may be seen in their natural condition’.28 The Heath was viewed as a semi-rural idyll near to the city, but not of the city, despite the fact that the preceding century of use by Londoners had vastly reshaped the Heath itself, and the very material of the Heath, in the form of sand, clay and gravel, had gone into building the nearby city. By the time the Heath was secured for the public, it was in enormous disrepair: the sand pits had entirely denuded Sandy Heath of herbage, leaving large lunar pits and long open vistas. There was unfinished and abandoned construction, not to mention a gravel yard, scattered over East Heath. The acidic grassland and gorse near the fairground had been trampled out. After the earlier popularity of the Heath during the spa boom and fairground site, during which the Heath transitioned from being actively used both agriculturally and as a natural resource (for water and minerals), the acquisition for the public meant the site would primarily be used for recreation. The 1871 Hampstead Heath Act stated that whomsoever was entrusted with the Heath’s care shall ‘preserve as far as may be the natural aspect and state of the Heath’.29 It was not to be beautified or gardened: rather, ‘wildness’ and ‘naturalness’, taking many different forms throughout the ensuing decades, became the watchwords by which the land was managed. Exactly what such a landscape aesthetic might entail was a matter for debate. Visions for the Heath shifted dramatically and frequently. Upon acquiring the barren landscape left by Wilson, the Metropolitan Board of Works set about restoring fields and hedgerows, marking paths and planting ornamental trees and flowers, much to the dismay of those seeking something rather wilder. In 1889, the newly formed London County Council took over management of the Heath and likewise continued such ‘parkification’. But the Second World War saw the Heath dug up once more for sand bags during the Blitz, and its fields turned over for military drills. While sheep grazing had long kept encroachment of scrub and woodland at bay, the London County Council oversaw the end of grazing on the Heath in the 1950s. Around the same time, the virus myxomatosis, which had in previous decades been considered a means for controlling rabbit populations, spread across the UK, wiping out enormous numbers of rabbits, who also kept the Heath’s grasses short.30 Without steady grazing, the fields and hedgerows grew out long and full, and scrub gave way to seedling trees at the borders of the woodland. This dealt a final blow to the site’s ‘heathland’: heather and other low-growing, shade-intolerant species, most of which had already disappeared under footfall, struggled against the spread of fast-growing birch, sycamore, and turkey oak. But by the 1970s, locals had grown accustomed to these shaggy fields and spreading woodlands, a quintessential ‘rural landscape emptied of rural labour’, as Raymond Williams once wrote of the English pastoral.31 The Greater London Council (GLC), then charged with care of the Heath, became embroiled in a further battle over how exactly to manage the site. In late-1977 and 1978, park staff brought over from other sites managed by the GLC set about clearing scrub across the Heath, mowing the fields and cutting back growth, particularly where birch saplings had grown over and dried up the Heath’s few remaining bogs.32 The public outcry was swift but complex: some local residents decried the indiscriminate clearances, while others argued that such

Watery Wilds: Pond Swimming and Protest on Hampstead Heath

187

clearances were necessary but required a trained hand, in the form of specially trained ‘Heath keepers’. The debate cut to the heart of conservation itself, as its actors diverged on whether appropriate conservation of the Heath meant restoration to a much barer, nineteenth-century vision of itself, or whether it should remain the wild and unkempt idyll it had become in the twentieth century, with forest succession held static through measured maintenance.33 The conflict raged for two years, eventually resulting in the creation of the first Hampstead Heath Management Plan, a multi-year ‘vision’ for how the site ought to be landscaped, a practice of negotiation and re-articulation that continues to this day. Ultimately, shifting aesthetic notions inform and continue to shape management of the Heath: from the eighteenth-century picturesque garden style that shaped Kenwood, through the Heath’s use as a common, its despoliation under Wilson, subsequent ‘parkification’ in the late nineteenth century, or twentieth-century debates around what constitutes appropriate conservation. The many incarnations of the site have been born largely from conflict: between landowners and tenants, between the industrializing city and the need for green space, and between competing visions of conservation in efforts to maintain the landscape in its ‘natural aspect’. As such, articulations for how the site can and should be managed have emerged through the deeply interwoven history of the site’s aesthetics and its legacy as a site of conflict, protest and conservation battles. In more recent years, these conflicts re-emerged: in the battle for the ponds and the vision of wildness they represent.

The Ponds Project The Hampstead Heath Ponds Project emerged amidst a growing national concern about flooding and the risks presented by increasing rainfall. In 2010 the City of London Corporation (CoLC), the present-day custodians of the Heath, commissioned a hydrological assessment of the site’s ponds and dams.34 In 2011, they announced that work would need to be carried out to ensure the dams, which had not been upgraded since their construction at the turn of the eighteenth century, would meet existing flood safety requirements under the 1975 Reservoirs Act. The CoLC, with Surreybased engineering firm Atkins, determined that the project required extensive work on the dams at the Model Boating Pond, the Ladies’ Pond, the Men’s Pond, the Mixed Bathing Pond, the Viaduct Pond, among others, in order to cope with the ‘probable maximum flood’ risk of a 1 in a 400,000-year storm, a 1 in a 10,000-year storm, and a 1 in a 1,000-year storm.35 They proposed to raise the dams at the Model Boating Ponds, Men’s Pond, Highgate No. 1 Pond and the Mixed Bathing Pond, to construct grassy spillways that would mitigate flood risk at some of the ponds, as well as to carry out reinforcement work and other interventions to secure the dams and improve water quality (Figure 11.3). The work would require heavy vehicles, cranes, construction fencing and crews, as well as the closure of a number of the Heath’s ponds and fields, some of which would be used as borrow pits for clay to use in construction.36 They sought to meet the legal requirement for construction ‘whilst preserving the natural aspect and state of the Heath as far as possible’.37

188

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 11.3 Areas of the Heath most impacted by the Ponds Project (marked with lines).

An advisory group was formed from a variety of local stakeholders. The City of London argued that while the work was intensive, ‘the impact on the Heath will be as formal as necessary but as informal as possible’.38 Specifically, as Atkins indicated in a report, they sought to maintain the ‘visual rural/countryside landscape’ that Heath users had become familiar with over the past century.39 The proposals iterated yet another vision for the Heath’s landscape: neither the industrial, dug-up appearance of the nineteenth century (indeed, that seemed to be particularly undesirable to locals), nor the twenty-first century equivalent with diggers and cranes. Rather, the goal postconstruction was to restore the Heath to a vision of a pastoral landscape, without it being a working agricultural site, or as one swimmer told me, ‘a sort of rural analogue in the middle of the city’. The vision was to be maintained and static, with grasses mown sporadically and in rotation, scrub clearance to prevent forest succession at Parliament Hill Fields and West Meadow, and dead hedges and other Heath-sourced material instead of formal fencing. Atkins thus proposed to mitigate the impact of heavy construction on the Heath using mixed-seed grasses on the spillways, digging clay from borrow pits on the Heath itself to construct the dams (as the ponds were constructed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and instating strict regulation on the use of heavy machinery. After lengthy consultation, however, in 2013 the CoLC and the Heath and Hampstead Society, a local conservation group charged with advocating for the Heath, published a joint statement: they could not come to an agreement on how and to what

Watery Wilds: Pond Swimming and Protest on Hampstead Heath

189

extent such works should take place.40 They lacked a shared vision for the site. Local conservation organizations and the pond swimmers’ organizations in particular (both the Highgate Men’s Pond Association and the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association, or KLPA for short) thus came together under the name ‘Dam Nonsense’ to protest the works during the subsequent years of consultation and planning. While filing legal challenges to the project, campaigners also gathered on the Heath with placards and flyers to oppose the construction. Of particular concern for local stakeholders was the reoccurring question of how the Heath might be ‘preserved in its natural aspect’.41 Despite their efforts, following years of opposition and protest, the project was given planning permission and scheduled to begin in 2015. The Ponds Project thus became a further chapter in the long history of conflicts over the Heath’s aesthetic vision and management.

Wild waters In January, 2015, in the weeks before the dam works were set to commence, I embarked on participant observation fieldwork at the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond with the intention of examining aesthetic experiences of Hampstead Heath amongst the winter swimmers. I began winter swimming with the women, interviewing a group of fifteen swimmers to explore ideas of beauty, landscape and nature on Hampstead Heath. Given the timing, the Ponds Project became central to our discussions. By early February, tree and scrub clearance had begun around the Ladies’ Pond, preparing the southern shore for dam renovations over the subsequent weeks. Dam Nonsense protesters gathered on the morning work was set to commence, launching a small and final protest against the project. With planning permission in hand, however, crews began stripping the shoreline and meadow, reserving most of the trees for building material to be used around the Heath as dead hedges and fencing. But one felled tree, an old oak, a lifeguard named Jane asked to keep. Jane was a bodger, a self-described ‘tree artist’, skilled at turning raw wood into decorative furniture and sculpture. She had it in mind to use the old oak to build a bench for the pond. One rainy day, after launching myself into the icy water for a brief swim, I sat by the pond to watch Jane at work on a slice of the tree, which she’d clamped to a bench on the dock (Figure 11.4). She ran a wood shave over the surface of the oak, polishing the sawdust away with the back of her hand to reveal an intricate pattern of rings. She counted them aloud, tapping her fingers on the dark and light circles of the oak. Eighty-two. In the days that followed, the oak tree remained on the dock, and passing swimmers would pause to count the rings, counting how many years they’d swum. One swimmer traced the distance of five decades (‘This is when I first came to the pond,’ she remarked) while another marked the years of the Second World War (‘This is when I was evacuated during the Blitz,’ she surmised). One regular swimmer was eighty-two years old, and the women came to associate the tree with her, wondering at what this particular oak tree had seen in its journey from acorn to tree to felled timber. It had been planted, Jane guessed, in the early 1930s.

190

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 11.4 The slice of oak, 2015. © Photo: Jessica J. Lee.

Drawing on the ethnographic work of Anna Tsing, who emphasizes open-endedness and multi-vocal storytelling, I interviewed swimmers at the pond, recording and transcribing our conversations.42 I sought to collect a bank of perspectives on the pond, consistent with Tsing’s assertion that ‘a rush of stories cannot be neatly summed up. Its scales do not nest neatly; they draw attention to interrupting geographies and tempos. These interruptions elicit more stories’.43 Likewise, I conducted most of the interviews at the pond directly after swimming, enabling swimmers to give me a fresh report on their experiences, emphasizing their direct, embodied engagement with the Heath. I was guided in this approach by the work of environmental aesthetic philosopher Arnold Berleant, whose engagement model emphasizes bodily and sensory experience in the moment, rather than aesthetic disinterest.44 The questions I asked were open-ended (‘How long have you been swimming?’, ‘Why do you swim?’, ‘Is there anything specific about the Heath that leads you to swim here?’), and I followed the swimmers’ cues in our discussions, asking them to elaborate especially on what, in particular, drew them to swim at the Heath and not elsewhere. After swimming, we often sat sheltering from the rain in the changing rooms or huddling under the awning on the dock overlooking the water. We chatted while sipping flasks of tea, talking about the time they’d spent at the pond and what swimming meant to them. The swimmers often replied in similar terms: describing the meditative quality of swimming, the ‘wildness’ of the pond, and its seclusion. As one swimmer put it:

Watery Wilds: Pond Swimming and Protest on Hampstead Heath

191

It’s not clinical, like a swimming bath would be. There’s something slightly wild about it. I saw an enormous terrapin, must’ve been there about 50 years, basking on a lifebuoy, and I know there are crayfish in there. There’s something about it being a real environment. A bit of murkiness and mystery.

Swimming, it seemed, gave the women the opportunity to physically engage with the natural world: ‘You’re right in touch with nature, you’re right in the middle,’ one told me. Specifically, the swimmers saw the Heath as a landscape in distinct opposition to municipal parks, echoing the nineteenth-century campaigners who argued much the same: I love its naturalness. Of course, I know it’s not natural and that every blade of grass is being looked after, but it feels like a natural open space. It’s not a park, it’s not all prettified, it’s allowed to be natural and to have a real feeling of being in the country in wild heath land.

The swimmers’ responses pointed to the act of negotiation at play in the Heath’s aesthetic: that it was not in fact a wild landscape, but that it ought to feel like it. Much as in the 1978 controversy over grass management, the swimmers indicated that the Heath and the pond were sites to be managed according to a vision of pastoral, remote heathland rather than municipal park. Our conversations also pointed to the wider difficulties of negotiating an intricate, enclosed community: many of the women were long-time swimmers, and some bristled at the wave of newer and younger swimmers coming to the pond, longing to keep the site a secret. Some celebrated the boom in popularity. All indicated concern about the Ponds Project, and there was an almost universal suspicion of the City of London’s intentions with regards to the works and a fear that the Heath would lose its ‘wildness’. As one swimmer explained, ‘The City of London look after it very well, but sometimes I think they err on the side of trying to make it a municipal park, and it’s not that, and we don’t want it to be that, we want it to have that wildness.’ Of particular concern was the notion that the construction would prove too great an interruption to the Heath’s pastoral landscape: ‘What raises my eyebrows is seeing big dumper trucks driving over the Heath,’ one swimmer told me. Concerns around fencing, digging, and heavy construction vehicles peppered our conversations. Likewise, swimmers articulated a sense that while they understood that the pond and the Heath more widely were managed lands, they did not want the Ponds Project to result in a ‘parkified’ Heath. Many worried the work would create an opportunity for the CoLC to institute fees for swimmers at the pond, a matter of deep concern following failed efforts by the CoLC to institute fees for swimmers in the early 2000s. Indeed, early proposals for the Ponds Project had included the erection of turnstiles, which were fiercely opposed by swimmers, who noted that efforts to restrict public access to the Heath and its ponds represented further ‘parkification’ of a public site. As such, a wild landscape aesthetic and public access were pitted against park-like management, charges for access and construction work on the site. Moreover, in speaking of the pond’s tranquillity, the swimmers worried that the works – the felling of tress in particular, as well as the construction of new facilities and a concrete

192

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

dock – would transform the Ladies’ Pond irreparably. As one swimmer said, ‘I don’t think they’ll be able [to put it back to how it was] because of all the concrete they’re going to put down. You won’t get it back by any stretch. And all the trees take decades to grow.’ As Anna Tsing argues, such ‘frictions’ can make ‘new objects and agents possible’.45 The conflict thus spurred the swimmers and many other locals to articulate their visions for the Heath, particularly through their fears of what might change and what could not be restored. When the work began and the campaigns to prevent it ended, the swimmers turned from resistance to celebration: to sharing their vision for the Heath, their legacy as swimmers, and the aesthetic possibilities afforded by the pond. In mid-September 2015, locals gathered at Kenwood House to launch an exhibit of artworks produced by swimmers at the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. The show – titled ‘A Celebration’ – was located in Kenwood’s Orangery and was organized by the swimmers. The walls were hung heavily with paintings, photographs, sculptures and texts inspired by the pond. Outside the Orangery, Jane stood with the slice of oak and a number of other tree pieces, discussing her work with visitors. Inside, a photograph of the oak with the 82-year-old swimmer sat proudly in the middle of the exhibit. This felled oak and its timeline of change on the Heath was central to the swimmers’ understanding of the pond and to the vision of it they sought to preserve. Implicit amongst the works was the notion the swimmers sought to celebrate their time on the Heath in the face of unprecedented change: construction had begun and the pond was due to be closed soon to carry out work on the dam and reconstruct the changing facilities. As visitors meandered through the artworks, swimmers acting as guides repeatedly told visitors that they ought to visit the pond now, as it wouldn’t be the same after the works finished. With the trees now cleared on the southern shore, and the dock, changing hut and old dam due to be demolished and renovated in the months ahead, the exhibit articulated a vision of the pond as the swimmers had described it to me: photographs showed it secluded amidst the trees and replete with wildlife, while paintings of the old changing hut provided a mournful reminder that the site would soon be changing. In ‘celebrating’ the pond that would soon disappear, the exhibit crystallized the notion that the Ladies’ Pond was a public space ever negotiated by its community. As the swimmers had indicated in our conversations, that community was understood to include not solely the swimmers, but the birds, trees, water and other nonhuman presences. It did not include the heavy construction vehicles required by the Ponds Project crews, nor the concrete and fencing the project would bring. Rather, the pond’s and the Heath’s ‘naturalness’ were understood to be the result of a carefully balanced act of conservation, a managed wildness in the middle of the city. As in previous battles for the Heath’s land, the preservation of such wildness – without trucks, without digging, without renovation – cut to the heart of their belief that the Heath was vital public space at risk of restriction.

Conclusion In my time spent swimming at the pond in the winter of 2015, in interviews with the swimmers and in archival research on the Heath, the connection felt by swimmers with

Watery Wilds: Pond Swimming and Protest on Hampstead Heath

193

the trees on the shoreline was a recurring theme. As many had indicated in our conversations, the trees sheltered the Ladies’ Pond from the rest of the Heath, giving the pond its sense of seclusion and wildness amidst the city. The loss of the oak – one of the oldest among them – pointed not solely to a loss to the community, but also to a perceived ‘victory’ of the City of London Corporation in reshaping and closing off a ‘wild’ landscape the locals felt deeply to be public. In protesting the Ponds Project, the swimmers and other locals had articulated a vision for the Heath: a pastoral snapshot in which construction and industry did not belong, but likewise a landscape in which fields, woodlands and waterways held their borders. As in the 1978 conflict over grass management, the resistance to the Ponds Project articulated a vision of the Heath maintained in a particular stage of its natural succession. The Ponds Project and the opposition to it crystallized local visions for the Heath, contributing to the centuries-long negotiation over how the Heath ought to look, and how its users and caretakers ought to manage it. The ‘wildness’ of the pond and its swimmers is but a recent chapter in the continual and shifting negotiation of how the Heath might be managed ‘in its natural aspect’, a legacy begun with Wilson’s effort to despoil the Heath, rearticulated in the Hampstead Heath Act, and re-negotiated in twentieth-century conflicts over the Heath’s land management. As such, it is through such frictions and conflicts that the Heath’s landscape has been shaped. The legacies of both historical and contemporary conflicts like the Ponds Project are far reaching: they continue to shape local perspectives on the Heath’s management. And on the land itself, the traces of these conflicts can be found in the grass, the woodland and the waters: in the remains of Wilson’s buildings, in the cleared-away scrub at the borders of the trees, and in the many ponds, where new grassy spillways now line the banks.

Notes 1 2

3 4

5 6 7

Atkins, Hampstead Heath Ponds Project: Shortlist Options Report: Appendices. (London: Atkins, 2013). City of London Corporation and The Heath and Hampstead Society, ‘The Hampstead Heath Ponds Project Without Prejudice Joint Statement’ (2013), https://democracy. cityoflondon.gov.uk/documents/s28379/Appendix%205%20-%20Hampstead%20 Heath%20Ponds%20Project%20Joint%20Written%20Statement.pdf. Jessica J. Lee, ‘Of Field and Forest: Aesthetics and the Nonhuman on Hampstead Heath’ (York University, 2016). 2006 saw the formation of the Outdoor Swimming Society, an advocacy group dedicated to improving access to and swimmers’ rights in open waters. In the years that followed, attendance at the Heath’s ponds climbed steadily, until, around 2014, swimmers I interviewed have indicated, numbers swelled dramatically. At the time of writing, life guards reported summer attendance at the pond well into the thousands on warm days. British Geological Survey, England and Wales Sheet 256 North London, Geology Series, 1:50,000 Scale (Nottingham: National Environment Research Council, 2006). Lee, ‘Of Field and Forest: Aesthetics and the Nonhuman on Hampstead Heath’, 2. Ibid., 65–66.

194 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21 22 23

24 25

26

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered Caitlin Davies, Taking the Waters: A Swim Around Hampstead Heath (London: Frances Lincoln, 2012), 26–46. John James Park, Topography and Natural History of Hampstead, in the County of Middlesex (London: White, Cochrane, and Co., 1814), 52fn. John Soame, Hampstead-Wells: or, Directions for the Drinking of Those Waters (London: F. Clay and D. Brown, 1734), 35–41. Thomas J. Barratt, The Annals of Hampstead, vol. 1 (London: L. Leventhal, 1972 [1912]), 156–157. Humphry Repton, Red Book for Kenwood (Middlesex) (Mansfield Archives, Scone Palace, Perthshire, 1793). Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London: Harper Collins, 1998), 429. Charles Robert Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1845), 78–79. Daisy Hay, Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), 7. Andrew Motion, Keats (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997), 106. The brief history given in the following paragraphs is greatly condensed. For a more detailed account, see Lee, ‘Of Field and Forest: Aesthetics and the Nonhuman on Hampstead Heath’. See Sir Thomas M. Wilson Bart, Will and 12 Codicils 5 September 1806, proved 16 October, 1821. Copy. Parliamentary Archives FCP/1/64. An Act to enable Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson, Baronet and other Persons successively entitled under the Will and Codicile of the late Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson Baronet to grant building Leases of his Estates in the Counties of Middlesex and Kent, part of the Estates devized by the said Will and Codicils And also to grant Licenses and make Agreements to and with the Copyhold Tenants of the Manor of Hampstead in the County of Middlesex for encouraging the improvement of their Copyhold Tenements by Building or otherwise (H.L.), 28 April, 1829. Nos. 290–95. Parliamentary Archives HL/PO/JO/10/8/841. Ibid. The Sun, cited in Alan Farmer, Hampstead Heath (London: Historical Publications, 1996), 64. See ibid., 72.; and Christopher Woodroffe Ikin, Hampstead Heath Centenary: How the Heath Was Saved for the Public (London: Greater London Council, 1971), 11. George Shaw Lefevre, Lord Eversleigh, Commons, Forests & Footpaths: The Story of the Battle During the Last Forty-Five Years for Public Rights Over the Commons, Forests and Footpaths of England and Wales (London: Cassell, 1910), 34–35. Thomas J. Barratt, The Annals of Hampstead, vol. 3 (London: L. Leventhal, 1972 [1912]), 256. J. C. Loudon, ‘Hints for breathing places for the metropolis, and for country towns and villages, on fixed principles’, in The Gardener’s Magazine (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1829). The government’s Select Committee on Open Spaces took evidence from a number of actors involved in the Heath conflict, including, famously, Wilson himself. Second Report from the Select Committee on Open Spaces (Metropolis); Together with the Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix. Ordered by the House of Commons to be Printed 20 June, 1865, 7. Museum of English Rural Life SR OSS/P2/B/5 (1). See also: Charles Dickens, Household Words (1851): 160; and Octavia Hill, Daily Graphic, 31 January 1890.

Watery Wilds: Pond Swimming and Protest on Hampstead Heath

195

27 See David Evans, A History of Nature Conservation in Britain (London: Routledge, 1992), xxiii, 41. 28 Hill. Daily Graphic. 29 Hampstead Heath Act, 1871, Note 16. 30 Peter W. J. Bartrip, Myxomatosis: a History of Pest Control and the Rabbit (London: I. B. Tauris 2008). 31 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 125. 32 Jessica J. Lee, ‘A walk in the long grass: agriculture, aesthetics, and wildness on Hampstead Heath’, Landscape Research 44, no. 7 (2019): 849. 33 Ibid., 851. 34 Haycock, ‘Hydrology Improvements Detailed Evaluation Process (HiDEP): Hydrology and Structure Hydraulic and Recommendations,’ (2010) [PDF no longer available online]. 35 Atkins, Hampstead Heath Ponds Project Preferred Solution Report (2014), 13. http:// democracy.cityoflondon.gov.uk/documents/s35825/Appendix%201%20-%20 Atkins%20Preferred%20Solution%20Report.pdf 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 5. 38 City of London Corporation, Hampstead Heath Dams: Why the Work is Needed (London: City of London Corporation, 2012). 39 Atkins, Hampstead Heath Ponds Project Preferred Solution Report, 7. 40 City of London Corporation and The Heath and Hampstead Society, ‘The Hampstead Heath Ponds Project Without Prejudice Joint Statement’ (London 2013). http:// democracy.cityoflondon.gov.uk/documents/s28379/Appendix%205%20-%20 Hampstead%20Heath%20Ponds%20Project%20Joint%20Written%20Statement.pdf 41 Ibid. 42 This fieldwork was carried out in compliance with York University’s Office of Research Ethics. Participants provided informed consent and will be referred to anonymously in this research. 43 Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015), 37. 44 See, for example, Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Art and Engagement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); ‘The world from the water’, in Aesthetics and Environment: Variations on a Theme (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 45 Anna Tsing, Friction: an Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005), 173.

Literature Atkins. Hampstead Heath Ponds Project Preferred Solution Report. 2014. Atkins. Hampstead Heath Ponds Project: Shortlist Options Report: Appendices. London: Atkins, 2013. Barratt, Thomas J. The Annals of Hampstead. Vol. 1, London: L. Leventhal, 1972 [1912]. Barratt, Thomas J. The Annals of Hampstead. Vol. 3, London: L. Leventhal, 1972 [1912]. Bartrip, Peter W. J. Myxomatosis: a History of Pest Control and the Rabbit. London: I. B. Tauris 2008.

196

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Berleant, Arnold. The Aesthetics of Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Berleant, Arnold. Art and Engagement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. Berleant, Arnold. ‘The world from the water’, in Aesthetics and Environment: Variations on a Theme, 57–67. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. City of London Corporation. Hampstead Heath Dams: Why the Work Is Needed. London: City of London Corporation, 2012. City of London Corporation and The Heath and Hampstead Society. ‘The Hampstead Heath Ponds Project Without Prejudice Joint Statement’ (2013). https://democracy. cityoflondon.gov.uk/documents/s28379/Appendix%205%20-%20Hampstead%20 Heath%20Ponds%20Project%20Joint%20Written%20Statement.pdf. City of London Corporation and The Heath and Hampstead Society. ‘The Hampstead Heath Ponds Project Without Prejudice Joint Statement’. London, 2013. Davies, Caitlin. Taking the Waters: A Swim Around Hampstead Heath. London: Frances Lincoln, 2012. Dickens, Charles. Household Words (10 May 1851). Evans, David. A History of Nature Conservation in Britain. London: Routledge, 1992. Farmer, Alan. Hampstead Heath. London: Historical Publications, 1996. Hay, Daisy. Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010. Haycock. ‘Hydrology Improvements Detailed Evaluation Process (HiDEP): Hydrology and Structure Hydraulic and Recommendations’ (2010). Hill, Octavia. Daily Graphic, 31 January 1890. Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Darker Reflections. London: Harper Collins, 1998. Ikin, Christopher Woodroffe. Hampstead Heath Centenary: How the Heath Was Saved for the Public. London: Greater London Council, 1971. Lee, Jessica J. ‘Of Field and Forest: Aesthetics and the Nonhuman on Hampstead Heath’. York University, 2016. Lee, Jessica J. ‘A walk in the long grass: Agriculture, aesthetics, and wildness on Hampstead Heath’. Landscape Research 44, no. 7 (2019): 846–856. Lefevre, George Shaw, Lord Eversleigh. Commons, Forests & Footpaths: The Story of the Battle During the Last Forty-Five Years for Public Rights Over the Commons, Forests and Footpaths of England and Wales. London: Cassell, 1910. Leslie, Charles Robert Memoirs of the Life of John Constable. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1845. Loudon, J. C. ‘Hints for breathing places for the metropolis, and for country towns and villages, on fixed principles’. In The Gardener’s Magazine. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1829. Motion, Andrew. Keats. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997. Park, John James. Topography and Natural History of Hampstead, in the County of Middlesex. London: White, Cochrane, and Co., 1814. Repton, Humphry. Red Book for Kenwood (Middlesex). Mansfield Archives, Scone Palace, Perthshire, 1793. Soame, John. Hampstead-Wells: or, Directions for the Drinking of Those Waters. London: F. Clay and D. Brown, 1734. Tsing, Anna. Friction: an Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 2005. Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.

12

The Fallow Land. A Farewell Jan Brockmann

No metropolis can be imagined without fallow land. But if anyone had asked me what it is that separates Berlin from other large cities I have encountered, my answer would be ‘the fallow land’. But it vanishes. Fallow land is land that is delayed, situated between that which is no more and that which has yet to be. Berlin has gone through many quiescent conditions, and many areas in the city are still in a waiting state. This is true even now, when the increasing demand for housing makes it necessary to find new areas for building houses. A lack of expectations during this quiescent condition has permeated the atmosphere throughout the city during the post-war periods, including long periods behind the Berlin Wall in the eastern part of town. After a wearing past, the present lay fallow. In a series of photographs from the middle of the 1950s up to the erection of the Berlin Wall, Arno Fisher (1927–2011) captured Situation Berlin.1 The people in front of the ruins of the city’s boulevard Unter den Linden in East Berlin seem lost and irresolute, and not at all in a festive mood given the anticipation of the celebration of 1 May, which was to demonstrate the acquisition of power by the victorious working class.2 Several pictures from this photo series have in a unique way retained this atmosphere. The autumn of 1953 saw the German premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in East Berlin. This was the same year as the first performance in Paris, and it struck a chord with the audience of that period. Many people in Berlin during the 1950s recognized themselves within the play’s existential tone. The communist Bert Brecht, who despaired when he saw injustice without rebellion, understood immediately how this tragic-comedy challenged his overall view of the theatre, an artform that was to inspire the audience to participate in changing the world. The widespread idleness was for him the original sin under the reign of capitalism. Even shortly before he died, Brecht asked for Beckett’s text so he could adapt it; the idle waiting time was going to be confronted by the progress of socialism. Forty years after Beckett’s premiere, the Swiss producer Christoph Marthaler set up the self-composed play Murx at the Berlin theatre Volksbühne in Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.3 The play, which hardly has any plot, unfolds in a large, almost empty waiting room created by Anne Viebrock, where the figures appear to be just as cocooned in their disheartenedness and exposed to a time of stagnation as the individuals in Arno Fisher’s photograph. The space could also be 197

198

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

reminiscent of the pre-war shelters for the homeless people in Berlin’s poorer district Scheunenviertel (literally meaning ‘the barn district’).4 Like Waiting for Godot, Marthaler’s play met the spirit of the time and space, this time in Berlin of the 1990s, when the role of Berlin as capital was pending. The play became cool, a hit amongst the audience in Berlin, and it was put on the stage and performed for more than four years. Alte Nationalgalerie [Old National Gallery], one of the five buildings that constitute the famous ensemble on Berlin’s Museum Island, is housing in its cabinets on the first floor some of the masterpieces of German realism, made by Adolph Menzel. In one of the cabinets, there are several pictures from the 1840s, which show the growing city’s colonization of the surrounding areas. One of the most famous paintings is Railway between Berlin and Potsdam (1847) (Plate 13), which is based on a pencil sketch from two years earlier. It is a very precise topographic representation of the first railway in Prussia (and the third one in Germany), which was built in 1837–1838, shortly before the painting was made. The railway was 26.3 kilometres long and connected the two cities with a travelling time of 41 minutes, which was considerably less than the time that was needed to travel between East Berlin and Potsdam after the GDR’s (German Democratic Republic) Berlin Wall was erected. The picture shows the fallow land outside the city, with the silhouette of the city in the background. It is a sort of waiting room for the time to come, the emptiness that is waiting to be taken over by the city. The dull day is painted in a dirty palette with blunt colours that highlight the derelict, tundra-like landscape. The railway track forms a forceful turn from the background into the foreground at the edge of the image, a compositional act, a schwung, that evokes an impression of dynamics and speed, the industrial conquest of time and space. Menzel has added a goods train to the painting. The locomotive appears like a monster from the past, with headlights glowing like the eyes of a dragon. The steam would be its poisonous breath, and the wagons resemble the animal’s tail. It is with fearful joy that the artist presents the archaic features of a new era. A new time flies, at a hitherto unknown speed. The picture was painted three years after William Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed.5 The first locomotives to arrive in Prussia stemmed from Stephenson (Newcastle upon Tyne, England) and Norris (Philadelphia, United States). However, when Menzel painted this picture, the railway network was already undergoing rapid development and Berlin had already accrued six railway stations; machine constructor August Borsig6 had already begun his production of locomotives in Berlin and soon after established a monopoly in Prussia, which led to a significant contribution to the emergence of the industrial city of Berlin. With this in mind, Menzel’s picture can be interpreted as a prediction of the industrial development that followed. Jens Christian Jensen, an art connoisseur with intimate knowledge of German painting in the nineteenth century, has described the railway track as a sickle ready to clear away the natural surroundings to provide more space to the city.7 Industrialization demolished nature and wilderness in order to facilitate new urban developments. Linden and poplar trees that protect the small house (probably the official residence at the railway crossing) in this picture appear as some sort of Arcadian idyll that inexorably gives way, just like Philemon and Baucis and their cabin became removed by the colonizing entrepreneur Faust in Goethe’s tragic play (part two).

The Fallow Land: A Farewell

199

The abrupt transition from the edge of the dense urbanization in the background, which appears as some sort of miserable fata morgana, to the deserted landscape ahead is striking. Today, when one travels towards Berlin via plane or if one looks at satellite images of the city, it is clearly noticeable that this metropolis is located in a landscape that still appears to be fairly deserted; numerous lakes and vast forests dominate the surrounding area. Unlike Paris with its banlieu or London with its agglomeration, Berlin has no real metropolitan area. The region of Brandenburg, which surrounds the town, is one of Germany’s most sparsely populated areas with a steadily declining population figure in its rural areas. Berlin and its surroundings have long been separate worlds. Certainly, the city has taken a large bite out of the countryside through the expansion of 1920, and after the unification, a Speckgürtel or ‘lard belt’ has developed around the city, creating suburban areas where people after the fall of the Berlin Wall finally got to make the dream of living in the green a reality. However, those who wish to take a trip by car or train usually end up spending more time travelling out of town than they actually spend outdoors in nature: walking though woodland experiencing the solitude of the German Romantic, Waldeinsamkeit, the loneliness of the woods. Many Berliners believe that one must travel to Norway to experience pristine nature and wilderness. They need not travel so far. Some distance west of Berlin, near the river Havel, lies Germany’s alleged darkest place: the small village of Gülpe, which attracts those who love to see the starry sky undisturbed by artificial light. Just like the Mark Brandenburg in the Middle Ages, this region is dominated by forest, heath, marsh and water. It is one of Germany’s most waterrich regions with 3,000 lakes and 33,000 km of water veins. During the period of the 1300s, two-thirds of the land stood uncultivated and yet today more than a third of it consists of forest. Today’s tourism industry advertises that about a third of Brandenburg’s barely 30,000 km² area is reserved for different classifications of landscape preservation. Water, forest and heath areas all seem to expand. The growth of wilderness is supported politically. Brandenburg is no longer only stork land; animals that have been extinct from the area for a long period of time, such as wolves and elk, have now returned. Old military artillery ranges have been converted to wildlife parks and populated with European bison and wild horses. In southern Brandenburg and northern Saxony, they are about to flood large parts of the GDR’s brown coal territory so that in a few years it will form Europe’s largest artificial seascape with twenty-one lakes, the majority of which are going to be connected through a network of channels. In a small sketch from 1835, View of Roofs and Gardens (Plate 14), Menzel’s predecessor, landscape painter Carl Blechen, has captured the character of Berlin’s suburbs during this period. It is depicting a view from his home in Kochstrasse 9, which lay between Friedrichstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse, an area that would quickly develop into one of Berlin’s busiest. Fifty years later, the same street would develop into Berlin’s and the German Empire’s press centre, and during the Cold War in 1961 the publisher and media tsar Axel Springer created his media centre in close contact with and as a challenge to the Berlin Wall that had just been erected. In Blechen’s painting, we see in the foreground a dispersed rural settlement with small potagers, while the city in the background is already on its way to being concentrated into blocks of flats. We find the same sordid palette as in Menzel’s painting. This is not a beautiful idyll like

200

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

the ones we recognize from previous Romantic paintings of villages, but rather a melancholic abundance of derelict houses, a poor quarter where a sentence of condemnation already seems to have passed. Menzel resided a short distance away in the present district of Kreuzberg. Like Blechen, Menzel painted the view from his home in Ritterstrasse 43, only twelve years later (Plate 15). The painting provides a glance at Berlin’s backyards towards the city’s growing edge zones. The painting is signed but unfinished. The unfinishedness of the painting may be interpreted as an authentic expression of the incompleteness of the situation, as seen through the eyes of the artist. The foreground depicts wild growth, excrescences that seem to sway back and forth in rebellion against the outlines of the houses in the background. The two zones stand in contrast to each other. The almost spontaneously painted foreground stands against an urban background, which with its variety of geometric shapes almost reminds us of a cubistic painting: a terrain vague gives the impression that it is concealing something. An untamed situation is depicted here, seemingly possessing a ghost-like quality. As in the painting of the railway (Plate 13), this picture was also painted during a time of historic transition, in the year before the unsuccessful German bourgeois revolution in 1848. Several drawings and paintings by the same artist display the same character. They portray the growth of the suburbs as spontaneous; the houses seem to have sown themselves out in the Märkischer Sand, as hybrids between the village and the urban houses, leaving a mutilated scenery beneath the cloudy sky. The thicket in the foreground seems to crash into the buildings, like breakers crash into the coastal cliffs. The paintings visualize how urbanization and disparate nature, both untamed, fight each other in a struggle where the outcome is uncertain. It is not for nothing that the jungle is a well-used metaphor for the metropolis. The young Bertolt Brecht’s encounter with the metropolis Berlin was a meeting with a rough and uneven terrain, a man-made shrubbery. This is reflected in works like Ballad of Cortez’s Men,8 in which conquistadores gone astray are completely absorbed by the wild primeval forest. The metaphor is also explored in the early piece In the Jungle of Cities,9 in which human beings struggle with elemental forces they themselves have created, and eventually surrender. At the same time, a new movement was established with the purpose of offering small allotment gardens, where the poorest part of the population could grow vegetables, and thus mend the disadvantages of the urbanization process. Berlin has more than 70,000 allotment gardens, making up 3,200 hectares, 10 per cent of the city’s green areas, which means that Berlin lies at the top in Germany. The allotment gardens are not pushed out on the outskirts of the city but spread over the entire city. During the Cold War, they were more than just a paradise for garden gnomes; they provided much-needed food for a lot of people, and a place for rest and recreation. Today, the gardens are exposed to the pressure of building projects for an increasing population. The graveyards, of which there are 227, a world record for metropolitan cities, are like the gardens’ green oases scattered throughout the city, partially transformed into small parks or memorials, lively biotopes, small sheds for many animal species. Around 1900, Heinrich Zille (1858–1929), a true eccentric original and artist, famous for his drawings from the everyday life of the developing proletarian class in Berlin, his Milljöh, as it is called in the Berliner jargon, photographed the quarters and

The Fallow Land: A Farewell

201

Figure 12.1 Heinrich Zille (1858–1929): Untitled. Wood Gatherers. [Ohne Titel (Zwei Frauen ziehen und schieben gemeinsam den Handkarren durch den Sand)] Knobelsdorff Bridge, Berlin-Charlottenburg around c. 1900, photograph. © bpk / Berlinische Galerie / Heinrich Zille.

the life of the poor people in the city. The photographs lack the extenuating humour that characterized the drawings and made them popular; in contrast, they show the everyday struggle for existence in an unvarnished way. This photograph (Figure 12.1) is taken at the outskirts of the Westend district, where Zille lived at the time. As in Menzel’s painting from approximately fifty years before, we can see the fallow land by the edge of the city, which is almost abruptly raising out of the plains. The two women laboriously push a cart loaded with firewood through the inert märkisches sand. They have obviously been in the nearby city forest Grunewald 10 and fetched wood, perhaps for some small change. A Berliner street ballad, a so-called Gassenhauer from the 1890s goes like this: Im Grunewald, im Grunewald ist Holzauktion.11 The public firewood auctions provided affordable access to vital supplies for poor people, while at the same time being a place for recreation and entertainment. The food supply problems of World War II led the Nazi regime as early as 1940 to launch the ‘fallow land campaign’ on vacant plots of land, but eventually parks and other places were also freed up for food production. Even historical representative market places such as Gendarmenmarkt became ploughed up for potato production. The food shortage after the war required that the process was continued. According to a decree by the city administration, the Berlin Magistrate, in October 1945, all land that was not built on would be freed up for food production, and all garden owners were

202

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

obliged to turn their flower gardens into vegetable gardens. Today, the international movement Urban Farming, a reaction to the world’s growing urbanization, has a foothold in Berlin. The city is leading in Germany by taking fallow land for cooperative and intercultural agriculture.12 New tenants and immigrants are invited to join in the quest to turn small and large open spaces into communal gardens, in the hope that those who participate in the planting will be able to more easily take root themselves. Overcrowding and emptiness have shifted in Berlin’s urban landscape as ebb and tide. Emptiness has many faces. In many places it has been striking, but just as often it has been hidden. Much of the emptiness appeared as the Berlin Wall disappeared. At the same time, the wall that had caused a clear-cut area through the city had shut down the emptiness and softened it. Even to me, who has met the different faces of emptiness on all my travels through the city, the sight of the wilderness after the fall of the wall came as a shock. A shock that opened the eye to what had long fallen into the blind spot. In several places, single houses stood out in the void as in surreal projections. Paradoxically, the emptiness seemed to increase as rebuilding was done. Thus, it was only in the moment of rebuilding that I would be able to acknowledge the emptiness.13 At present, strolling and jogging people enjoy Berlin’s green lung, the 210-hectare Tiergarten located in the city centre. Tiergarten was originally a fenced hunting ground for Brandenburg’s electoral princes [kürfursten] for 200 years before it became a park for the citizens of the city, first a Baroque park ground, and later an English-inspired landscape park. Under West Berlin’s isolation during the post-war period, the park became an essential resource for the enclaved population. But a year after the war, the park was like a desolate wasteland. In a photograph from 1946 (Figure 12.2), we can see two policemen, standing with their back to us, looking across the sandy area and the ruins of the city, a motif reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. The afforestation of trees, and the slow reconstruction of this central city park, have reinforced the citizens’ love for trees. More than forty years later, the removal of the Berlin Wall revealed a huge empty area in the middle of the city; from Potsdamer Platz [Potsdamer Square] to Leipziger and Pariser Platz, it was tabula rasa. Here once was the urban pulse, the rhythm of the city. The fragments of buildings that remained after the war were removed both on the east and west sides. On the east side they were removed in order to create a large security zone behind the wall where nothing should stand in the way of total control. On the west side, they wanted to clear space for the city railroad. The professor of painting, and the neoexpressionist [heftige Malerei; Neue Wilde] guru Karl Horst Hödicke (born 1938), who from his studio had a view of the ruined area, called it ‘the desert Gobi’. In 1982, he painted a vision of the place (Black Gobi [Schwarze Gobi]): instead of Menzel’s steam locomotive, we can now see luminous car headlamps on a future auto or magnetic track, just like a ghostly roller coaster, perhaps an allegory of the fate of the city. This is exactly the place where Wim Wenders in 1987 made the film Wings of Desire [Der Himmel über Berlin], in which we experience the moving scene where the grandiose old actor Curt Bois, a former singer in Berlin cabarets in the 1920s, walks stiffly, only accompanied by his angel, over the wasteland that was once the lively Potsdamer Platz. Instead of the urban pre-war life, there are now only a few observation towers meant for Western tourists who would like to let their eyes wander over the wall, as well as some insignificant souvenir stands. Before GDR dissolved itself, the two city halves had

The Fallow Land: A Farewell

203

Figure 12.2 Tiergarten 1946. Two policemen standing in front of the destroyed Tiergarten. Photograph. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz. © bpk / Friedrich Seidenstücker. ‘A treeless, unforested grassland,’ wrote the author Max Frisch in 1947.14

entered into a barter trade where West Berlin was allowed to incorporate a strip of land sticking out like an appendix from East Berlin’s terrain. A few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 21 July 1990, Roger Waters arranged the Pink Floyd concert The Wall at this desolate venue for more than 200,000 listeners, the largest rock concert ever, the grandiose prelude to Berlin’s new event culture. As soon as Germany was reunited and the terrain was available for sale, big corporations such as Daimler-Benz and Sony were quick to act, securing the lion’s share of the terrain and setting a ‘forest’ of building cranes to work. They have done thorough work; the wasteland, and the lonely, staggering old man are sealed under the new architecture and swallowed up by the daily tourist crowd that flows through Renzo Piano’s (born 1937) shopping mall Potsdamer Platz Arcade or agglomerate under the huge tilts of Helmut Jahn (born 1940). Berlin’s shift between overcrowding and emptiness has a long history. As a vacuum, first the marshland [märkische] and then the city from the Middle Ages onwards, attracted people. The Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century drained cities and land again. But the depopulation opened up for the migration of refugees from many places on the continent. After the end of World War II, the population of the city became drastically reduced, and the untamed nature promptly recurred, conquering the ruins and the fallow land. The process of the nineteenth century seemingly reversed.

204

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the process repeated itself: first it was a wave of emigration, and subsequently came a new wave of immigration, again with many refugees seeking shelter in the city. From my walks in the city during the 1950s, I remember well the deep impression the ruins in the Gendarmenmarkt made on me: on the fragments of the cathedral, and on the ruins of Schinkel’s theatre, birch trees had sprouted; and in just a few years they had grown to a considerable height. Like a Baroque painting, they stood as a symbol of the perishability of all the splendour of the world. Architect Axel Schultes, in his grand building for the Federal Chancellor’s Office [Bundeskanzsleramt], has taken up this motif by planting bushes and trees on the steles that flank the entrance (Figures 12.3 and 12.4). For me as a 15-yearold, my thoughts were directed to the Mayan cities swallowed by the primeval forest. Standing in front of the ruins in Frankfurt, in May 1946, the Swiss writer Max Frisch wrote: It is going to continue just like this, grass will grow in the houses, dandelions in the churches. And suddenly, one can imagine how it continues to grow, how our cities almost will be overgrown by a primeval forest, slowly, unstoppable, a growth without people, a silence of thistles and moss, an earth ignorant of history, in addition to the chirping of birds in the spring, summer and autumn, the breath of the years that no one counts anymore.15

Figure 12.3 Bundeskanzleramt (Federal Chancellor’s Office), architects Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundeskanzleramt_ Berlin_2010.jpg. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

The Fallow Land: A Farewell

205

Figure 12.4 Bundeskanzleramt (Federal Chancellor’s Office), detail, architects Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank. Photo: Jan Brockmann, 2004.

This may as well have been written about Berlin – or another German metropolis – at that time. Today, one could say that Adolph Menzel’s paintings could tell us about this reverse process: how trees and shrubs infiltrated the city and took the terrain back after World War II. In his 1924 commentary ‘Confession to Gleisdreieck’ [Bekenntnis zum Gleisdreieck], Gleisdreieck being the central junction where two highways met across the fan of railway lines, author Joseph Roth warned of the future in which a landscape of iron would displace the nature, which then would have to live a miserable life in an iron corset.16 The opposite came to pass. As we look out of the carriages on line 1 or 2 of the city railroad connecting east and west, we look at a vast open space extending north to the new silhouette at Potsdamer Platz and south to the edge of the old urban districts. Over the years, this flat land, together with an almost equal area of the neighbourhood, has been transformed into a central urban park of twenty-six hectares. The park is divided into a western and eastern half by Berlin’s new track for express trains. The collaboration between citizen initiatives and the senate’s urban planning on this project has not been without conflicts, which tended to arise when the authorities wanted to give the fallow land a facelift. Some of these conflicts stemmed from the fact that for many citizens, the re-natured railway area in the eastern part of the park has become a ‘sentimental landscape’, in a similar way that the eighteenth-century ruin

206

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

parks were for the nobility. Because railway services were closed during West Berlin’s life as an ‘island’, parts of the area were left to the elements, and nature became its own gardener. The remains of the railroad sheds and tracks are overgrown with brushwood. The spontaneity of nature aroused the spontaneous reactions of citizens, again and again. They could recognize themselves in the uncontrollable wild growth. The ‘Gallery of Wild Herbs’ was to be preserved, not ‘upgraded’ into an urban, chic, flawless park. Many of Berlin’s visitors who make use of the many radial lines of the city rail, S-Bahn, look in vain for the cityscape as they peer out of the train windows. What has become of the city? Very little of it is visible from there; most of the cityscape escapes behind bushes, trees, woods and wasteland. A resistance among the citizens is easy to arouse. The fallow land is an underdetermined area. The under-defined situation invites many different forms of use for different users who spontaneously are willing to join forces to defend what they perceive as their free space. Any capitalization of the free space must be prevented. The district of Kreuzberg is known for its rebelliousness in this way. One of the more recent examples is the victorious resistance fighting against a project which had ‘Confronting Comfort’ as a working title. One would think that such a project would be welcomed by an urban community where anti-capitalism is a dominant attitude. The project intended to build a temporary laboratory at a desolate site at Spree. In collaboration with the residents, the laboratory should investigate and discuss urban problems,

Figure 12.5 Schöneberger Südgelände. Photo: Jacobo.ka, 2015. CC BY-SA 4.0. https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:8357_2ShLC%2B_Natur-Park_Sch%C3%B6neberger_ S%C3%BCdgel%C3%A4nde,_Berlin.jpg

The Fallow Land: A Farewell

207

especially the increasing gentrification. It started in August 2011 on New York’s Lower Eastside and was due to appear in Berlin in May 2012 and then move on to Mumbai. There was only one catch. It was the Guggenheim Foundation sponsored by BMW that was responsible for the project. In New York, it is self-evident that cultural ventures are funded by capitalist corporations that thus polish their ‘image’, but not in Kreuzberg. The project was accused of singularly promoting gentrification under the guise of fighting it. The site was to be upgraded to increase the sale value so that the area’s increasing attractiveness would lead to raised rents. On this occasion, BMW was also reminded of its dark past under national socialism. Accordingly, the site was left fallow and untouched by the money of the capital, free to be used by those who feel that they rightly belong there. Further south, in the Schöneberg district, the process of renaturation is pronounced. Here, spontaneous vegetation has been able to spread on the tracks of a marshalling yard that was abandoned in 1952, and on gravel and crushed stone a rural flora has formed with many rare plants whose seeds were transported here by trains as an ‘extra’ cargo (Figure 12.5). Since 2000, the area has been a protected nature reserve, free of barking dogs and dog excrement – an exception in Berlin – and where rare insects and rare bird species thrive. The public is guided on set paths through the park, partly on a steel path laid over the ground, so that nature can unfold as undisturbed as possible. The fallow land with its thicket and shrubbery has created many small oases in the city in places where the war had caused some empty space between the buildings. There are still some of them left; it takes time to fill them even under today’s increasing building activities. The city’s precarious situation after the war has delayed the reconstruction in relation to West Germany, but also the clean-up and beautification. Many empty places were given the chance to ‘settle into lovely places’ as Lois Weinberger put it.17 Therefore, it is argued to ‘venture into the vague’,18 for a deliberate underdetermination of the urban planning, for a ‘planned shapelessness’.19 Formlessness can hardly be planned, but underdetermination may seem like a welcome remedy in a city that has always been haunted by the big plans. Against the well-known Prussian slogan Ordnung muss sein! stands the anarchic credo of the metropolis Chaos muss sein! But since 2010, the city’s population has grown steadily, far more than previous forecasts assumed. Building activities were halted for a long time but are now increasing rapidly and taking over open spaces. Often this has happened in smaller units that hardly fall into sight, and small holes that were made by the war in the city’s ‘row of teeth’ have been sealed. The porous body of the city should be healed by closing the wounds; but the question is whether this removes the breathing holes that the city organism needs to survive. In many places in the city one can find posters in front of thicket and scrub, promising that the specific place is a resource for the future (Figure 12.6). What kind of resource, and for what future? The small investment areas for new townhouses for sale to wealthy new citizens do not cure the housing shortage for an increasing amount of homeless people in the city. Today, the battle is about large open spaces within the city that must facilitate social housing. Where the unregulated flora thrives, the undomesticated wildlife thrives too. Berlin is rich in urban wildlife; in fact, it is the richest in animal species among Europe’s major cities, and this does not only apply to Berlin’s two zoos. While the sixteenth-century

208

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Figure 12.6 Poster near Anhalter Bahnhof. Photo: Sludge G, 19 August 2010. CC BY-SA 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/sludgeulper/4998814252.

electoral prince had to fence in the stock of game on Tiergarten’s hunting ground to have it at hand, after the fall of the Berlin Wall it willingly entered the city. Berlin’s big five are the wild boar, the fox, the marten, the raccoon and the beaver. Wild boar annoyance, as well as hunting for marten, raccoon and fox, are common reading matter in the local news. During the hunting season in 2017–2018, 2,644 boars were finished off, and not only by hunters; cars were also involved. Still, the number seems to remain stable at between 3,000 and 5,000 animals. The damage they cause to public and private parks is enormous. Because hunting with ammunition is dangerous in the city, some have suggested using bows and arrows instead. The fox is popular with many people and lives a rather undisturbed life in large parts of the city, with an estimated 6,000 creatures. For decades the western and eastern foxes have had to live apart, separated by the Berlin Wall, a phenomenon which must have been incorporated into their genetic material. In 2015, researchers asked the population to submit their observations of the animals and received an overwhelming response. But in the zoo, the fox is an uninvited guest and is hunted because it kills penguins and small antelopes. The domestic heron has also found its abundant dish of food there and can overeat from the food meant for exotic birds. At least 400 raccoons have been registered in the city, and in many places they are not at all welcomed, as they are descendants of some specimens that escaped from a fur farm east of Berlin during the last acts of war in April 1945. However, beavers are protected and have made Berlin

The Fallow Land: A Farewell

209

their stronghold. In the middle of the city, on the banks of the Spree in the densely populated district of Friedrichshain, the municipality has, with the help of money from the EU, created a dedicated place for these rodents. Recently, even the moose, which had long ago disappeared from German fauna, was discovered along the Berliner Ring city railroad. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between wild and domesticated animals because many big city people are so animal-friendly that they feed the intruders even though it is strictly forbidden. The animal husbandry is widespread, especially the Berlin ‘dog madness’ – there are more than 100,000 registered dogs in the city, and owners often allow them to wander about freely, leaving their droppings on the pavement, the so-called Tretminen, ‘land mines’, which unfortunately have not yet aroused the commitment of Human Rights Watch. Big cities have become the best protected areas of endangered bees, after their death toll has hit large parts of the world. In Berlin there are around 800 beekeepers and 4,500 bee people, and the bees are doing reasonably well. Since the agriculture monocultures have removed the availability of much of the nutritional basis for the bees, the city is the place to offer a greater diversity of nature, as there is less use of pesticides, and food is provided from early spring to late autumn. In October 2010, an initiative was started by dedicated conservationists under the motto Berlin summt! [Berlin is buzzing!], which has branched into several big cities in Germany. Berlin is supposed to be the city of bees. In 2014, the city senate started the project ‘More Bees to Berlin’, which is supported by – modest – EU funds. Originally, there were gardeners in the city’s many colonial gardens in the early 1900s who began beekeeping, most often as a hobby for elderly gentlemen. Today, a lot of young people are very committed, and the hives are placed on roofs, often on iconic buildings such as the cathedral and the city parliament building. Also, in Oslo in Norway, in the autumn of 2012, the city’s beekeepers organized themselves into the association ByBi [CityBee], which protects ‘800,000 new small striped residents of Oslo’.20 In 2015, a very special action was initiated by the Berlin Railway; around a thousand sand lizards (Lacerta agilis), an endangered and protected animal species, had to be relocated from a former area in the Schönefeld district to a park area especially prepared for them in the Lichtenberg district. From spring to autumn, they were trapped and carried in buckets and pails to their new biotope. That the protection of rare insects, reptiles, birds and bats prevents or delays building projects is a yearly phenomenon. Many metropolises in the world today are the most important places of residence for birds, and Berlin is in a class of its own, an attraction for bird lovers and ornithologists. Magpies and crows have long since moved into the city because here they cannot be shot by angry farmers or garden owners. In 2000, between 4,100 and 4,900 areas of Nebelkrähen [Hooded crow] (Corvus corone cornix) were registered. In the winter, tens of thousands of Saatkrähen [Carrion crow] (Corvus corone corone) come from the area around St. Petersburg to Berlin. Almost the entire range of European bird life from sea eagle to sparrow is found here, including Europe’s largest colony of Grey herons. Ruins with their wild growth, but also the ‘death strip’ of the Berlin Wall, have long provided many bird species with a protected habitat. But as many of the small fallow land niches

210

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

in the city disappear, the small birds’ terrain decreases, and eventually the nutritional basis of some birds of prey disappears. Until 2015, I could see hawk over hawk hovering in a spiral over the old Jewish cemetery in the Prenzlauer Berg district. Now only a few of them remain. The sparrow, the small metropolitan bird, the companion of poor people, is in danger of extinction in the rest of Germany. But in Berlin, it is still able to find enough bush to pull through: one assumes approximately 100 brooding couples in 2020. In 2006, the city was given the title of ‘Sparrow capital of Germany’. Unlike the sparrow, the nightingale has not been known as an urban bird, but it has become one. Each year, more than 3,000 migrate to the city. They are said to have increased their voice volume by 14 decibels compared with that of their rural congeners in order to extinguish the city noise.21 At the initiative of the German Conservation Alliance, 1,600 of Berlin’s many bird lovers counted 41,000 winter birds in January 2011, including 7,000 sparrows. In 2014, a new municipal regulation came in agreement, typically with a German-bureaucratic designation, the Gebäudebrüterverordnung [edifice breeder regulation]. This regulation will save the nesting sites of sparrows and other small birds that build their nests in the many bullet holes from the war or the many cracks in the walls and ceilings that poor maintenance – especially in former East Berlin – has left behind. The landlords are not allowed to repair any damage as long as the birds brood. This regulation slows down the comprehensive renovation of the house facades. In the fall, starlings form large flocks over the city; as winter approaches, the crows do the same (Figure 12.7). As you sit on the balcony alongside their landing lane, you get the feel of a powerful undertow by their wings. Alfred Hitchcock’s horror movie

Figure 12.7 The sky of crows over Berlin [Krähenhimmel über Berlin]. Photo: Jan Brockmann 2002.

The Fallow Land: A Farewell

211

The Birds (1963) comes to mind. Some bird species have adapted very well to the city life. For example, the European robin was endangered for a while because the traffic noise drowned out their mating song. But they learned to wait with the song all day long, until the traffic calmed down. Like real Berliners, they switched from being A-birds to become B-birds. The lights of the metropolis have given the peregrine falcons at Alexanderplatz new opportunities; they hunt prey that was previously protected by darkness of night. The starlings at the cathedral on their part, sound imitators as they are, have learned to mimic the bells that signal the departure of the tourist boats on the river Die Spree and thereby cause confusion among the tourists, to the great pleasure of the residents. Many starlings have ceased to be migratory birds and overwinter under the roof of the Alexanderplatz train station nearby, where they are well-stocked and protected from birds of prey. After Berlin’s central airport Tempelhof was closed in 2008 and became Tempelhofer Freiheit, a 386-hectare outdoor area, more than a hundred pairs of larks have been found, a bird species that has almost disappeared from German agricultural areas. The nightingale, not exactly known as an urban bird, populates the city in the spring by the thousands. Nowhere else in Germany can one listen to their song as much as in Berlin. While you can see crane and swan migrate in their characteristic formations in the fall, flying across the sky of Berlin on their way to the south, at the same time, almost invisible, tens of thousands of bats enter the city in search of winter quarters. There are sixteen different species of bats in Berlin, attended to by a dedicated circle of people who protect animals. They are concerned that because the city is being increasingly renovated, ruins and open firewalls that previously gave the animals plenty of space in which to hibernate are in danger of disappearing. Most bats now gather in the casemates of the Baroque fortress in Spandau. This is not unproblematic, because the bats may be vectors for rabies and other viral diseases, as we learned from the Covid-19 virus pandemic. One of Berlin’s most contentious construction projects, a memorial site for Germany’s reunification, a heavy swing placed in front of the restored castle, is threatened because the old pedestal is home to the rare Daubenton’s bat (Myotis daubentonii). It is not just the animal protectors who would be happy if the project had to give way to the bats. Rats cannot be excluded from the urban wildlife. As in other big cities, they also have good conditions in Berlin, although the increasing building work in vacant areas has destroyed many of their territories, so they must move to playgrounds and parks. Their number is estimated by some to be able to keep up with the city’s population and more, while others estimate that there are approximately 2.2 million. In defence of the rats, it must be said that they secure nearly 200 jobs for Kammerjäger [chamberlain huntsmen], who, despite the noble title, are not hunting masters of the court, but vermin controllers.22 In 2014, in the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, there were 1,270 vermin alarms, and in 2017 there were 10,022 in the entire city. In terms of the fish resources, on the other hand, which in the early Middle Ages was a major source of income in Berlin’s predecessor cities, little is left, and one can hardly make a living of fishing anymore. At Müggelsee there is a lone professional fisherman who sells what he fishes, preferably hot smoked. The hopeful anglers

212

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

standing somewhere or other by the heavily polluted river Spree should ideally throw their catch and not even feed it to the cat. Some of the many larger and smaller lakes, which are partly leftovers from the ice age, and the artificially constructed ponds that the anglers’ associations take care of, are in slightly better condition. After they stopped setting out invasive fish species, the population of endemic fish stabilized. But basically, one moves in a circle; you set out the small fry and afterwards you angle it again when it has grown big enough. Surrounded by Mark Brandenburg with 1.1 million hectares of forest, the land of the pine wood itself, Berlin is Germany’s largest urban municipal forest owner. Twenty per cent of its area is forest, and as much as 45 per cent is defined as park or water. Berlin has Tegeler Forst [Tegel Forest] with the city’s tallest tree, a larch tree of 42.5 metres, and its oldest, a 900-year-old oak tree, called Dicke Marie [fat Mary], allegedly named after the chef of the Humboldt brothers. And of course, one has the Grunewald Forest along the Havel River in the west and the areas around Müggelsee, the city’s largest lake with 7.4 square kilometres, in the southeast. These are forest paradises that, during Berlin’s isolation, were a vital resource for a locked-up population. The pines dominate with 61 per cent of the trees, followed by oak with 19 per cent and other deciduous trees with 14 per cent. The town might be called the place of origin of German forest Romanticism. The beautiful German word Waldeinsamkeit was conceived in 1796 by the Berlin Romanticist writer Ludwig Tieck in this city.23 Tourists who visit Berlin often notice that the city centre itself is also very green. Even narrow streets are adorned with trees. In total, there are currently about 440,000 trees in the streets. But the number has declined in recent years, due to financial reasons: trees need care, and the city does not see itself able to employ enough tree gardeners. Nevertheless, the Nature Conservation Association24 has started an offensive for the city’s trees with plans to re-plant 10,000 in the coming years. After the clear-cutting of Tiergarten in the first years after World War II, during which people starved and froze, the Berliners have protected their trees. In the poem Die Pappel am Karlsplatz [The poplar tree on Karlsplatz], Brecht paid tribute to the residents because they resisted the temptation to cut down the last remaining trees.25 The reservoir of underdetermined area is still enormous. The ‘death strip’ along the Berlin Wall has become an important addition that could rightly be called terrain vague because this term originally derives from the war’s terminology and denotes the terrain between the front lines. The occupying powers in the west and east have left behind larger areas that have long been vacant. The biggest contributions are West Berlin’s old airports. Berlin Tempelhof Airport has already been closed and has provided the city a 386-hectare city park area, larger than the city’s Tiergarten or New York’s Central Park. A May 2014 referendum shelved all plans to use the vast area or just a peripheral area to remedy the city’s growing needs for housing. The demand for ‘100 Prozent Tempelhofer Feld’ [100 per cent Tempelhof park area] gained a majority, and the city’s politicians have not dared to touch it until now. Here kiting enthusiasts can enjoy themselves. The larch, the bird of the year in 2019, displaced by agricultural monocultures, has settled here and can be seen and heard singing loudly, in the midst of people’s leisure activities. However, the housing shortage is pressing, and it is an

The Fallow Land: A Farewell

213

open question as to how long one can prevent at least the area’s border zones being developed. Known as Tempelhofer Freiheit, it is today an arena for lively recreational outdoor life. In the western urban quarter Gatow, Hitler founded a Luftwaffe airport and used it for his excursions to the ‘Eagle’s Nest’ in Berchtesgaden. It was taken over by the Royal Air Force after World War II and turned into a village-like residential area with adjoining park. Tegel Airport, with 466 hectares, will be added in 2021. No other metropolis has so much recreation area within its boundaries. Even where the city seems to have its most densely built areas, we can discover surprisingly beautiful biotopes. When walking along a poorer quarter, for example in the urban district of Kreuzberg, one can be tempted to go through an opening in a house facade that leads to a lavish green and flowering backyard filled with exotic scents, buzzing insects and bustling bird life. The bombs that hollowed out the apartment buildings have created many small urban oases that soften the harsh city life. A new urban ecological movement is establishing itself: Animal Aided Design.26 This is a different kind of urban planning that tries to preserve or revive the nondomesticated remains in the city to accommodate urban wildlife and bird song. For the sake of humankind.27

Thrush Nightingales and the Underground I grew up in the big city – and at the same time I grew up in the countryside. The house I was born in is located in a small district facing a main street, a tree-lined avenue with a footpath in the middle, flanked by green herbaceous borders and – today – framed by lilacs. On the other side of the main street is the agricultural college, located beyond fruit trees and fields, during the war with a large red cross on the roof when it served as a field hospital, today a faculty of the Freie Universität Berlin. The avenue follows the underground line that was built before World War I and linked the rapidly growing southwestern municipalities that were incorporated in Berlin in 1920. This should make it easier for the residents to reach their various errands there, but more importantly it was to make sure that servants, living in the eastern districts, came to their master and mistress faster. At the end of the avenue, the subway leaves the tunnel and enters a crossing. To experience the transition from darkness to light and vice versa was something I could not get enough of, so like an Orpheus of repetition, I enjoyed commuting between the stations from darkness to light and back again. Even more fun was collecting autumn leaves over the underground’s air well and then letting the leaves swirl away by the currents of air, like a geyser of leaves. The caretaker’s housing at the college was located vis-à-vis and possessed all kinds of poultry, rabbits and shepherd dogs. In the mornings I used to be awakened by thrush nightingales; and tired as I was, especially as the nights became porous in the years of war, I desperately tried to get some sleep. During the spring and summer evenings, it was the thrush nightingales that kept me anxious and awake, and it was the repetitive rumbling of the underground and the house’s responsive tremor that gave me rest and sleep. This chapter has been translated into English by Hege Charlotte Faber.

214

Wild: Aesthetics of the Dangerous and Endangered

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6 7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17

Arno Fischer (1927–2011) trained as a sculptor from 1947 to 1953 in West and East Berlin but turned to photography in 1954. He settled in 1953 in East Berlin and worked until the fall of the GDR as photojournalist and teacher of photography. The series Situation Berlin was a book project; however, due to the erection of the Berlin Wall, it was never published. See http://www.arnofischer.com/sites/arno_1.html#, accessed 20 March 2020. The described photograph is from the series Berlin, no. 17, ‘Ost-Berlin, Unter den Linden 1956’. The full title reads ‘Murx the Europaen! Murx ihn! Murx ihn! Murx ihn ab!’ (1993). The title is from an Indian Song by Paul Scheerbart, a writer of the last century. The scenography was by Anna Viebrock, who was working with Marthaler on a regular basis. Siegfried Kracauer described them in the early 1930s (Frankfurter Zeitung, 18 January 1931), in Siegfried Kracauer, Straßen in Berlin und anderswo (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009), 82. See catalogue: Sigrid Achenbach, ed. Menzel und Berlin: Eine Hommage: [Ausstellung, Berlin, Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 11 March–5 June 2005] (Berlin: Staatliche Museen, Kupferstichkabinett, 2005). Cat. # 101 (pp. 96–98), 20.1 × 26.4 cm and cat. # 110 (102–104), 42 × 52 cm. August Borsig (1804–1854). Jens Christian Jensen, Adolph Menzel, DuMont’s Bibliothek großer Maler (Köln: DuMont, 2003), 62. ‘Ballade von des Cortez Leuten’, Hauspostille 1927. In Bertolt Brecht, Werke: grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe: Gedichte, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, and Gabriele Knopf, vol. 11 (Berlin; Weimar; Frankfurt am Main: AufbauVerlag; Suhrkamp, 1988), 84f. Im Dickicht 1923, Im Dickicht der Städte 1927. In Werke: große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe: Stücke, ed. Hermann Kähler and Werner Hecht, vol. 1 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1989). The name Grunewald derives from the hunting lodge Zum gruenen Walde, erected by order of Elector Joachim II Hector of Brandenburg in 1542. Im Grunewald (ist Holzauktion) – Franz Meißner, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=yH3tgkZ8yjk Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen, Die Hauptstadtgärtner eine Anleitung zum Urban Gardening; Tipps vom Allmende-Kontor auf dem Tempelhofer Feld (Berlin: Jaron, 2015). One of the first to thematize the emptiness was Andreas Huyssen in the essay ‘The Voids of Berlin’, Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (1997). A still very readable critical analysis. ‘Eine baumlose Steppe’ ([A treeless, unforested grassland]). Max Frisch, Tagebuch 1946–1949 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1950), 210. Tagebuch 1946–1949 (Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1987), 31. ‘. . .es bleibt dabei: das Gras, das in der Häusern wächst, der Löwenzahn in der Kirchen, und plötzlich kann man sich vorstellen, wie sich ein Urwald über unsere Städte zieht, langsam, unaufhaltsam, ein menchenloses Gedeihen, ein Schweigen aus Disteln und Moos, eine geschichtslose Erde, dazu da Zwitschern der Vögel, Frühling, Sommer und Herbst, Atem der Jahre, die niemand mehr zählt’. Joseph Roth (1894–1939), ‘Bekenntnis zum Gleisdreieck’, Frankfurter Zeitung 16 July 1924, in Werke: Das journalistische Werk: 1924–1928, ed. Klaus Westermann and Fritz Hackert (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990). Quoted in Tagesspiegel by Beate Rossic, 12 August 2001.

The Fallow Land: A Farewell 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

26

27

215

Hanno Reuterberg, ‘Das Vage wagen’, Die Zeit, 10 January 2002. Architect Theo Brenner, ‘vorsätzliche Gestaltlosigkeit’, Tagesspiegel, 5 March 2002. See http://bybi.no/ (in Norwegian, accessed 20 March 2020). Emina Benalia, ‘Berlin, die Hauptstadt der Nachtigallen’, Berliner Morgenpost 2 June 2016. Stefan Jacobs, ‘Die heimlichen Mitbewohner’, Tagesspiegel, 15 January 2012. ‘O wie mich freut/ Waldeinsamkeit’, from the poem Waldeinsamkeit, 1796. The word is difficult to translate into English but refers to the feeling one has while being alone in the woods. Stiftung Naturschutz Berlin ‘Die Pappel am Karlsplatz’ (1950), in Kinderlieder, Bertolt Brecht, Werke: große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe: Gedichte Sammlungen 1938–1956, ed. Jan Knopf and Werner Hecht, vol. 12 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1988), 295. A project initiated by town planner and landscape architect Thomas E. Hauck (University of Kassel). See also Deike Diening: ‘Stadtplanung für Berlin’s wilde Tiere’, Tagesspiegel 22 May 2015, https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/serie-auf-der-faehrte-1stadtplanung-fuer-berlins-wilde-tiere/12086822.html. Kerstin Decker, ‘Coronastille’, Tagesspiegel, 12 April 2020.

Literature Achenbach, Sigrid, ed. Menzel und Berlin: Eine Hommage: [Ausstellung, Berlin, Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 11 March–5 June 2005]. Berlin: Staatliche Museen, Kupferstichkabinett, 2005. Benalia, Emina. ‘Berlin, die Hauptstadt der Nachtigallen’. Berliner Morgenpost 2 June 2016. Brecht, Bertolt. Werke: grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe: Gedichte. Edited by Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf and Gabriele Knopf. Vol. 11, Berlin; Weimar; Frankfurt am Main: Aufbau-Verlag; Suhrkamp, 1988. Brecht, Bertolt. Werke: große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe: Gedichte Sammlungen 1938–1956. Edited by Jan Knopf and Werner Hecht. Vol. 12, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1988. Brecht, Bertolt. Werke: große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe: Stücke. Edited by Hermann Kähler and Werner Hecht. Vol. 1 Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1989. Brenner, Theo. ‘vorsätzliche Gestaltlosigkeit’. Tagesspiegel, 5 March 2002. Decker, Kerstin. ‘Coronastille’. Tagesspiegel, 12 April 2020. Frisch, Max. Tagebuch 1946–1949. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1950. Frisch, Max. Tagebuch 1946–1949. Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1987. Huyssen, Andreas. ‘The voids of Berlin’. Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (1997): 57–81. Jacobs, Stefan. ‘Die heimlichen Mitbewohner’. Tagesspiegel, 15 January 2012. Jensen, Jens Christian. Adolph Menzel. DuMont’s Bibliothek großer Maler. Köln: DuMont, 2003. Kracauer, Siegfried. Straßen in Berlin und anderswo. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009. Meyer-Renschhausen, Elisabeth. Die Hauptstadtgärtner eine Anleitung zum Urban Gardening; Tipps vom Allmende-Kontor auf dem Tempelhofer Feld. Berlin: Jaron, 2015. Reuterberg, Hanno. ‘Das Vage wagen’. Die Zeit, 10 January 2002. Roth, Joseph. ‘Bekenntnis zum Gleisdreieck’, Frankfurter Zeitung 16 July 1924. In Werke: Das journalistische Werk: 1924–1928, edited by Klaus Westermann and Fritz Hackert, 218–221. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990.

216

Index aesthetic experience 1, 3, 8, 11–12, 17, 19–22, 38, 61, 91, 97, 100–101, 103, 189–190 practice 4 quality 8, 11, 12, 14, 17–21, 40–41, 53 value 8, 11–12, 17, 19, 97, 185 aestheticization 9, 92, 96, 104 aesthetics 3, 6–7, 9, 11–12, 21, 37, 47, 53, 91–92, 97, 100–102, 105, 149, 181–182, 187 agriculture 16, 20, 65, 68, 144, 170, 182–183, 186, 188, 202, 209, 211–213 animalistic 122 animality, see human animality animals 2, 9, 12–14, 19–21, 45, 47–48, 51, 57–59, 62, 68–69, 74, 81–86, 88, 91, 103, 135, 144, 151, 154, 198–200, 207–209, 211, 213 anthropocene 1, 8, 63, 66, 73, 141 anthropocentric 22 anthropocentrism 104–105 anthropogenic wild 2, 10, 169, 171–172, 174–175 architecture 4, 6–8, 10, 45–48, 50–53, 55–53, 65, 67, 74, 132, 164, 169, 172–175, 203 arcadia 6–7, 60, 62, 69, 71, 198 areas 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, 18, 32–33, 35, 39–40, 61, 66, 93, 103, 105, 142, 154, 181, 183, 198–200, 202, 205–207, 209, 211–13 art 3–4, 6–7, 9–11, 31, 83–84, 109, 131, 137, 141–155, 164, 167–169, 192, 198, 200 of building 53, 58 Artscape Nordland 142 atmosphere 8, 10, 34, 36–37, 39–41, 125, 136–138, 151, 164, 167–168, 171, 174–175, 197 attraction 9, 91–92, 97–98, 102, 105–106, 113, 122, 168, 207, 209 authenticity 14, 16, 131, 200

Bateson, Gregory 73 beast 45, 65, 69, 81, 87, 125, 141, 143 beauty 10, 19, 21–22, 37, 56, 60–62, 71, 91, 95, 97–98, 100–101, 103, 105, 135, 141–143, 145, 148–149, 153–155, 186, 189, 199, 207, 213 Beckert, Hans 9, 109, 111–114, 117–127 bees 209 Berleant, Arnold 38, 181, 190 Berlin 10, 123, 197–213 Berlin Wall 10, 197–199, 202–4, 208–209, 212 biotopes 10, 200, 209, 213 birds 17, 37, 60, 68, 91, 136, 192, 204, 207–213 Blechen, Carl 199–200 bricks 67–68, 184–185 build 51, 58, 65, 172–173 building 4, 6–8, 10, 35–37, 45, 50–58, 60–63, 65–68, 125, 172–174, 184–186, 197–198, 200, 202–204, 207, 209, 211, 213 bumblebees 14, 23 n.31 Bure 164, 172–173 Burke, Edmund 62, 91–92, 97, 100–104, 151 Carrifran Wildwood 15–19, 21–22 Christianity 95, 137, 139, 172 cities 5, 8–10, 35, 37–41, 51, 65, 67–69, 71–73, 75, 81, 110–111, 183–188, 191–193, 197–198, 200, 203–204, 207, 209, 211 climate 4, 16, 45, 51, 54, 57–58, 60, 65, 70, 141, 143, 169–170, 172 change 15, 169–172, 175 community 12, 20, 81, 170–172, 174, 181, 191–193, 206 rural 67 condition 31, 65, 70, 101, 117, 165, 169, 171–172, 186, 197

217

218 animal 82–83 climatic 51 human 50, 58, 89 n.27 sublime 102, 104–105 weather 51, 169, 174 wild 60 conflict 11, 32, 97–98, 165, 168, 170, 182–184, 187, 189, 192–193, 205 consciousness 68–69, 72, 169, 175 self- 167 conservation (history) 11–12, 14, 22, 182, 185, 187–189, 192, 209, 212 contemporary art 9, 141, 150–152, 154 creatures 32–33, 45, 93–95, 100, 103, 122, 141, 143–144, 146, 150–151, 208 dangerous 21, 93, 103, 106, 122, 143–146, 155 wild 39 Cronon, William 32–33 Cross, Dorothy 9, 141–144, 146, 152, 155 Shark-Cow-Bathtub 9, 141–144, 150, 155, 156 n.14 crows 209–210 culture 4, 8, 13–14, 16, 49, 58, 67–68, 72–74, 81–83, 132–133, 139, 144, 155, 163, 170–172, 174, 203, 207 popular culture 115, 131 dangerous 3, 8, 38, 41, 46, 48, 63, 101–104, 113, 115–116, 122–123, 127, 137, 141, 143, 185 forces 2, 9, 109, 121 nature 3, 9, 59, 91, 133, 141, 143 Daren, Oddvar I. N., 9, 141–142, 147–150, 155 Opus for Heaven and Earth 9, 141, 147–148, 150 death 3, 5, 7, 20, 49, 59–60, 62, 71, 86, 102, 106, 125, 127, 136–139, 146, 150, 165–167 Deleuze, Gilles 66 Derrida, Jacques 83 domesticated 4, 13–14, 20, 32, 35, 37, 73, 103–104, 209 Dovregubben (the Dovre King, the Mountain King) 95, 109, 120, 122–125 dwell 8, 34–36, 38–9, 41, 50, 68–69, 72, 173

Index ecological crisis 2, 141, 146, 150, 153, 157 n.26 restoration 4, 8, 11–15, 17, 20–21 values 11, 22 ecology 4–5, 8, 13–14, 17, 19–22, 37, 47, 51–53, 59, 73–74, 151, 153–155, 163, 166, 170, 181–182, 213 ecosystem 11, 13–17, 19–20, 169 embodied 5, 19, 47, 49–50, 52, 55–56, 58–59, 69 emptiness 198, 202–203 endangered 1, 3, 9, 33, 48, 63, 70, 109, 111, 120, 127, 141, 143–144, 151, 153, 155, 209, 211 environment 1, 3–4, 8–9, 15, 20, 22, 32, 34, 37–39, 41, 47–48, 50, 56, 58–59, 85, 103, 120, 141, 144, 152–155, 163, 170, 171–174, 181 environmental aesthetics 5, 11–12, 21–22, 181, 190 management 13–14, 16–17, 19–20, 182, 189, 191 ethics 16, 20, 153, 158 n.51 existence 7, 32, 34, 41, 59, 62, 85–86, 88, 91, 103–104, 111, 141, 163, 201 fallow land 10, 197–108, 201–203, 205–207, 209 Fiji 10, 163–164, 169–173, 175 film music 118–119 Finland 35, 37, 131–133, 135 folk songs 115, 132, 139 forces of nature 69, 82–83, 92, 99, 104, 120, 142, 167–174 forest 2, 19, 33, 45, 54, 57, 60, 69–70, 72–73, 92–3, 103, 120, 133, 142, 151, 153–155, 182, 187–188, 199–204, 212 foundation 52, 56–57 future 10, 15–18, 22, 106, 151, 153–154, 167, 172, 174–175, 207 garden 6, 37, 41, 60–63, 64 n.30, 69, 72–73, 185, 187, 200–202, 209 Gibson, James 8, 46–48, 50, 52, 56, 58–60 Grieg, Edvard 9, 95, 109–110, 113–122, 125–127, 131 ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ 9, 95, 109–110, 113, 115, 117–120, 122

Index Hampstead Heath 10, 181–182, 185–187, 189, 193 Heidegger, Martin 34–36, 38–40 Hildegard von Bingen 166, 176 n.11 Holocene 8, 66, 155 n.1 home 4, 31, 33–36, 39–41 horror 9, 96, 101–102, 104, 146, 149 fiction 31, 36 House of the Spirits 10, 163–164, 169, 175 human animality 9, 81–83, 88 n.2 body 13, 149, 173–174 Ibsen, Henrik 9, 95, 109, 114, 119–120, 122–123 Peer Gynt 9, 95, 109, 114–115, 119–120, 122–125 idyll 6, 183, 186–187, 198–199 imagination 12, 14, 17–18, 21, 67, 69, 98–99, 103–105, 122, 163, 166, 183 Kalevala 4, 9, 131–139 Tuonela 136–139 Väinämöinen 4, 133–135, 137 Kant, Immanuel 37, 47–48, 91–92, 97–102, 104–105 Kantele 133–135 Kent, William 62, 69 Ladies’ Pond 10, 181–183, 187, 189, 192–193 landscape 1–2, 10, 11, 13–14, 16–22, 33, 42 n.6, 69, 103, 120, 148, 155, 183, 185–189, 191, 193, 199, 202, 205 aesthetics 10, 11, 14, 16–22, 183, 185–188, 191 painters 150, 199 paintings 62, 152, 198 Lang, Fritz 9, 109, 118–120, 124 M 9, 109, 111–112, 118, 120, 124 Leopold, Aldo 73 liminal 10, 141–143, 150, 152, 154–155 Lispector, Clarice 9, 84–86 London 10, 181–186, 188, 191 Longinus 97 machines 74, 167–169 meaning 5, 12, 14, 38–39, 41, 46–50, 59–60, 62, 68, 73, 131, 163, 165

219

Medusa 143–146 Menzel, Adolph 10, 198–202, 205 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 9, 82–85 monster 103–104, 125, 143–146, 150–151, 154 Monteiro, Fabrice 10, 141–142, 150, 152–155 The Prophecy 10, 141, 152–154 multispecies ethnography 10, 181, 190 murderer 9, 109–114, 117–118, 120, 122–127 music 4, 7, 9, 74, 95, 110, 113–120, 125, 131–132, 135–139 mythology 3, 136, 143–144, 150–152, 155, 165 Nordic 3, 9, 92–94, 133, 135, 139 myths 3, 6, 60, 62, 69–70, 94–96, 136, 143–146, 152 nature 1, 3–5, 7, 9–10, 14, 17, 19–20, 22, 31–33, 37, 39, 41, 46, 48–50, 53–63, 69, 73, 81–87, 91–97, 99–100, 102–106, 120, 122–123, 131, 133, 135, 138–139, 141–144, 149–151, 153, 155, 163–164, 166, 168–169, 171, 173, 175, 183–184, 189, 198–200, 203, 205–207, 209 Nordic 60, 92–93, 103 Naess, Arne 158 n.51 Oddvar I. N., see Daren, Oddvar I. N. Olsen, Kjell Erik Killi 10, 141–142, 150–151, 155, 158 n.41, 158 n.42, 158 n.44 Salamandernatten (Salamander Night) 10, 141, 150–151, 153–154 original hut, see primitive hut Orpheus 4, 69, 135, 213 pain 3, 59, 62, 97–98, 100–103, 146 Pan 3, 6, 62 paradise 6–7, 60, 170, 212 pastoral 6, 183, 185–186, 188, 191 perception 8, 33, 46–48, 50, 81–87, 164, 170 phenomenology 9, 82–84, 88 n.6, 88 n.7 picturesque 61–62, 69, 183–184, 187

220 place 2, 4, 10, 12, 14, 18–21, 34–36, 51, 70–73, 85, 93, 99, 102, 143–144, 163–166, 175, 200–203, 207, 209 primitive hut 45, 48, 50, 54, 57–58 psychology of perception 47 public space 181–182, 192 reconciliation 6–7, 60, 62, 166, 175, 177 n.16 religion 139, 168, 170–172, 174 renaturation 10, 207 responsibility 41, 127, 154, 171 rewilding 4, 8, 11–17, 19–22, 23 n.38 ruins 53, 55–56, 59, 63, 197, 202–205, 209, 211 rune songs 131–133, 135–136, 139 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 10, 163–167, 169, 176 n.9 Ode to the West Wind 10, 163–167 shelter 8, 34–36, 45–60, 65, 171, 173–174, 190, 198, 204 Sibelius, Jean 9, 131, 133, 135–139 Swan of Tuonela 9, 131, 136–139 spirit 54, 63, 72–73, 86, 141, 152, 164–169, 175 strange 3, 6, 8, 31–32, 36–37, 39–40, 138, 143, 152 sublime 3, 9, 21, 31, 33, 37, 40, 61–62, 91–92, 96–106, 142, 148–151 swimmers 10, 181–182, 189–193 tame 1, 3–4, 8, 32, 34–35, 49, 59–60, 69, 74, 81, 106, 120, 163–164, 169, 175 tameless 166–167, 169, 171, 173 terror 62, 69, 100–104, 150 see also sublime Thoreau, Henry David 32, 71, 73–75, 163 troll 3, 9, 92–96, 100–101, 103–106, 109, 115, 120–125, 151 Tsing, Anna 181–182, 190, 192 Turner, J.M.W. 10, 150, 163–164, 167–169, 177 n.29, 198 Snowstorm 10, 163–164, 167–169 ugliness 8, 12, 19, 21–22, 93, 103, 141, 149, 154

Index uncontrollable 3, 9, 36–37, 40, 72, 91–92, 96, 105–106, 109, 165–166, 169, 171, 206 undomesticated 2, 5, 207, 213 unpredictable 1, 3, 10, 15, 21, 34, 96, 104, 131, 165, 167, 171, 174–175 unscenic landscape 8, 12, 19 untamed 1, 3, 5, 9–10, 32, 60–61, 82, 91, 103, 120, 127, 131, 163–164, 175, 200, 203 urban development 198, 206 environment 32, 37, 39, 41 landscape 21–22, 202, 212 wildlife 207, 210–211, 213 wildness 32, 37, 40 urbanization 10, 199–200, 202 Vitruvius 45, 48, 50–54, 56–57, 65 vulnerable nature 4, 141–142, 149–151, 153, 155 wall 4, 8, 48, 51, 53–54, 57, 60–61, 65, 70, 72–75, 172 walled garden 6, 60 weather 142–143, 148, 164, 167–175 wild 10, 49, 163–164, 167–172, 174–175 wild being 9, 51, 81–83, 86–88 nature 1, 4, 9, 14, 37, 46, 48–49, 55–56, 58, 62, 69, 91–92, 104, 106, 131, 141–142, 149–150 swimming 10, 181–182, 189–193 wilderness 2, 5–6, 8, 12–14, 22, 32–33, 35, 37–38, 41, 45–46, 48, 60, 70, 73, 81, 103, 163–164, 166, 175 n.2, 198–199, 202 wildness 2, 8–10, 13–14, 22, 31–33, 37–41, 62, 65, 68–69, 71, 73–75, 91, 105, 109, 127, 135–136, 163, 168, 171, 181–182, 186–187, 190–193 wisdom 69, 164, 166, 174–175 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 48, 74 wolves 12, 18, 21, 65, 70–74, 199 woodland 15–20, 41, 154, 186, 193, 199 Zille, Heinrich 200–201

221

222

223

224

225

226

Carrifran1Wildwood; planted trees are visible on both sides of the valley. Photograph taken by Jonathan Prior, August 2009.

2 Movie poster M – Il Mostro di Düsseldorf (1931?), artist unknown, by permission from the Everett Collection.

3 Th. Kittelsen (1857–1914): Peer Gynt in the Hall of the Dovre King. 1913. Water colour (900 × 1200 mm), private collection. Public domain. https:// no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:Per_gynt_i_dovregubbens_hall.jpg

4 Dorothy Cross: Shark-Cow-Bathtub (1993), Sømna, Nordland, commissioned by Artscape Nordland / Nordland County. Photo: Ernst Furuhatt. Granite (cow’s udder), bronze (shark), cast iron (bathtub). Cow’s udder 75 × 75 cm, length of shark 250 cm, bathtub 60 × 110 × 57 cm.

5 Dorothy Cross: Shark-Cow-Bathtub (1993), Sømna, Nordland, commissioned by Artscape Nordland / Nordland County. Photo: Vegar Moen.

6 Dorothy Cross: Shark-Cow-Bathtub (1993), Sømna, Nordland, commissioned by Artscape Nordland / Nordland County. Photo: Vegar Moen.

7 Oddvar I. N.: Opus for Heaven and Earth (1993), Vevelstad, Nordland, commissioned by Artscape Nordland / Nordland County. Photo: Vegar Moen. Engraved into the mountain. Diameter of the circle 980 cm, area 75 m².

8 Fabrice Monteiro: Untitled #1, 2013 from The Prophecy, 2013–2015. Photograph © Fabrice Monteiro / BONO 2021/ Adagp, Paris, 2021 – Photo: Adagp images 2021.

9 Fabrice Monteiro: Untitled #6, 2014 from The Prophecy, 2013–2015. Photograph © Fabrice Monteiro / BONO 2021/ Adagp, Paris, 2021 – Photo: Adagp images 2021.

10 Fabrice Monteiro: Untitled #8, 2015, from The Prophecy, 2013–2015. Photograph © Fabrice Monteiro / BONO 2021/ Adagp, Paris, 2021 – Photo: Adagp images 2021.

11 J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), Snowstorm – Steam-boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead, c. 1842, oil on canvas, 91 × 122 cm, Tate Britain, London, © Wikimedia commons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Mallord_William_Turner_-_Snow_ Storm_-_Steam-Boat_off_a_Harbour%27s_Mouth_-_WGA23178.jpg, 26 April 2019.

12 Ladies’ Pond. © Photo: Jessica J. Lee.

13 Adolph Menzel (1815–1905): Railway between Berlin and Potsdam [Die Berlin-Potsdamer Bahn], 1847, oil on canvas, 42 × 52 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin. © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / Jörg P. Anders.

14 Carl Blechen (1798–1840): View of Roofs and Gardens [Blick auf Dächer und Gärten], 1835, oil on canvas, 20 × 26 cm, Nationalgalerie Berlin. © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / Jörg P. Anders.

15 Adolph Menzel (1815–1905): View of the Backyard Houses [Blick auf Hinterhäuser], 1847, oil on paper, 27 × 53 cm, Nationalgalerie Berlin. © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / S. R. Gnamm.