We tend to think of landscapes affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places – retreated to most often when we are most remote from them – are among the most important landscapes we possess.
Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways
The Welsh call the feeling that Robert MacFarlane describes above as hiraeth – the heartfelt affinity with the land that keeps pulling one home. Shetland is one of these landscapes for me. When we moved there (I was 12) I was told to expect “bleak”. No-one mentioned the immensity of the sky, the clarity of the light, or the omni-presence of the weather. Or that just by standing on a hillside, buffeted by the wind, one could feel so fragile and inconsequential.
Remembered landscapes come with layers of time and memory: seeing the aurora borealis in the winter sky late at night as we drove home. We pulled over at the side of the road to get out and watch. That feeling of being so close to the upper atmosphere. Realizing that the sky is so thin, so barely there. I felt so close to those “merry dancers”, as if I could jump up and float away with them into the stars beyond.
It is 30 years since I moved away, I think about going back, but worry that my remembered landscape will dissolve when confronted with the real place. I need my imaginary landscapes.
The existence…of these unseen but accessible places is of consequence to each of us. They dominate the geography of our imagination and dreams…We meed these places that we’ve never traveled to, that we may never go to. We need them, not for escape, but for measure: of all the places we have been to, and even-of ourselves as well. We need them as a way of balancing what is, with what might be. And as a way of understanding the scope of things, of admitting that the things beyond us are also the things that define us. These are places that are at once both actual and acts of imagination. They function to keep the world large, hopeful, and unknown.
These rarely experienced places – are no less valuable than those we occupy daily, no less inhabited by us than our most familiar and intimate ones. In acknowledging them we understand that we are something more than the body we inhabit and the things we consume; and that we dwell in places beyond our immediate perception or reach – so that we may see beyond our sight.
Roni Horn, Roni Horn
