through law, public policy, and actions undertaken hundreds, even thousands, of miles away. All living tilings share the same space, all make landscape, and all landscapes, wild or domes-ticated, have coauthors, all are phenomena of nature and culture. Others share the language, but only humans (as far as we yet know) reflect, worship, make art, and design landscapes like the gardens of the Villa d’Este that “set the formal structures” within a natural context “where the tension lectures us on our mortal state.”9...
Metaphors grounded in landscape guide how humans think and act. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson demonstrate what Emerson observed: that humans understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another, projecting bodies and minds onto the surrounding world: trees and clouds seen as bounded, a river seen as having a mouth, a mountain as having a foot, front, back, and side.10 One might just as easily see things as continuous and undifferentiated; viewing them as separate is more a function of individual consciousness than an inherent quality of landscape. Many metaphors are grounded in fundamental relationships with landscape—moving, making, eating, wasting. The most common refer to space and direction: in and out, up and down. In American culture, high and in are good, down and out are bad; central is important, marginal is not. Landscape imagery conveys feelings and ideas: emotions churning like a stormy sea, rivers of time, clouds where gods live, sacred mountains, Father Sky impregnating Mother Earth with rain as the seed, Zeus and Thor hurling thunderbolts in anger, Siva flashing lightening from his Third Eye, a flare of cosmic intelligence, the god of Jews and Christians dispatching plagues of locusts and disease to punish the wicked. Personification, the attribution of human feelings like intention, anger, love to natural forms and phenomena, is the foundation of myth and religion.
Landscapes are the world itself and may also be metaphors of the world. A tree can be both a tree and The Tree, a path both a path and The Path. A tree in the Garden of Eden represents the Tree of Life, the Tree of Knowledge. It becomes the archetype of Tree. When a path represents the Path of Enlightenment of Buddhism or the Stations of the Cross of Christianity it is no longer a mere path, but The Path. The yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz is both path and Path. The similar is the stuff of metaphor, simile, and personification; contrasts are the stuff of paradox and oxymoron. Landscape actors, objects, and modifiers may enhance meaning without rhetoric: rivers reflect and run, but they do not pun.
Built landscapes may be rhetorical. Landscape features, like hill and street, may be emphasized or embellished for effect, slope steepened to make climb difficult, street broadened and lined with trees to impress the viewer. Gardens of allusion reflect oral and written literature: Shakespeare gardens allude to the bard’s plays and poetry, their herbs and blooms references to his works; eighteenth-century English gardens, with their buildings in classical style and pastoral landscape refer to classical literature. When Mussolini built a monument in 1938 to those who died in a battle of the First World War in Redipuglia, near Italy’s northwestern boundary, he used the language of rhetoric. More than one hundred thousand soldiers are buried there in twenty-two terraces of tombs, arranged from bottom to top in alphabetical order, sixty thousand buried at the top of the hill in a common grave surmounted by three crosses, like Calvary. Words engraved in the pavement tell how these soldiers died for the glory of Italy, immortal in memory. Facing the hill of tombs is the grave of their general, as if addressing his entombed soldiers. Their inscriptions answer, “Presente.” “I am here.”
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