Uncle Zip and Mindspace chew over Ransome's exemplary series. The books -- especially the old blue Puffins, with Ransome's illustrations on their covers -- were always around the house, though my mom, brother dru, and uncle Paul were probably more faithful readers than I. As with Tove Jansson, or Rupert Bear, the illustrations always seemed a less mediated interface to the mirror-world of the text, and I probably paged through Swallowdale or Peter Duck more often than I read them. The simplified contours of Ransome's Lake District escarpments, hills and islands remind me of Ferdinand Hodler's lake-and-mountain vistas: landscapes whose compositions appear undirected, large and open enough to permit the mind to wander freely.

Mindspace: "The narrative in concerning the ‘now’ as it were yet takes its penetrative force – its ability to break with the mundane, with routine (its story-making value) – from the subversion of this ‘now’. Thus: making the wild the subject. The children are in communion with nature, camping, sailing, walking, exploring. Thus, I read of this ‘adventure in reality’; but only as a kind of voided now; for it was only in that balance with nature that the tale existed, the tale being about this very balance. In other words, I found myself identifying with characters who could survive ontologically (as it were) only to the extent that the link with the past was observed: observed, understood, brought into play, experienced, in one’s own life. But of course that for me at that time, even then, in the Sixties, that was impossible. Swallows and Amazons was impossible. It was all dead and gone. The book instead, for me, expressed an acute sense of the past’s irretrievable loss."

Fair enough, but I think that the series' impact on a young socially awkward West Coast Canadian in the 1970s and early 1980s was measurably different than its impact on, say, a resident of Toronto, New York, or Birmingham. Fucking around in the Coast Range -- which begins, literally, five minutes from my childhood West Vancouver home -- imparts a strong sense of, if not exactly nature's "permanence," then at least its presence as something larger than (and indifferent to) human activities. Early trips to Garibaldi Park got me into trouble later, in high school and in university art history classes, where I learned, somewhat to my surprise, that landscape was a "social construct," and largely fiction. We make our own landscapes, there is no "nature," essentialism, Western rationalism, boo hiss, & etc. Which makes sense, I suppose, if you're a chainsmoking PhD. who gets winded walking up a flight of stairs, and whose only experience of "nature" is watching the evergreens creak in the wind outside Lasserre's third-floor windows. It makes a lot less sense if you're an artist who spends a lot of time outside, like Bob Smithson -- "Well, in nature you can fall off cliffs...." -- or if you're descending a manky sixty-foot cliff slick with moss and running water, using several pairs of jeans tied together as a "rope," and seriously beginning to wonder if you and your friends will ever make it back alive.

"What'd you do on the weekend?"

"Oh, went climbing...."

"Really!" said my Art History and English Honors friends, glad that someone was out enjoying "nature."

This "nature is a mental construct" line plays well in arts seminars, less well in the applied sciences, and not at all in the work of writers like John McPhee and Robert Smithson, whose geological time-take on the hubris of anthropocentric mental-construct fakery is a cold and accurate corrective to the kind of thinking that still routinely appears on VAG wall texts and in the pages of the Oxford Art Journal.
- posted by cjb @ 8:53 PM