Theodor Wildt's development notebooks (10/10)

Theodor Wildt is a skilled excursionist, a studious prose writer and a brilliant camera operator, sharing textual and pictorial fragments of his work with Regard Libre readers. Regard Libre.

The materialized space within which our lives take place, the frame of reference in which we situate our landmarks, as it offers itself to our sight and even more so to our senses, is now commonly referred to as the landscape. It is an entity from which we originate and into which we are integrated as actors, and from which we are instinctively separated as spectators. It includes the most essential idea in the history of human thought, that of natureA matrix representing the whole, its contents and its functioning. We tend to see nature in the landscape, but it is the landscape that is in nature. This term, which appeared at the turn of the XVI^th In the 19th century, it came to us from painting studios, and basically determined the ’extent of the country that the eye can embrace as a whole«.

It's interesting to note that what was originally a pictorial projection of nature on a support has become the support for our ideal projections of nature. For if we accept that nature fully integrates our species in the same way as the components of the mineral and living worlds, we should admit that everything man is and creates is natural by definition. By way of example, we readily confuse the character of a so-called «artificial» object in that it is an artifice, a human production, with the fact that it is composed of «unnatural» elements.

Denying that humans and their emanations - imperfect though they may be - are part of it is a form of denial. An infantile phantasm akin to religious myth, of a pure original nature separated from a corrupted Man, thus the purveyor of his own degradation. To conceive of it without incorporating Humanity in extenso presumes the non-existence of a human nature, making us beings to be perfected to the point of death.’hybris, confusing will to power with omnipotence.

That we use our faculties sensibly is no less desirable. I discovered the tranquility of a privileged relationship with the landscape and nature in the excursion to the rugged regions of Nuithonie, between the Alemannic shores of the Saane and Sense rivers. A land of night, where darkness allows light, where shadows reveal the obscurantism of the age, it has become my space, my time, the source of my contemporary commitment.

Write to the author: theodor.wildt@leregardlibre.com

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