Appreciation (25) … Mountains & water = beauty!?

Appreciation (25) … Mountains & water = beauty!?
Torrey Orton,
Barcelona, Spain
June 10, 2010

 

Where there's mountains and there's water, there's beauty

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  Rough translation of traditional Chinese saying
  
   

As we walked along our fourth snowmelt powered stream in the Pyrenees a week ago, I became aware that the rhythm of its downhill rush had an undercurrent to the foreground roar of water on stone and water. This was a persistent low rumble, a susurration maybe, which recalled the background voice of our favourite beach respite, Eastern View. We spend a week a year looking out into the steady but highly varying roar and rumblings of the ocean surf. It's the auditory respite of our resort from the city. The noise counterpoints the view in that case, and so maybe that was what was happening in the mountains. It is ever-present to some degree, lingering while the waters of stream or sea come and go with thunder or slush (hear it).


While the views of the mountains in their ever changing variations were moment to moment present to us, the fact of their slow degradation by the waters rested in the background of my awareness. And so, perhaps, in starting this post my first awareness of its topic was aural, not visual. This came, as topics usually do, in the early morning seeking words for the difference between the noise of clashing waters and the sound of flowing waters – a search as yet incomplete! The undercurrent sound was delicate and could only be heard at certain spots on the mountain path, to be as suddenly overwhelmed by noise as it had appeared out of the noise moments earlier. Their expressions, the undercurrents and the topics, are similarly reluctant. But, on to the mountains, and the questionable eminence of the visual over the aural, unlike that of taste over touch ….


Primary senses?
The attraction of attractions in real mountains (we haven't any in Oz, though we have competitive heights – a reminder of the eventual dominance of the waters over the lands) is the appearance of having a great view of this or that snow-garnished, rising wonder…great until we move from this point of view to the next one a few steps over or up from here. We seem to produce the new view by moving, without knowing what it will be only that it will be. As we were walking one of these perception-making paths, I encouraged us not to stop for lunch until we went around one more corner, out of my certainty that a better view was there, as it was to some others' surprise. It has so often, so long been so for me that I don't even think about proposing it.


Attracted attention
This is the attraction of mountains, and of waters, for me. They attract my attention; incite my interest…..as much if not more than I invest them with attractiveness by creating the changing views. That any scene/setting can be attractive is attested by the capacity to see views which people have in the most unpromising visual and auditory environments – the two apparent perceptual deserts of permanent sand and snow. Languages notoriously reflect this capacity to invest attractiveness with, to others, incredible refinements of descriptive power for their dominant environments. What's snow for us is a dozen distinctions in the character of its surface and composition for Inuit, as is sand a palette of colours to the Tuareg, who lack our variety of greens for good reason.


A motion picture can show that this process occurs, that there are views to be produced by what's present in the terrain of our passage – the objective mountains of life. I'm exploring the subjective ones of our experience, what keeps us seeking them perhaps. Maybe, too , it's not 'us', just me who does this, though I suspect a greater generality of experience because my capacity is not mine it's human, with the variation arising from my particular biopsychosocial heritages.


Novelty and interest
Staying with representations (photos, videos, paintings) a bit more: I noticed at Millau, France, that the viaduct was less compelling alive, so to speak, than some of its web images, particularly the moving ones done from a helicopter on perfect days, etc. I was a little disappointed, though Jane was not. She had a different investment in the event, the thing. From close up my disappointment melted without mention because I was seeing aspects of the viaduct inaccessible to the helicoptered eye. We were seeing it at moments from the inside as when we entered one of the pillars at its base to find it was two pillars designed to reduce wind resistance by circulating the passing winds to create a counter pressure to that applied by their hitting the exposed flanks of the pillars. And, we could see that the other six pillars, over their 2.5 Ks carriage of the roadway, were similar great things scaled down by distance.


What we saw on arriving is also not what we mostly saw in the recent Richard Hammond treatment of the viaduct's engineering wonders, and their historical origins (another reason for my diminished joy with the eventual reality – too much exposure?).


A missing picture
Another take on perception driving objectivity: two days ago I followed Jane into the Bilbao (Gehry) Guggenheim which is quite wondrously intrusive on the outside and enclosing on the inside. That's a double in most books. This is another place she has wanted to be in and around for a while. Among the offers inside was an Henri Rousseau historical from start to finish. I enjoyed wandering through with a mild sense of 'I know what's going on here' which derived from a competent exposure to the visual arts in college, backed by a fair photo recall memory for pictures and words. This has done me OK for a general grip on the visual art world.



 
But, towards the end of the review I realised I was on the edge of a slight disappointment - that the most characteristic Rousseau (The Dream, 1910) was not on show, though a small photo of it in somebody else's museum was on show. I had actually been going through the show to get to that pic, to revisit in the real an image I had collected 45 years ago in Art 102 (101 was everything up the renaissance, or so, I think). Not, of course, that I consciously knew I was doing so until the awareness struck. It only slightly surprised me when I looked the picture up to discover that I had cropped it in my memory, leaving out the dreamer.


This event opens a Pandora's worth of wonder about underlying motivations in all manner of settings…but that's for another day. Yet on this day I have to notice that this event points the finger of probability at unseen influences distorting our everyday perceptions …which a number of people have noticed before. What they do not say is that the motivation of the unknown, but not unknowable, may also be the very force which drags us into the light of unexperienced objects as with Rousseau above. So, a reality undistorted by consciousness may not be available.

And I haven't even started to describe the mountain / water mix with any fineness!