Land, Landscape - Writing by ester spitz
My dearest mama,
I miss you so much, if only you were still here for everything I have been going through. Your soul was a beautiful landscape.
I am sending you journal notes and thoughts about land and landscape, and bits of text that I wrote about you, because I want you to know it all and feel you close to me.
Because we will have a gathering at El Nido where we will talk about landscape, I have been thinking a lot about land and landscape — the inner landscape: dreams and thoughts, and the outer landscape: mountains, the desert, the forest — the spaces around us as landscape: streets, highways, buildings, houses, spaces inside buildings and houses, and spaces within spaces — and the conceptual landscape: the landscape of relationships. I could go on and on.
For a while I thought about nature, about what nature is and what a natural landscape is, and what it looks like without human interference. Then I thought about our interference, what we do to the earth, and I wondered whether all of that is simply part of nature.
I came to the conclusion that we are no different from, for example, the Ice Age — a possible catastrophe. But then I thought we might invent something to prevent that. That we can think ourselves and nature into another direction. When I thought that, I thought: we can imagine anything and believe anything, and we have imagined and believed so many things that have shaped our reality. Our entire reality may be a slowly formed agreement. We have a certain understanding of how we are and what we are, but that can change, because in fact we have invented everything ourselves. And perhaps one day it will be completely different — something we cannot even imagine yet.
And then I think... maybe it is all a dream, a thought.
So I thought about all forms of landscape — for example, the landscape of relationships — and how relationships influence your inner landscape, and your biological landscape, your physical landscape. Landscapes of relationships inside cells.
And I wrote this about you:
Mama is landscape. Her arms and legs, and hands that do everything — cooking, driving, putting the laundry in the machine, typing on the typewriter, holding the phone, writing an appointment in her planner.
Her planner is landscape. Her car, the driveway, our house, the kitchen, the view over the trees, the end of the street.
Mama is land and land is also mama, the earth. Abundance. Nourishment.
I drink milk from a cow that eats grass from the land. I eat almonds
Potatoes
Strawberries
I eat an apple
Everything is land or comes from land.
And then there is the landscape of my bedroom.
I look at the vague contours and shadows in the room, and at the window with the soft light from outside
And the inner landscape
My dreams
I am falling. I am in a theatre, and I am falling. If I continue to fall, I will end up in another culture, with people who are very far from me but treat me kindly. Even so I feel lonely among them and paralyzed. I can’t find my place.
I flew and landed on a building in a big city.
I am in bed with mama. I only see the burning tip of her cigarette in the dark.
I don’t want to go to school.
I dream of another world, a world beyond the stars.
I am afraid in this world — of rules that don’t make sense, of death, of life, of not being able to do it all.
Not becoming a desert — but that is allowed too
The relationship between outer landscape and inner landscape. Coincidence. The cutting down of trees outside my window while I was in a particularly difficult period of my life, discovering a new foundation and building it — as if my old life was being torn down to build a new one?
Landscapes of life:
daily gestures
the world around us orchards
hills, dreams, and routines
Mountains, gardens, and moments — mirrors of our dreams, fears, the terrain. Garden of abundance, garden of opulence
Land
Drifting away from yourself
Swamp
Life as a chessboard — constellations, conflicts, relationships, situations — the chessboard as landscape.
The kitchen floor is worn down where I stood for thirty years.
I sit on a small wall in the garden, next to the cars, but I see all the green. I think of all the organisms, the energy that makes everything grow. At that moment I feel — it seems — the same energy in my hands.
Pelvis
Old
Noise
Papa
Terror. Endless terror
Land
I am not familiar with land that is untouched and wild. I come from an environment where nothing was untouched. I come from cultivated land — reclaimed land, farmland, planted forests — nothing that nature made itself. Like Greenland.
Holland looked so beautiful from the air, like a blanket with planes in different shapes and colors, like a work of art that is made to be seen from above, especially in comparison to Greenland, which is just land, land as it comes, the way nature made it.
Untouched are the mountains, the winds, the fires — phenomena as manifestations of inner life and the psyche.
And then what the land gives — everything from which our lives are built. And from what we are built, food: wine, jam, bread, nuts, grains, fruit, berries.
Landscape moves me — dreams, cities, interiors, villages, infrastructure. Landscape.
In my experience my environment is central — but is that land? It’s not always land, but landscape for sure.
Everything comes from land - what we make — buildings, houses, cities.
Landscape Land
Space Environment
The hills know — they are stable.
The mountain is solid — land as metaphor, as support and example.
Fruit trees
Fields
Mother cares, nourishes Fertile growth, abundance
Mountain tops, the shape of mountain tops against the late afternoon sky, is if carefully drawn. I eat an apple and almonds, strawberries. I drink milk from a cow. I eat a potato.
Body as landscape, how the body organizes itself, organizes like a space, an interior. - and as land, organisms
Places of my childhood in my dream. My friend’s mid century modern house with a large lawn bordering the woods. The small square in front of my other friend’s house. The stone bench where we secretly smoked cigarettes.
Mostly space
Ancestors
I wandered off. Are you still there, mama?
You are dead now. We buried you in a coffin that decays quickly. Sara chose it. She was seven — you know she was seven the last time you saw her.
The years after you died, we talked about whether you would already be bones, and when you would be completely disintegrated and become one with the earth.
Of course, you were already one with the earth.