----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 3:57 PM
Subject: Re: Richard Long at SFMOMA
> Interesting points, Dave. Although it might be precisely that sense he
> has of being in a tradition that includes the Romantics, Japanese
> poets, etc, that leads him out away from the cities.
Yes, Doug, I'd suspect he +does+ have that sense of a tradition and thereby
dug a hole for himself with what I suspect were actually joke remarks that
Stephen reported and which generated this thread. As RL's work certainly
seems to share a common absence of humour with Wordsworth, with that
inevitable diminuition of tonality, it's unsurprising perhaps that the
comments have been taken seriously.
Although here for me is urbs, the countryside is yet within modest walking
distance, but Country here is Hopkins's 'wilderness and wet' but rather
farmland, dormitory or extra-suburban villages, a few parks and more golf
courses. But also a landscape that is a palimpsest of human history,
pinpointed as much by mediaeval church towers and spires as by pylons and
mobile phone antennae, written over with the little swelling mounds of lost
plague villages, chartered, apportioned, foxhunt run, coach road before
motorway crossed. It is not that one cannot feel the presence of the soil as
a living biomass, as earth's breathbed, it is not that one cannot feel
aesthetic pleasure at low rolling hill vistas, November mists infiltrating
the ramparts of Bronze Age earthworks, thin ice coated winter canals, gated
roads, the sudden turning alerted head of a stag in long grass, but atht
these things are of the same lattice as the City, webbed with it by time and
habitation.
They are not escapes. Rather they teach the eye to see the Country within
the City, the City within the Country.
Best
Dave
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