Borrowed sight: The halted traveller in Caspar David Friedrich and William Wordsworth

Abstract

Abstract I. ENTERING THE WOOD A path leads into the wood before me (figurer). I trace it with my eyes: a white painted surface which rises vertically from the bottom of the canvas, but which, as I cling to it with my gaze, stretches forth as a horizontal path. I see into the canvas as if into a wood; my eye goes forth into the distance as a stone would fall to earth.! Entering the wood, my eye can trace many paths. Straight ahead, the wall of bare tree trunks dissolves into shadow. The wood I have entered appears now like woodwork, or better, mock woodwork, like the false marble of a trompe-l'oeil. When the forest thus flattens into the canvas' surface, depth and the illusion of space vanishes. If I raise my eyes higher, however, above the trees, my gaze soars into the distance. The sky, that little patch of blue, invokes a vast space beyond the painting's narrow horizons. Lowering my gaze now, I can enter the wood under the sky. The road turns to the right and my eyes follow it, gliding over the fir trees which hide its progress. In my mind, I can see the road's continued course, yet it is a phantom path beyond what the painted image offers. To follow this path is to trust a ‘blind path’, blind to the experience of the painting. Yet it is precisely at this turn into blindness that friedrich's Early Snow (Frithschnee) situates us. We know of such roads in real forests, roads which seem to lead somewhere, but which end in the unnavigable. Such paths are paradoxical, since their existence means that someone was already there, yet their abrupt endings make us wonder where their creators have gone. We finally wonder whether they are paths at all. Like Heidegger's Holzwege, they bring us to the threshold of something never seen before. To pursue such paths is to enter the new, although a new with strange origins in the past.