Feeling is believing, or landscape as a way of being in the world

Abstract

.This article is work‐in‐progress, an orientation of thought towards possibilities for individual human beings to diminish the distance between outer and inner landscapes imposed by cultural norms and happenstances such as exile. The dominance of visual landscapes and visual perceptions is seen as a pivotal problem, to be solved by the engagement of all the senses in landscape discourse and formation. All the senses are engaged in earliest childhood, as they have been in ‘primitive’ societies. While returning to either a state of childhood or primitivism is an impossible dream, it is possible to edge closer to human nature by engaging and honing all the senses, especially the ‘earth‐bound senses’ of feel, smell and taste. Cultivating those senses and developing discourse about them, and incorporating them into landscape formation and enjoyment, is much more difficult than having a discourse about sight and hearing, for which there is a rich and well‐developed symbolic language and which can be shared through various types of media. The way towards a deeper discourse about the earth‐bound senses, and the way out of the tyranny of the visual, is to be found in stories, as several thinkers suggest.The story told is autobiographical and literary – a mode of geographic writing that I developed in a 2004 book (Bunkše 2004a), in which the complex dilemmas of home and road were explored. This article shows how in the early 1970s I defined the individual's landscape as ‘a unity in one's surroundings perceived through all the senses’, with imagination as the key human faculty. And I tell the story of how through complex circumstances, a visually and emotionally repugnant landscape became emotionally and intellectually attractive, with a scent, not a picture or image causing the initial attraction. The external and internal landscapes are thus unified, resulting in a sense of timelessness and placelessness of deep existential significance for the person.