Or Mountains and Molehills of the Mind
The other day, walking outdoors was like stepping into a picture. The lake and precocious moon were by Aivasovsky. Not turbulent enough to try as a Turner, but there was a hint of mist courtesy of Caspar David Friedrich.
The woods nearby by Klimt, trees and fields below by Corot. A patch of sun by Bieler, a patch of grass by Durer. Mountains by Calame or l’Eplattenier in the distance.
In Switzerland, they are never far away, mountains. On a good day, I can see them out the studio window (if they’re sharp, popular wisdom says the weather will turn bad, but there’s no such thing as bad weather, just a switch of painters and palettes.)
From our place, it’s a hop, skip and jump, at least in fancy, across the lake and the plateau to the Alps. Remote enough to be a backdrop, sometimes startlingly clear or often near-invisible in the mist and cloud, they are only an hour and a bit by car, but far enough to be more routinely ideas of mountains than looming lumps of vertical rock (which do have a tendancy to tumble down on highways and railways, given that Switzerland’s mountains are very lived-in.)
So, ideas of mountains. Fair enough. (An aside here: when I was small, I recall a book entitled “Gaberell’s Schweizer Bilder”, one of those coffee table books with triligual captions from the first half of the century, with lovely black and white photos of the Alps, forming backdrops for tumbling cascades and castles on crags, photos I slavishly copied in my early teens. I don’t know if it had been in the family for some time, gift of some distant cousin or aunt, or if it was one of my father’s occasionally inspired used-book shop impulse purchases, but it did paint a powerful – and predominantly monochromatic – picture of a fantasy Europe in my young mind. I’ve since found a French-language copy of the book, but the photos aren’t the same. Even then, it seemed to me that there were two kinds of mountains, the ones you hiked up on foot, and the ones to be reached by the imagination.)
But, to my surprise it appears that the notion of mountains is actually quite recent. Not that they weren’t there before, of course, but the idea of them as we now see it, is barely more than a couple of centuries old.
But let me start again. While researching for another book, I stumble continually over other subjects which have nothing to do with the business at hand (research is a rocky path, always trod upon in half-light) and before I can even mutter “darn, distracted again” I have plunged off a precipice into another subject entirely. While this does represent a serious sidetracking from the matter at hand, it does turn up all manner of heretofore-unsuspected subjects about which learnèd folks have penned tomes. (Which I suddenly end up ordering – luckily I recently built new bookshelves.)
Naturally, mountains have always been places dedicated to and inhabited by Those on High. Olympus wasn’t going to cut it as a seaside resort, it had to be atop a mountain, with a Cloud Gate to keep mortal voyeurism to a minimum. What are ziggurats and mounds but artifical mountains, a few steps closer to God in a flat landscape that doen’t permit much physical elevation. To achieve a View, one needs a bit of a view. Gothic cathedrals are the same, with their “Aren’t I clever to build something so tall?” side in the most extragavant earthly application of faith ever to be translated into architecure. The 1130’s and the couple of centuries following, until the last capstones as late as the early 1500’s, saw an epidemic eruption of sandstone spires that spread like a rash across Europe. A true departure from the roundness and internal resonance of Romanesque (with their ceramic “speakers” built unto the walls that function when the right notes are attained), Gothic is all about making sure that chant and prayer get off the launch pad with enough velocity to make it Up There unhindered.
Monotheism is not big on mountains, except as locations for fetching tablets of law and the occasional revelation, burning bush, timely angel or banishing of serpents, whether in the Sinaii or County Mayo. Sacred mountains are far thicker on the ground in the Far Orient, where the last half of the spiritual journey has traditionally been prepared by the rigorous climbing of the rather more physical first leg. And, of course, painting Mountains for their own sake has long been a tradition in China, perhaps the longest of unbroken painting traditions, over a thousand years dedicated to the nature of nature.
But, Western Mountains were never much a part of the pagan picture, the Vikings preferred World-Trees, the druids dolmens and monoliths, the Celts never mention them. The Dark Ages don’t lavish much prose on peaks, any more than do the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in fact before the 18th century, mountains aren’t any more found in literature than writers are in mountains, unless in passing. Painting is concerned with both loftier and lower considerations, basically us and Him. Can you think of a remarkable mountain in a medieval painting, an alpine landscape from the Renaissance? Joachim Patenier has a few craggy peaks, and though they wouldn’t be out of place in a Han Dynasty penzai, they are hardly real mountains. While Dürer sketched Innsbruck, he seems to have been largely immune to putting the Alps down in watercolour. Altdorfer was partial to landscapes, but he never managed to trigger off a genre.
In religious architecture, sacred “mountains” did become something of a fashion from the 1400’s on, perhaps because a procession up a tall hill with stations of the cross and other biblical reminders to a church or sanctuary was a lot less time-consuming than going all the way to the Holy Land. There are hundreds of these throughout Europe, spreading from Lombardy and Piemont, especially after the Council of Trent in the middle 1500’s, which, while soundly condemning Protestantism and redefining such niceties as the Original Sin, was intent on a re-focusing of the steps taken in faith – better on local soil than traipsing off to parts heathen for months or years.
So, a little healthy exercise as an act of faith, aerobics, fresh air and spirituality, but hardly mountaineering per se… (and certainly far less physical than the Tibetian practice of progressing by prosernation). As for mountains, while they were indubitably there, the debate as to their nature went on.
And not only real mountains, the fabled ones of positive peopgraphy were granted good press too. The Magnetic Mountain drew speculation for centuries. The mythical polar lodestone, the Rupes Nigra, situated at the top of the Earth, was a gigantic black magnetic rock, so strong that it could cause compass points to flicker northwards world over (the annoying variations of magnetic north were ascribed to meteorology or inaccurate readings), and deadly if one drew too close – the iron nails in a ship would pin the helpless vessel to the lodestone. (From there it was a plunge into the entrails of the Earth, to emerge either in Eden or the South Pole, not that any sane mariner was going to give it a try, mind you.) It was such an alluring and tenacious fable that Mercator even put in on one of his mappemondes.
Even the very nature of the Earth was still pretty much open to speculation, prey to the impossible reconciliation of Scripture and emerging scientific thought. Athanasius Kircher imagined the Earth riddled with subterranean rivers of fire and a molten core, rather like a soft-center chocolate, which burst out occasionally. Thomas Burnet on the other hand, saw mountains as the visible traces of the deluge. The originally smooth Mundane Egg had cracked, letting the Waters out to inundate the globe. When they subsided, mountain ranges were naught but the soggy wreckage of the once-perfect crust. Marine fossils at high altitudes were taken as proof of the same Deluge, which, according to the unavoidable Archbishop Ussher, was not so long ago, given that Creation was firmly dated on the evening of October 23, 4004 B.C., making mountains all rather youthful indeed.
Naturally, if they had only been there a few thousand years at most, gazing at them does not afford much of a sentiment of infinity and comparative eternity. Despite a certain curiosity about glaciers (Louis Aggassiz was born a few miles from here and taught in Neuchâtel, by the way), even the Swiss were just waking up to the nature (and unimagined antiquity) of the alpine backbone of their country.
It took the English, of course, the awaken to the appeal of “because it’s there”, and that only a couple of centuries ago. Edmund Burke redefined the “sublime” in the 1750’s, not that it was a new idea even to the Greeks, but Burke handed the concept a day pack and a walking stick, giving words and form to the British obsession with rugged landscape and damp tweed. For a time, tarns, heath and glens were enough, but soon the idea of tramping about in the mountains spread to the continent. The British also awoke the Swiss, a “mountain people” who never really went into the mountains, unless chasing stray goats or bound for Italy, to the lucrative possibilities of escorted tourism, and soon ooh-ing and ah-ing at altitude was a given of the Grand Tour. With them came the Romantics and their successors, who took the first spiritual excursions beyond the foothills. The mountains were invaded by diligent cohorts of watercolourists and outdoor philosophers, putting on pre-stretched Arches and canvas the first brush strokes, washes and premises of our modern view of the mountains.
Perhaps the most exemplary landscape genre, though, is American, where landscape painting coincided with the claiming of the land, and frontier romanticism has forever shaped the view of history, from Thomas Cole to the Hudson River school, from the White Mountains to the Rockies. The history of American landscape painting is perhaps the most eloquent of history books to be found on the Americas, both accomplice and witness to the re-shaping of a continent. Much later, and a little farther North, the impetus of Group of Seven, Canada’s own much-lauded (and practically unknown abroad) defining moment was also busily shaping the nature of cultural heritage through use of landscape.
All these random thoughts because on a clear day I can see mountains from the studio window and was researching something else entirely…
Of course, when contemplating even a sidetrip, guidebooks are essential and I managed to find two. To wit: Mountains of the Mind, by Robert Macfarlane and Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom Mountain Glory. See you later. I’m off for a walk in the mountains.
ON A DIFFERENT NOTE
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For those who live near enough to Geneva to attend, there will be a lovely series of concerts of early music in late April. Pen in the dates on your calendars.
