On Landscape, or The Satire of Ansel Adams

Hawk-circling, a locusts' drone, amid the warbling magpie, the pipping blue tit, and distant sirens. I've been thinking about landscapes and how they inspire. You sit or stand in a place. Maybe you're moving–as in gliding across a glassy river calm, gazing at the canyon or prairie–or you might be still, and you gaze upon a landscape and it opens a place in your heart, and magically, that place feels breezy and alive where once it was still. Normally, it's still.

I can't help but think of poor Ansel Adams, the impotence of his work. How can you appreciate the mastery without lamenting the shortcoming of the medium? Maybe that's the point. Maybe he was a satirist, after all. The power of any mechanical capture, honestly, to come anywhere close to the transcendence of true landscape, firsthand experience, what a perfect example of human folly.

Some sort of god gave us landscape with its puzzling, mystical experience, and we heady little things built a little contraption to capture it, take it away and depict it somewhere else, and then print in a book of seventy-five others. Each one diluting the last of its magic.

Not to single out poor Ansel Adams, but he illustrates the point we all know is true. No capture of an awe-inspiring landscape is anything but an emotional postage stamp. Sunset photos? Don't bother. Let the memory live, and it will shine more vividly than those six identical captures in your photo roll (no shame, we all have them). And moon pics? Ha!

I frequently see depictions in film and television of people immersed in sublime beauty, and the visual story captures their moment of spiritual grace and wonder, but as far as reproducing the splendor of the landscape, well, watching such a scene is like listening to Beethoven inside a soundproof booth.

I conjure this thought to the point of picking up the pen as I sit on my balcony feeling such absolute delight at the view - red tiled roofs, a steeple, and a dome (two different churches), the distant hills, and the tops of trees (dozens of them) and the pale blue sky where the hawk was circling just a short while ago. And I'm powerless to capture it, powerless to share it. But I see you, Ansel. I get it - it can't hurt to try.