Country of the mind
19th June 2015
19th June
Country of the mind
"For Nature's particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking - a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree - is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe—certainly creative and suprasensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you while you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old earth that is pushing life forth of every sort under your feet or spellbound in a death like winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation."
Kenneth Grahame.
When I started this journey I wrote how I believed that memory and place are linked. I argued that the places we pass through, with their walls, hedges, trees, rivers and crags, the weather, the shape of the land seem to retain an element of the time we had there. Through recognition and retracing steps it seems the land has absorbed our feelings and thoughts.
I commented, some what prosaically, how we "place mental markers into the atomic structure of place; we slice a piece of our spirit and tuck it into the folds and crevices of the landscape to be returned to, recaptured and relived at some future time. We retain a piece of ourselves in the structure, time and spirit of place. We wander consciously, or by coincidence, colliding with these hot spots of memory and meaning."
Kenneth Grahame argues how the experiences of travelling through a landscape leads to "high converse, the high adventures . . . in the country of the mind" (qtd. in Green 6).
And though the land we travel is solid, measurable and objective, our experiencs are subjective (?) It seems any exploration of 'place' we also explore our own consciousness. This means any undertaking of passage or journey through a landscape is a journey through the "country of the mind".
Like Grahame, I understand the landscape as having a mental and spiritual dimension, where any objective world also has a subjective quality. This (almost conflation of ideas) means creation of thought and feeling are stimulated through journey and can make changes to the person as they pass through. And as each change is made the landscape becomes frame that surrounds all the mental markers, waypoints that contains all of the 'moment' - the time, smells, sounds, colour, thoughts and feelings.....all of the experience stored into the land we travel.
Maureen Thum's essay on Kenneth Grahame's works highlights how journeys provide profound experiences "which alters the mind-set and cannot—as Grahame suggests—be undone". The journey leads beyond the "starting point" to an "awakening of or modification of consciousness". We are are changed by these journeys and the landscape becomes the catalyst and data base of our experiences.
Rebecca Solnit picks up on this theme but warns how we can too often "travel by abstraction, which makes us too busy and looking for the big view and engaged in finding the next great big experience to be ticked off the list". She pulls together the ideas of both Thum and Grahame by arguing how travelling through a landscape, and by getting lost, we do not find our way by returning, but by changing into something else. As we walk, through the landscape, we build and develop out country of the mind, changing and modifying our thoughts and feelings in a way that will forever and be bookmarked on place and mind.
I find that every journey, through the wild landscapes I encounter, bends and shapes me just a little bit more. The mind is set free to explore and analyse and, by conclusion of these processes, gain greater insights and depth of feeling and thought. The places I visit retain these moments of cognition and memory, to be accessed and re-evaluated on my return.
"The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow.......We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.”
Virginia Woolf
Country of the mind
"For Nature's particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking - a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree - is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe—certainly creative and suprasensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you while you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old earth that is pushing life forth of every sort under your feet or spellbound in a death like winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation."
Kenneth Grahame.
When I started this journey I wrote how I believed that memory and place are linked. I argued that the places we pass through, with their walls, hedges, trees, rivers and crags, the weather, the shape of the land seem to retain an element of the time we had there. Through recognition and retracing steps it seems the land has absorbed our feelings and thoughts.
I commented, some what prosaically, how we "place mental markers into the atomic structure of place; we slice a piece of our spirit and tuck it into the folds and crevices of the landscape to be returned to, recaptured and relived at some future time. We retain a piece of ourselves in the structure, time and spirit of place. We wander consciously, or by coincidence, colliding with these hot spots of memory and meaning."
Kenneth Grahame argues how the experiences of travelling through a landscape leads to "high converse, the high adventures . . . in the country of the mind" (qtd. in Green 6).
And though the land we travel is solid, measurable and objective, our experiencs are subjective (?) It seems any exploration of 'place' we also explore our own consciousness. This means any undertaking of passage or journey through a landscape is a journey through the "country of the mind".
Like Grahame, I understand the landscape as having a mental and spiritual dimension, where any objective world also has a subjective quality. This (almost conflation of ideas) means creation of thought and feeling are stimulated through journey and can make changes to the person as they pass through. And as each change is made the landscape becomes frame that surrounds all the mental markers, waypoints that contains all of the 'moment' - the time, smells, sounds, colour, thoughts and feelings.....all of the experience stored into the land we travel.
Maureen Thum's essay on Kenneth Grahame's works highlights how journeys provide profound experiences "which alters the mind-set and cannot—as Grahame suggests—be undone". The journey leads beyond the "starting point" to an "awakening of or modification of consciousness". We are are changed by these journeys and the landscape becomes the catalyst and data base of our experiences.
Rebecca Solnit picks up on this theme but warns how we can too often "travel by abstraction, which makes us too busy and looking for the big view and engaged in finding the next great big experience to be ticked off the list". She pulls together the ideas of both Thum and Grahame by arguing how travelling through a landscape, and by getting lost, we do not find our way by returning, but by changing into something else. As we walk, through the landscape, we build and develop out country of the mind, changing and modifying our thoughts and feelings in a way that will forever and be bookmarked on place and mind.
I find that every journey, through the wild landscapes I encounter, bends and shapes me just a little bit more. The mind is set free to explore and analyse and, by conclusion of these processes, gain greater insights and depth of feeling and thought. The places I visit retain these moments of cognition and memory, to be accessed and re-evaluated on my return.
"The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow.......We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.”
Virginia Woolf