2. The island of trajection
When we say that something is “concrete”, we are generally under the direct influence of the dualist paradigm of modernity; in other words, we understand it as a material and palpable object, out there. In contrast, we understand “abstract” as something immaterial and impalpable, within our head. This is exactly the definition given by the New Oxford Dictionary of English: concrete “existing in a material or physical form; real or solid; not abstract; specific, definite; denoting a material object as opposed to an abstract quality, state or action.” This is no less than the res extensa that Descartes identifies as matter and contrasts with consciousness. A good example of this way of seeing ourselves is provided by the English language, in which concrete means both something specific and a construction material. Concrete (in the latter sense) is a defined object which is clearly there, outside of consciousness.
However, concrete comes from the Latin concretus, which is the past participle of concrescere: “grow (crescere) together (cum)”. Concretus is what has been formed through this shared growth. Sometimes it is this very process of growth.
In terms of reality, the problem is: what are these things that grow together? From the point of view of modernity they are objects. For example, in the case of concrete, they are “broken stones or gravel, sand and cement”, according to the New Oxford Dictionary of English, sometimes adding a reinforcement of iron or steel bars. Mixed with water, these objects grow together and change into concrete. The whole of this process is outside of consciousness. It develops within itself, out there.
But there is nothing concrete about this way of seeing. It is purely abstract; because, in fact, this process, from beginning to end, involves the presence, the representations, the feelings, the projects and the actions of human subjects. In short, it involves human existence, without which concrete would not exist. This is, concretely, reality. Concrete in itself is an abstraction: something from which an essential component, human existence, has been abstracted (taken out).
In other words, concrete reality involves growing together; put another way, the common history of things and of human beings. This common history is what I call “trajection”. And like all real things, concrete participates in this common history. In fact, concrete is not a pure object; it is trajective.
If I have employed this terminology for around twenty years it is because it did not emerge out of the blue from an abstract reflection, as Minerva sprang fully armed from the head of Jupiter. Concretely, it has involved a long gestation period, in which the experience of alien geographical realities was decisive.
In particular, I can say that the concept of trajection was the result, around ten years later, of the preparation of my thesis in Hokkaidô, in the early seventies. Hokkaidô is a large island in the north of Japan, which in fact was not colonized before the Meiji Restoration (1868), although the Japanese had been crossing the Tsugaru Strait (between Hokkaidô and the main island of Honshû) since the 12th century, and permanently settling on the southern coast since the 15th century. Still today, the southern part of Hokkaidô is called Watarishima, or “the island (shima) [to where it is necessary] to cross (wataru).” Cross beyond the Tsugaru Strait.
In Hokkaidô, I also had to cross beyond, outside my familiar surroundings, and in particular beyond the conception of the landscape that I had inherited from my training as a geographer; that is, an object, being in itself, out there. That object that was the very object of geography as some of the founding fathers of the French school of geography thought, for example Max Sorre.
What I discovered in Hokkaidô was that the landscape is not an object as such. It does not exist in itself but depends on the way in which people see their surroundings. Of course, I knew that writers, such as Amiel (1821-1881), had been able to write that the landscape was a “mirror of the soul”. I had even read, in the sixties, Man and the Earth (L’Homme et la terre, 1952) by Eric Dardel. Today, Dardel is recognised as a precursor of phenomenological geography, which started to be developed in the seventies, precisely at the time that I was preparing my thesis. But for me, at first, all of this was no more than literature. Literature on subjective representations, different from reality. Reality was objective, out there. And it was about analyzing it objectively in order to produce a true geography thesis.
However, living in Hokkaidô and studying the history of its colonization must have gradually made me understand that reality was different. The way in which the peasants who had emigrated from Honshû saw the northern island could not be reduced to mere subjective representations; because this way of seeing was, at once, a way of feeling, living, thinking and acting, in short, a way of existing, whose concrete result was the birth of a new fûdo, that is, a new milieu that was not a mere reproduction of that of Honshû, nor a reproduction of the model that the American advisors to the Japanese government had advocated to develop this northern island, whose surroundings evoked for them that of their own milieu, that of New England. They advised, therefore, an agriculture focused on wheat, potato and milk production. But what the peasants carried out was focused on the cultivation of rice, which, at first, had been prohibited by the government. In around fifty years, the rice fields reached almost to the region of Nemuro, in the northeast, where summer is less warm than in Stockholm.
This process was, strictly speaking, a “growing together”, a common history of the peasants and of rice because it was possible not only through human innovations – for example, the takoashi (“octopus arms”), a sower with eight arms which made it possible to go much faster than the traditional method of replanting the rice seedlings – but also with a mutation of the plant itself, which produced a particular variety of rice, called bôzu (bonze) because it had a bald ear like the head of a bonze. This bôzu, particularly in its hashiri bôzu variety (“running bonze”), was very resistant to cold, and it benefited as far as possible from the brief summers of Hokkaidô.
The result of this common history were those landscapes that my eyes saw in the region of Abashiri at the start of the seventies: rice fields under the snow, with the sea ice of Okhotsk as the background. They were not the subjective “mirrors of the soul”, of simple peasants, imprisoned in myths arbitrarily superimposed over the objective surroundings; it was the concrete reality of Hokkaidô, born out of the common history of an immigrant society and alien surroundings, trajected into a new milieu. Precisely the reality that I had to get to know for my thesis.

3. Trajection and landscape
If it was my experience of the landscapes of Hokkaidô and my research into its history that made me outline the way towards the concept of trajection, the very construction of its theoretical framework cannot do without a philosophical work for which I read the writings of landscape designers such as Nakamura Yoshio, Higuchi Tadahiko, Bernard Lassus, of psychologists such as James Gibson, of philosophers such as Henri Lefebvre, Watsuji Tetsurô, Martin Heidegger, Nishida Kitarô, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alain Roger, Anne Cauquelin, of sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, of anthropologists such as André Leroi-Gourhan, etc.; without forgetting classics such as Physics by Aristotle or Timeus by Plato to understand what a place is. This work took around twenty years, at the end of which I was able to attempt a synthesis of the ecumene, which from this point of view is the relationship of humanity with the Earth, or put another way, the whole of the milieus of the various human societies.
The leading thread of this research was the question of landscape. I really began – that is, not only as vague impressions or disperse notations – with the discovery, in the library of the Nordic Studies Centre at the University of Hokkaidô where I taught French, of a treatise on the regional geography of the Japanese empire, published during the “Fifteen Years’ War”, as it is called in Japan, in which there was a chapter about the landscapes of Hokkaidô, stressing their distance and comparing them with those of Honshû. This reading made me sense what a landscape must be for the Japanese. It was something that my eyes, until then, had not perceived, because they had other points of reference, other landmarks, emphasising other features.
With respect to the concept itself of landscape, which my training as a geographer had made me consider as a universal object, the decisive aspect was my discovery, in the writings of Alain Roger, Anne Cauquelin and others, that this notion had not existed at all times, or in all societies. It is a historical notion, which as is known emerged in China around the 4th century, and in Europe in the Renaissance. Before the epiphany of the landscape, what people saw in their surroundings was something else, which was expressed with other words, and was manifested with other attitudes and ways of acting; for example, with other forms of architecture, unaware of the balconies which, in the case of France, appeared in the 16th century. The balcony is something that serves to enjoy a view of the surroundings, in other words, the landscape. Before its invention, people were interested in things other than the landscape, and consequently did not construct balconies.
Here one must stress that, when dealing with the existence or absence of the landscape, we must distrust our ways of seeing, which, being landscapely, perceive the surroundings as landscape. We must not trust anachronism and ethnocentrism. One should add that the absence of the landscape in this or that culture is not a shortcoming, a backwardness, which progress would resolve or correct. It is nothing less than the manifestation of another way of being in the world, another way of existing, no more or less complete than ours. Societies that do not possess the notion of landscape perceive their surroundings in other terms, which we do not perceive and that we have to learn if we wish to speak of concrete reality.
Perceiving the surroundings as landscape, or as another reality, is an effect of trajection; in other words, it is the concrete result of the common history of a society and its milieu. Other histories produce other realities, which have their own denominations in the societies concerned; for example the Tjukurrpa of the Kukatja, in the western desert of Australia. Western ethnologists have translated this word as “dreaming time”, or simply as “dreaming”; which clearly shows that, for them, the Tjukurrpa is no more than a myth, or a collective illusion arbitrarily projected onto the objective surroundings. But, for the Kukatja, the Tjukurrpa is no more than the reality they perceive in their milieu. This reality exists as Tjukurrpa, exactly as for the “Aussies” (the Australian immigrants from Europe, etc.) the same surroundings are manifested as landscape. The reason for this difference is that these are (exist) in another world alien to that of the Kukatja, while in both cases they are on the same Earth, with the same physical surroundings.
Here it can be seen that the question of landscape is a particular aspect of a more general question: that of the relationship between milieu (which involves human existence) and physical surroundings (which does not involve it). On another level, and from another point of view, this is also the question of the relationship between the world and the Earth.

4. Trajection and predicative world
In the course of my personal experience, I have discovered these questions through the reading of three philosophers: Watsuji Tetsurô (1889-1960), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Nishida Kitarô (1870-1945), but they were first set out by a naturalist, who was one of the fathers of ethology: Jacob von Uexküll (1864-1944).
In his Incursions into the Milieus of Animals and Humans (Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen, 1934), which is renowned in particular for his analysis of the world of the tick, Uexküll makes a fundamental distinction between what he calls Umgebung and Umwelt. Umgebung is the “surroundings” (um) which are “given” (Gebung, the fact of geben, giving) to a living being; in other words, what there is (es gibt) objectively in his surroundings, and that can be analyzed with the technical means of modern science. We can translate it as “the environment”. On the other hand, Umwelt is the “world” (Welt) “around” (um) that exists effectively for the animal species concerned, for example the tick. We can translate this term as “the milieu”. The milieu of the tick is not that of the rat, which is not that of the dog, etc., although all are in the same physical environment. They do not perceive the same things, and consequently they do not behave in the same way. Each species lives in its own milieu. It is the same for the human being. Our species has its own milieu, which is not that of other species. For example, we do not perceive the smells that a dog does, but in contrast we see colours that it does not, and so on.
Although not directly referring to Uexküll (but to Heidegger, who in this respect was inspired by Uexküll), the Japanese philosopher Watsuji, in a book called Fûdo (1935), established in his turn an essential distinction between the physical environment (shizen kankyô) and the milieu (fûdo; in this case it is only the milieu of human beings, not of other species). According to Watsuji, the difference between the two is that the milieu involves a human existence approach, while the physical environment does not; it is an object abstracted, by science, from the existential and concrete relationship of the being with its milieu. He calls this relationship fûdosei (which I have translated as “mediance” ), and defines it as “the structural momentum of human existence” (ningen sonzai no kôzô keiki). One should understand “momentum” here as in mechanics, where the “momentum of a force” is a power to move. Analogously, mediance is an ontological structure that has the power to motivate the existence of human beings who live in a certain milieu, which is specific to their culture and history. As Watsuji says, mediance is to space what historiality is to time. What temporally is historiality, spatially is mediance. They are mutually involved, and mediance incarnates historiality, which feeds it.
One must emphasise the fact that this thesis, in principle, has nothing to do with geographical determinism, which is a matter of physical environment (Umgebung, shizen kankyô), not of milieu (Umwelt, fûdo). The error of determinism is precisely to confuse the two, which is as absurd as confusing the milieu of a snake (which sees infrared rays, but not ultraviolet) with that of a butterfly (which sees ultraviolet rays, but not infrared). This confusion overlooks the focus of human existence. In contrast, what Watsuji clearly sets out is that in the first place this focus (shutaisei, “subjecthood”) must be considered with the method of hermeneutics, to understand what the milieu specific to a certain society is. The milieu cannot be reduced to the universal and anhistorical causality of the physical environment; it is necessarily unique and historical, because it is not an object but a human way of existing.
For his part, Heidegger was inspired by Uexküll in another way, which took him to the idea that the animal is “poor in World” (weltarm), while the stone is “worldless” (weltlos) and the human being is “world-building” (weltbildend). In terms of the world itself, that of the human being, and particularly of his relationship with the work of art, Heidegger, in The Origin of the Work of Art (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 1935) has also spoken of a “strife” (Streit) between the world (Welt) and the Earth (Erde). The nature of this strife is very obscure, but, from my point of view, it is no more than what happens between the physical environment and the milieu; adding that the milieu of a human being cannot be reduced to that of a mere living being, because it is not only a relationship between Umgebung and Umwelt in the sense of Uexküll, but also between Umwelt and Welt. Put another way, the problem is not only the relationship that exists between the planet (which is a physical-chemical entity) and the biosphere (which is an ecological entity, involving life), but also the relationship that exists between the biosphere and the ecumene (which is a medial entity, involving, moreover, the technical and symbolic systems specific to human existence).
The ecumene is all the milieus specific to the human being. In other words, our milieu is not only something ecological, like that of the other living beings, but an eco-techno-symbolic thing. In short, a medial thing. This mediance involves a historical development that cannot be reduced to mere natural evolution of the other living beings in their respective milieus; because, as André Leroi-Gourhan (1911-1986) has shown in Gesture and Speech (Le Geste et la parole, 1964), it has involved the exteriorization, in the form of increasingly more developed technical and symbolic systems, of functions that, initially, were limited to the animal body itself. For example, using a carved stone was an exteriorization of the function of teeth and nails, making it more efficient. Adding a handle to this stone was a supplementary exteriorization of this function, making it increasingly more efficient and so on. Leroi-Gourhan called the combination of these exterior systems “the social body”, as it is neither individual nor genetic but involves a social and cultural transmission. For my part, I call it “the medial body”, as it is not only social (techno-symbolic), but also ecological. It is no less than our milieu.
The question remains of the nature of what Heidegger calls “strife” (Streit). I think that this cannot be illuminated without reference to Nishida Kitarô, a Japanese philosopher whom Heidegger had no doubt heard of, although he does not mention him, and particularly what he calls “logic of the place” (basho no ronri) or “logic of the predicate” (jutsugo no ronri). From this thinking, let us pick up the idea that the world is not an object, that is, a logical subject; it is a predicate, that is, logically what is said about a subject. In other words, it is a way of seizing this object. From the ecumenal point of view (which is not that of Nishida), what the world (or culture) “predicates” is the Earth (or nature); and the “predication” of this “subject” as a world is no less than the trajection of the physical environment into the milieu specific to the human being; that is, into our medial body.

5. Trajection and reality
Reducing it to a logical form, this relationship can be represented as the following: r = S/P, in which r is reality, S the subject (the Earth, or nature) and P the predicate (the world, or culture), and which is read as reality is S as P. For example: reality is the physical environment as landscape; or even: reality is the physical environment as Tjukurrpa, and so on.
Of course, this “as” (the slash “/”) is not limited to a logical relationship in the strict sense. It is much more; it is the onto-cosmological relationship in which the human being unfolds the ecumene from the biosphere, in the same way that life unfolds the biosphere from the planet. But neither is this way a predication in the strict sense, because it is not only a verbal representation, but a way of feeling, thinking, naming and transforming the physical environment. In short, a way of existing, in the mediance (the structural momentum) formed by our animal body and our medial body.
It is important to specify here the relationship between mediance and trajection. As we have seen, mediance is the combination of the two sides of the human being, of which one is his animal body, and the other his medial body. It should be said that these two sides are the two “halves” of the being. In fact, although I have coined it in reference to the notion of milieu (as, after long reflection, I had decided to translate fûdo as “milieu”), this word comes lexically from the Latin medietas, which means “half”). Therefore, the definition that Watsuji gives of mediance (fûdosei), “the structural momentum of human existence” can be understood as the dynamic combination of these two halves, the animal body and the medial body.
The problem is the nature of this “momentum”, or dynamic relationship. As we have seen, according to Leroi-Gourhan, the origin of the social body (which I call medial) is the exteriorization, in the form of technical and symbolic systems, of functions initially limited to the animal body. The technical systems are clearly extensions of the animal body, and their dynamic is clearly an exteriorization, coming from the animal body towards the world. But from my point of view, the symbolic systems function in the inverse sense. They are not exteriorizations, but rather interiorizations, which return the world to our animal body.
In other words, the function of the symbol is exactly inverse and complementary to that of the technique: what the technique exteriorizes in the form of medial body, the symbol interiorizes in the animal body, that is, in our brain, in the form of neuronal connections. In summary, it can be said that the technique cosmicizes the animal body (making a milieu based on it), while the symbol somatizes the world (reflecting it in the animal body).
We must distinguish between this progressively growing complementarity (concrete, i.e. cum-crescens, “growing together”), or movement to and fro between the world and the body, which is at work from the beginning of the evolutionary process of hominization (the emergence of the human species), of a mere subjective and arbitrary projection of the human being, already completely constituted as in the Bible, on the objective environment, as modern anthropology often sees it. For the same reason, we must be aware that the technical systems are not limited to technical objects, which are out there in the objective surroundings, and over which we would arbitrarily project subjective representations, for example, names such as “hammer” or “nail”. These systems, from the outset, actively come and go between our animal body, in which they are present in the form of neuronal connections and sensory-motor schemes, and our medial body, in which they are present in the form of concrete things.
This movement to and fro (kayoi in Japanese) is what I call trajection. It should be noted that it is a movement of functions, not of material substances. The carved stone that was an exteriorization of the functions of the teeth and nails was not initially inside the animal body, and consequently its new functions did not materially need to move the teeth and nails in the stone. What was technically trajected from the body to the stone was only an immaterial function. In the same way, and at the same time, what was symbolically trajected from the stone to the brain was not the stone itself, but a representation of this function, from now on concretely associated with the stone.
Thus, what trajects (what comes and goes) between the animal body and the medial body are not substances and objects but relations, which I call as ecumenal. In other words, they are predicates. They are not S, but P. The stone changes into tool as an initially corporal function is delegated to it. In this delegation, the tool is not an object (S). It is not a substance that would exist in itself. It exists trajectively, as it receives this delegation of the body; that is, as it is a concrete thing (S/P), which has in common with the body something that is no less than this “as”. In other words, that it is predicated.

6. The reality of the landscape
This trajection works in the same way with all the things of the milieu, not all of which are the objects of the physical surroundings. They are not the Umgebung, but the Umwelt of our existence. What we have in common with them are not substances (S), but predicates (P). This – the S/P relationship – is the nature of the dynamic of the structural momentum of human existence.
It should be added that, from the ecumenal point of view, this is no other than what Heidegger calls the “strife” between the Earth and the world; as in this relationship, the Earth – I prefer to write it with a capital, because it is also the planet – is S (the substance of the subject which is predicated), and the world is P (the whole of the innumerable as, or predicates, that make up our world). It is indeed a strife, because the predicate is not the subject in itself. It is a way of seizing the subject, which diverts it from its own nature, because it involves our existence above that of this subject (which in itself is no more than an abstraction).
In the same way, there is a strife between the landscape (P) and the physical environment (S). The landscape is not the environment itself. It is a particular way of seizing it, which sets it apart from its own substance, trajecting it with our existence. The strife between the two is reality (S/P); which, as in all human reality, is not natural but historical.
This historicity is particularly clear in the case of the landscape because we know when and where this predicate was born: in the 4th century in southern China, later in the Renaissance in Flanders. We can also test the historicity of many other predicates, but most of the as that make our world cannot be dated or located. This is not only because of the lack of historical documents; it is because we are not only human beings, with a techno-symbolic body but also and primarily living beings, with an animal body rooted in the most profound mundanity (predicativity) of the biosphere, which does not belong to history but to evolution. We cannot consciously represent this mundanity ourselves, because it is our own life, which produces our consciousness (and not the inverse). We can only experience it unconsciously, exactly as the tick experiences its Umwelt.
The reality of the landscape, although this predicate appeared on a certain date in history, is also rooted in the most profound predicates of the biosphere, which ecologically link our being to the Earth. This relationship, certainly, is not the landscape itself; but it sustains it and is necessary to it, just as the Earth sustains our world – which we pompously call “the World”.
We must be careful because this necessity is not reciprocal. It is not mutual. The Earth, which is universal and necessary, does not need our world, which is unique and contingent like the history of its predication. We must not confuse the two, and we must not forget that the ecumene cannot do without the biosphere, while the biosphere, perhaps, could do without the ecumene. The physical environment (S) can sustain any world (P), bringing the landscape or the Tjukurrpa or other predicates of all kinds; but all of these “as” have only one basis: the physical environment, which, by the way, is ontologically inferior, but is the condition sine qua non of our being – which we pompously call “Being”.

Maurepas, 18th June 2006.

Losing place. This dissociation between man and nature has resulted in human beings losing their place on Earth and within the natural cycle of life and I say this not from a poetic or new age point of view but rather from a substantial one. This loss of place has also meant the lack of a feeling towards nature. The concept of landscape emerges when we become modern “individuals” independent from our surroundings and we can, therefore, identify the landscape as an element external to ourselves to admire it as an object or res extensa. The first step towards a reunion between man and nature would be to talk of the world in the second person – as Jordi Pigem proposes – which will allow us to establish other types of dyadic relationships between two equal elements. This you instead of he/she places us in a position of equality and of proximity that allows us to reinstate our place in/with nature. Nature is no longer that other but is this other and this this other refers only to ourselves.

Listening. Being able to speak on an equal basis with nature means being capable not only of speaking, affecting surroundings, but of having the capacity to listen – a very difficult aspect in an egocentric society like the modern one where individuality is put before and above all. We would have to set up a parliament of things, as Bruno Latour proposes, which finally also means listening to nature, to ourselves, to our body and to our natural substrate that Western medicine has largely forgotten, relegating this responsibility to machines and to medical specialists. Therefore, the moment has arrived to listen and stop blindly acting on the world.

Nature no longer exists. It is inevitable to think that nature is not nor will ever be more than a nature in “pure state”. The action of man on the world has a history of more than thirty million years to believe that he has not, directly or indirectly, left his mark on all the corners of our planet. In this sense the development of man on Earth has left and is leaving his mark day after day. If we understand by nature what Descartes called res extensa, that which exists in itself outside of man and his thought, this non-human, purely materialist nature no longer exists. In a process of co-existence (rather one should talk of in-existence understood as living-in or being-in) of around thirty million years, the mark of man on Earth (biotic substrate) is undeniable and now we can no longer talk of nature as such, it is necessary to find other terms. The chaotic matricial substrate is given form ecumenally (eco-techno-symbolically). The Earth, with the effect of technology and culture, is transformed into world. We no longer live on the Earth, we live in the world.

Basic trajection: biotic trajection. Any living being is a system that needs energy to be able to subsist: from a plant cell to an elephant or a man, all require, in this life process, energy that they constantly transform. In its development any living being is an interior that takes from the exterior resources that modify this interior and this exterior. When we eat an apple we feed ourselves and transform the matter into energy and into other matter (cells…) also changing the exterior (the apple). By eating we are interiorizing the world and exteriorizing ourselves. Obviously this trajection is basic because it affects any living being but this very trajection can evolve and become increasingly more complex until reaching a high level of symbolization and of mediation, which would be what Augustin Berque calls ecumenal development (eco-techno-symbolic). In this text we will develop the two fundamental elements, in my opinion, of trajection: food and home as motors of constant transformation of the surroundings (of the world).

Our physiology and the surroundings. The basic need of all living beings is that of satisfying the requirements of food and this fact obliges us to establish a relationship with the surroundings. Therefore, our physiology will only make sense if it is in contact with these surroundings and these surroundings define it. We are how we are based on how our surroundings are. In order to receive energy in the form of matter we must be able to perceive it and, moreover, assimilate it as food. This implies that our physiology is founded and constituted, in principle, in function of these two parameters.

The basic and universal trajective movement: food. The basic need to feed establishes a trajective relationship with the surroundings given that, based on a primary interior need (to eat), we interact, first cognitively and then technically, on our surroundings (taking this food, and therefore affecting and changing it). This is a basically trajective movement given that it connects at a very basic– not yet cultural – level common to all living beings our interior and our exterior. In this sense, the biochemists Maturana and Varela talk of giving birth to a world; in the words of Berque we cosmosize ourselves (we make a cosmos) in the world but, also, we somatize it (we make body) constantly. This is precisely the trajective movement, which keeps the landscape in constant mutation, a movement to and fro between our interior and our exterior which never stops and that maintains the buzz of life in movement.

Biological trajection and cultural trajection. We can distinguish two types of trajections: those based on the basic physiological needs of our own development as living beings (food, nest, reproduction) which to a greater or lesser extent are universal and those which emerge based on and a posteriori to the former; we would speak in this case of cultural trajection. Both have a direct influence on our surroundings. When the basic needs are covered a cultural development can emerge, a relationship with our surroundings which is the result of a surplus of time and energy and which goes beyond what is meant to satisfy basic needs. This also involves the development of a complex symbolic relationship, which finally channels this relationship with the exterior and obviously also directly affects it. Thus we see how the biological trajective movement can finally become a much more complex trajective movement, as is the cultural, which mediates between our interior and our exterior.

The emergence of agriculture: the stabilization of the primary need. The appearance of agriculture, together with the technological revolution it brought, made it possible to stabilize one of the main basic needs: food. The effects of this stabilization also had repercussions on the relationship with nature as sedentariness emerged together with social, economic and other repercussions. But what most interests us is the emergence of a new relationship with the second of the basic needs: shelter. The establishment, more or less permanent, allowed the development and the rooting of the shelter which gave body and form to the house. A technological change like agriculture provoked, by extension, a change in the shelter transforming it with time into a house and later into a home.

Concentric needs. As we have seen the ambit in which we move is the analysis of the most animal root of the being-in-the-world and because it is the most fundamental it also becomes the most universal. It is possible to make a diagram through circles that would concentrically be added to the needs of men beginning with the most basic and therefore most universal, until the most individual and subjective or cultural. Therefore, we would locate food on the outermost circle, then shelter and afterwards reproduction. These three factors are common to almost all living beings. From here the need would begin to be diluted in specificity and the social or group communication need would emerge which would lead to culture: a specifically human need. Within culture we can find different levels of relationship of need that gradually individualize (the need to know how to read is more universal or common than the need to have a jeep or a chalet in the mountain).

The second basic trajective element: shelter. If on the one hand food is the first trajective foundation, on the second level we find the need to find shelter, accommodation. For ants, birds, beavers and many other animals the second main foundation in life after the search for food is the construction of the nest, of the shelter or the house. This is a basic need for all living beings (some large fish or animals do not have the need to make a nest but they do defend their territory: their nest-state constructed with invisible frontiers like those of our countries). This is the second great trajective action of living beings on the world, an action that constantly transforms our surroundings to a greater or lesser extent. A colony of ants constructing its ant-hill, a stalk making its nest in a tree or a rabbit are radically transforming their own surroundings, although from our point of view these transformations can seem insignificant.

Relationships and the meta-surroundings. We can say that our being-in-the-world is mainly based on the relations that we establish with what surrounds us. Within the great sphere of what surrounds us and is closer to us, we must also include the other beings-in-the-world that share our sphere. Therefore, within the surroundings there are also other human beings who will become surroundings. When we talk of surroundings, therefore, we refer to the material and to the human that exists around us. However, at the same time, we ourselves also become surroundings given that we are the surroundings of other surroundings. The being-in-the-world in fact is being-world. This not only creates physical surroundings around us but also meta-surroundings which are the psychological, cultural and social surroundings that are often not visibly present because they are immaterial or because in our daily existence they have become invisible. These meta-surroundings are those that allow community life and, more extensively, society life.

The meta-home or the house-nation and the feeling of identity with the Earth. In his treatise Spheres Peter Sloterdijk poses the idea that the passage from the private sphere to the collective goes through the formation of globes that are common identity formations. If the family consists of a first existential wrapping that shapes the home, the nation-patria amplifies this sense of identity until establishing our identity with the country as an extension of the home. Home and country become synonyms. This patriotic feeling serves as a catalyser to form social coagulations that emerge from the structured relationships of great groups of population.

The amplifying effect of society. The change from nomadic cultures to sedentary cultures provokes a large growth in populations. First people live in tribes more or less reduced for eminently practical reasons given that if not the movements would have become exoduses. The settlement in fixed enclaves means that community life becomes society life with the consequences that this implies. The most important aspect for the issue that concerns us is that the influence of an individual or a small group of individuals on the surroundings is highly amplified exponentially with the massive increase in population. Society, with the consequent cultural expansion, provokes much faster changes and the consequences are much more serious. Ants, for example, are social but not cultural beings that constantly affect the world and essentially their-world, constructing ant-hills. The social nature of the ant-hills means that they can intervene much more powerfully in the world, adapting it to their needs.

We all work for a better world. All living beings are genetically programmed with the impulse to cover their needs, above all the basic. This means, as we have seen, decisively affecting their surroundings to adapt it, above all with the nest, to their needs. In this process of change what is sought is to create a better-world-to-live-in. The ant-hill constructed by the ants is in fact their better-world-to-live-in. Therefore, in any basic process of life trajection there is a sense of utopia, whether in animals or in persons, to construct a better-world-to-live-in. The fact of having more or less success in this impulse only depends on the accuracy when establishing our priorities for the needs to be satisfied.

Complex relationships. As we have seen, when the basic needs are covered we have a surplus of time and energy that allows us to develop much more complex ways of relating. This is how the meta-surroundings emerge. Culture is the meta-surroundings that, we can say, encompasses the surplus development of the human being on Earth. Culture acts as a filter when affecting the world until distorting the basic needs in such a way that they become almost invisible. With all the cultural substrate that has been accumulated about our existence – and more since the appearance of modernity – the most animal part of man or the basic needs have become invisible elements and in many cases troublesome for culture or have been regurgitated by it in forms of postmodernist atrophy: the chalet, nouvelle cuisine.

Economy as a cultural metaphor of organization of the basic foundations of life: house and food. In order to be able to establish a link that regulates and organizes the relationships that appear through culture of the surplus which emerged from the Neolithic, man develops a super-effective and practical system as is that of money and on a higher level, that of the economy. Although these two concepts have been associated with a series of eminently negative moral values, it is still a symbolic system of amoral exchange (in the strict sense, that is, without morals).

The cultural filter and the economy. Culture understood as a symbolic development of the being on Earth acts as a filter when affecting the world through technique. And as we have seen, affecting the world or the act of trajecting is primarily governed by the basic laws of food and home. Thus, culture acts as a sieve between our basic needs and the developing world, a technique through which we shape these basic needs in the surroundings and in the meta-surroundings. It is, therefore, the cultural lens which will optimize or not the resources of the surroundings now providing a moral charge to the economy.

Subtrophy and hypertrophy of the house and eating. The trophics of the basic relationships of man with his surroundings are provoked by moral trophics acquired after thousands of years of mistakes and misunderstandings. The trophics are therefore imbalances within our ecosystem by excess or by defect and are related with the two basic elements of life: house and food. The hypertrophy of the first economic powers of the world generates an excess (not for nothing the richest country in the world is also one of the fattest countries of the world) and the subtrophy a defect. These trophics have their origin in the relationship of possession that we establish with our surroundings and with its basic foundations.

Reformulating the basic trajective relationships: house and food. It is therefore necessary to first reformulate our basic relationships with the surroundings from two aspects that are currently in crisis and that are fundamental: house and food. A society without these aspects in balance (whether through hypertrophy or dystrophy) can have neither a socially nor culturally harmonious and balanced development. This is evident in the innumerable wars that assail our planet: all military confrontations, without exception, are provoked by imbalances with the house (invasion of countries, nationalisms…) and with food (control of energy resources). Moreover, the situation of development chaos of our country also denotes a largely unaware relationship with the house element.

The emergence of change as a concentric movement. Let us return to the diagram of needs of living beings. In this diagram a process of concentration is produced as we approach its centre. In the middle of this is the subject that demands a multitude of personal and peremptory, circumstantial and non-universal needs. A concentric force is thus produced from the exterior to the interior. From the universal towards the concrete. Therefore, a change of eccentric mentality is very difficult (from inside to outside) – society itself already uses this same denomination, often contemptuously. If there is no alternative, the change must be concentric from outside to inside (from universal to concrete). If we make the basic and fundamental needs of all persons shake, the remaining needs will automatically be reformulated. In short, being without a jeep can mean a more or less bearable calamity but being without a house and without food makes us see life through other eyes.

Crisis as an emergency. The ecological crisis we are currently experiencing is in fact a crisis that affects our house which is the planet Earth (the term ecological comes from the Greek oikos meaning house) and this implies, paradoxically, that it is also a crisis of food as, in our case, our house gives us food. This crisis is therefore the driving force that will lead to a social, economic, technological and political shift that will regenerate our whole world and drastically, radically and unquestionably relocate the relationships of need that we establish in our life with our surroundings. If we do not decide to voluntarily change it will be the house, the Earth, that which will change us and our world.

Recycling humanity. For this change to take place a fundamental circumstance must appear: we must recycle humanity. When talking of recycling I do so in the literal sense of the term: to return to the cycle. If man had not lost his most intimate connection with nature and had not exiled himself from the cycle of life we would not currently be in the situation we are. It is, therefore, necessary to recover our place in the cycle. Resuming the cycle will mean resuming life. If modernism has taken us to this point, postmodernism has realised this meaning and the obsolescence of this proposal. The modern machine has expired. It is, therefore, the moment to resume what is biotic. Resuming the natural cycle means recovering our lost eternity as we give up being teleological, unidirectional, speculative, lineal and temporal. We give up being un-presentable; that is, we will cease not being in the present. If we resume the cycle we will become systemic, chaotic, attractive, dynamic and synthetic. We will be presentable again, we will therefore live in a present continuous.

The synthetic or transmodernist moment. Thus, being synthetic strictly speaking means that we will synthesise all the knowledge of the past, recycling it in a new present. This new present involves a recycling at all levels: industrial, social, political, economic… We must, therefore, cease producing disposable things. We must abandon the Kleenex era to reach a point where everything we do is useful, and when I say do it is in a sense of becoming, everything we will become with our thoughts and our acts must be immersed in a cycle that serves those coming after us. Our waste must feed the others. Everything must be recyclable, not only industrially but also in terms of life. Uncovering the modern fallacy that makes us believe that the life cycle is birth-life-death and that it ends here when, in reality, the life cycle is birth-life-death-decomposition-life for another. In this sense, being synthetic also means being transmodernist: transcending modernism. Being in the cycle means being aware and letting oneself live in the apparent instability of constant mutation.

People give names to plants, but where do the names come from? What do

plant names say about plants? And what do plant names say about us?

Common plant names in the English language help align these extremely

variable organisms with our own habits, interests and needs. For example,

some common names for plants offer practical advice. Breadfruit is food, and

razor grass can draw blood. Other names describe plant characteristics:

trilliums have parts in threes and milkweeds have opaque white sap. In

Spanish the the same plants may have quite different common names, but I

think you probably get my point. Common names often tell us how to use a

plant, or point out some obvious characteristic of the plant so that we can

identify it.

Some common names reflect history. Jimson weed is named for Jamestown,

Virginia, where English settlers first learned about this plant. The

encounter, which took place in the 17th century, was not a happy one.

Local Indians, no doubt alarmed by the gang of adventurers and thieves who

had arrived from who-knows-where, fed them the plant, which causes violent

hallucinations. The Indians believed that the plant summoned divine forces,

but the English were neither enlightened nor driven away. Perhaps as a way

of dismissing the plantπs powers, they called it a weed.

For a sacred plant the name jimson weed is inappropriate, but at least

it directs attention to a moment in time and a clash of cultures. That is

more than we can say for the overwhelming majority of plant names, which

tell us nothing at all. Zinnias, for example, are named for Johann Gottfried

Zinn,

an 18th century professor of botany in Gottingen. The most that we can infer

from this name is that Europeans were acquainted with the plant until after

the age of colonization began.

2

Common names are notoriously confusing. Most countries and localities have

their own common names for plants. Not only can one name refer to more than

one kind of plant, but the same plant can have many different names.

Among the common names in English for Viola tricolor are heartsease,

love-lies-bleeding, love-in-idleness, johnny-jump-up, kit-run-about, wild

pansy, stepmother, and birdπs eye. No doubt there are plants that have

equivalent numbers of names in Spanish.

By the early 18th century unfamiliar plants from around the world were

flooding into Europe, and nomenclature and classification

had become what one professor of botany called the Augean stable of botany.

In response to this, Linnaeus developed the binomial system.

It was brilliantly simple. It gave each plant a genus and a species name in

Latin. To determine what constituted a species or a genus, Linnaeus directed

attention away from superficial plant characteristics, such as the colors of

flowers, to what he reasoned were most constant and signficant about

flowers: the structures of their reproductive organs.

Some found this scandalous. The St. Petersburg academician Johann

Siegesbeck denounced the Linnanean system for its ≥loathsome harlotry≤, and

asked ≥Who would have thought that bluebells, lilies and onions could be up

to such immorality?≤ What was offensive to Siegesbeck was not only that

Linnaeus seemed obcessed with sex, but that if flowers were indeed sexual

organs, then the flowering world was a panorama of promiscuity, where sins

such as incest and self-fertilization prevailed. As Siegesbeck saw it,

the binomial system validated licentiousness.

Linnaeus chose not to respond directly to these attacks, but named a

small, unattractive weed Sigesbeckia orientalis. The high road, however, had

its price. Linnaeus, who had been trained as a medical doctor, planned to

build a practice in Stockholm, but because of the damage done to his

reputation by Siegesbeck, no patients came to him.

Ironically, licentiousness, although not his own, saved Linnaeus from

disaster. In Stockholmπs taverns he encountered men who were suffering from

gonorrhea. He successfully treated a few of them, and word quickly spread.

Within a year he had so many patients that he complained he had no time for

his family or friends. His practice eventually came to the attention of the

court, and the King of Sweden appointed him professor of medicine and botany

at Uppsala University. Linnaeus remained in Uppsala for the rest of his

life.

The binomial system is something of a misnomer. It does not give each

plant two names, but a minimum of six. These correspond to the plantπs

division, class, order, family, genus and species. Thus the weed named for

Siegesbeck is Plantae Angiospermae Dicotyledoneae Compositae Sigesbeckia

orientalis. This sounds like the name of a king or grand duchess, but is

elegantly spare nevertheless, considering that it aligns the plant with all

other living things.

3

A great many plant binomials memorialize people, especially botanists,

their patrons, friends, and family members. The shift from descriptive names

to naming plants for people was no doubt favored by the sheer number of

unfamiliar plants that came to the attention of European botanists following

the first voyages of discovery. After the fiftieth lutea and the hundredth

hirsuta, the appeal and usefulness of many Latinate descriptive words must

have worn thin.

The shift also reflected the rise of humanism. Humanism tended to

construe the world as a treasury of resources to serve human needs and

desires. Plant names could further this grand project. For example, the most

conspicuous organism in the part of the world where I live is a magnificent

tree called Douglas fir. It is named for David Douglas, a Scottish plant

explorer who reached the American Pacific Northwest in the 1820s. He helped

make the tree known to European gardeners.

The treeπs binomial is Pseudotsuga menziesii and honors a different man,

Archibald Menzies, a Scottish doctor who identified the tree in 1791. Today,

whenever the treeπs name is spoken or written one or the other man is

evoked.

Such names celebrate not only individuals, but the values they represent. In

the case of Douglas Fir the values are science, European horticulture, and

humanism.

4

In China the belief that human beings are separate from animals and

plants and superior to them never took root. Perhaps as a consequence the

Chinese rarely named plants for people. Most plants had descriptive names,

or were named for other plants, or occasionally for animals or human

artifacts. For example, Amaranthus tricolor

is OYanlaihong,π which means ≥red at the time when the wild geese arrive.≤

Roses are OWoody Perfumed Flowers.π And the gardenia, which in English

memorializes Dr. Alexander Garden, a friend of Linnaeus, the Chinese call

OWine Cup.π

The only plants named for people were a few selections of ornamentals

that memorialize families rather than individuals. There is a peony named

OYao Huang,π which means Yao Family yellow. But more typical for peonies are

names like OTwo Beauties,π and OPhoenix White.π

5

Anthropocentrism, which is the belief that human beings are the central

fact or aim of the universe, is largely a Western phenomenon, traceable back

to the Bible and before that to Mesopotamia. In Genesis God creates human

beings in His image, separate from the beasts, who exist only in their own,

earthbound, lesser images. The message is clear: we are like God, they are

not.

Genesis reinforces this message through its account of how plants and

animals received their names. God brings every living creature before Adam

so that he can name them. After completing the job, Adam falls asleep, and

while he is unconscious, God removes one of his ribs and fashions it

into a helpmeet. When Adam awakens from this nonelective surgery, there she

is, and he names her Woman.

The parallels between Adamπs naming of the creatures and the original

creation of the universe are striking. According to Genesis, both activities

are masculine. Both involve words, and they arise out of incorporeal

reality:

God brings being out of nothingness by speaking, Adam brings names out of

his mind or soul. And both activities are exhausting: after the sixth day

God rests, and after naming the creatures, Adam sleeps.

In the Biblical scheme of things naming manifests power and establishes

heirarchies. Man gives names, but other organisms do not, which reflects the

chasm between man and all other creatures. There is a secondary division

between male and female. Adam names Eve. Presumably she is enough like him

to be capable of making up her own names. However, by the time God brings

her into being language is complete.

6

Names that assert human superiority in the grand scheme of things

are of course little more than expressions of wishful thinking. Wishful

thinking is very human, and can be funny or sad or tragic. In Europe during

the Middle Ages many people believed that God cared so much for them that He

endowed every plant with a sign which, if properly understood, indicated a

use. For example, plants with yellow flowers or roots were likely to cure

jaundice. The complex colors of iris petals were Godπs way of hinting

that they could serve as poltices for bruises. Poplar trees, whose leaves

tremble in the slightest breeze, would alleviate palsy.

In the 16th century this faith in the role that human need played in the

design of nature was elaborated into the Doctrine of Signatures, which

became a basis of pharmacology. Many plant names that we still use in

English

can be traced back to the Doctrine of Signatures. Thus adderπs tongue was an

antidote for snake bites, and toothwort, which has molar-shaped leaves,

treated toothache.

No doubt some of these plants had placebo effects, the power of which we

should not underestimate. However, placebo effects are unreliable, and we

know today that heartsease is a name that represents a failed experiment in

healing. We no longer expect hepaticas (from the Latin hepaticus, or liver)

to cure diseases of the liver, or scabiosa to help form scabs, or leopardπs

bane to repel leopards, but the names persist and have gradually ceased

to serve the anthropocentric gaze. If anything, they remind us of our

vulnerability to self-serving explanations. The plants that were named

according to the Doctrine of Signatures today accumulate associations

specific to the plants themselves. Time, they say, is the greatest artist.

It overcomes even the most treasured false beliefs.

7

The ancient Egyptians called cats maus. The Nauhatl-speaking Mexicans

call turkeys huacalotes, which is more-or-less the sound that these birds

make. We sometimes incorporate approximations of the sounds that animals

make into our languages as if we were adopting names that the animals had

given to themselves.

With plants no such pretense is possible. They are as devoid of language

as the sky, and consequently their names encourage flights of imagination.

Dianthus is the flower of Zeus from the Greek words di, or Zeus, and anthos,

which is flower. How the dianthus came to be associated with Zeus

has been forgotten. However the plant grows in Crete, which according to

myth is the birthplace of Zeus.

Only a few plant names have been in use for so long that their original

meanings are lost. Some authorities believe that the root word for rose may

be the Aryan word vrod, which meant something like ≥growth.≥ Others argue

that the root word could have been the Celtic rodd or rhudd, meaning red.

In any case, a rose was not originally a rose. It took a very long time for

the word to stand irreducibly for a certain kind of plant.

8

Irises are named for the Greek goddess of the rainbow. Iris delivered

messages from the gods to mortals, but she never carried messages from

mortals back to the gods. She ran a one-way communication service,

much like television, or movies.

Inspiration is one-way. Duchamp once said that no artist paints more

than seven pictures. I take this to mean that no artist can expect to

receive messages from the gods more than seven times. We can quibble about

the gods, of course, they may be electrochemical events, but what is

important is that the messages do not originate in what is identifiably the

self. The hallmark of inspiration is that it comes from somewhere else. As a

result, the practice of art tends to be humbling. Artists can be arrogant

toward other people, but they cannot be arrogant about inspiration, because

no artist has control over it. The name iris recalls the power of the gods,

who do not necessarily take human form, or even the forms of living

creatures. Iris reminds us that there are alternatives to the human will to

power.

9

Plant domestication began at least 12,000 years ago. During most of the

time since then people have selected plants without knowing anything about

genetics or even about plant sexuality. Although many species were

domesticated, and extremely refined ornamentals came into being,

such as most of the flowers painted by the 17th century Dutch, or the

astonishing azaleas pictured in the Pillow Book, a Japanese guide to

cultivated azaleas published in 1692, no one knew where these flowers came

from. As late as the 17th century when plants appeared with new colors,

patterns, or forms, the change was thought to have been brought about

from conjunctions of the planets, or directly from God.

Poets came closer to guessing the force that favored new hybrids. In

1681 Andrew Marvell wrote

≥Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use

Did after him the world seduce

And from the fields the flowers and plants allure,

Where Nature was most plain and pure.≤

Except for the heavy-handed moralism, this is a more-or-less accurate

description of the co-evolutionary process involved in the domestication of

ornamental plants. We domesticate ornamental plants to mirror our dreams,

values, habits, and aesthetic preferences. And vices too. That is, our

dreams, values, vices, and aesthetic preferences have evolutionary

consequences for flowers. And of course for animals as well.

10

In 1694 Rudolph Jakob Camerarius published Letter on the Sexuality of

Plants in which he identified the pistil as the female organ of flowers,

the stamen as the male organ, and pollen as the fertilizing agent. This

discovery made plant breeding in the modern sense possible.

The first ornamental plant breeders were artisans who in their spare

time

hybridized ornamental plants. In England these amateur breeders, called

florists, met in pubs, where they drank, held competitive exhibitions of

hybrids, and exchanged horticultural information. The artisan-florists only

bred plants that met exacting criteria: the plants had to be showy, highly

variable, and perennial, and they had to reproduce both sexually and

vegetatively. Sexual reproduction was necessary to produce new varieties,

but vegetative reproduction was also necessary, so that new varieties could

be propagated without further change.

Only a few kinds of plants in cultivation at the time met all of these

requirements. Carnations, pinks, tulips, hyacinths, primroses, ranunculuses,

and auriculas were popular among breeders in the 18th century. In the 19th

century others were added to the list, including violas, dahlias, geraniums,

camellias, roses, irises, and sweet peas. Today roughly a thousand breeding

complexes of ornamental plants evolve with human guidance.

From the beginning, plant breeders gave their creations names.

Auricula names from 1785 include OPopplewellπs Conquerer,π OGortonπs

Champion,π and OWrigleyπs Northern Hero.π A little later we get OTaylorπs

Gloryπ and OJolly Tar.π These names celebrate sports, victory,and the navy.

Throughout most of the 19th century ornamental plant breeding continued

to be associated with artisans. In class-conscious England they were

considered too ignorant and vulgar to produce serious art. Ruskin, perhaps

the most important art commentator and arbiter of English taste of the

Victorian era, fulminated against ornamental plant breeding, which he

considered depraved. For him the problems went deeper than class

and promiscuous sexuality: plant breeders twisted plants into something

other than their true forms, violating their natures. It took the the fin de

siecle decadents to make a virtue of impurity, and bring a degree of

aesthetic respectability to plant breeding.

However, groundwork for another kind of respectability had already been

laid. In the middle of the 19th century a few clergymen began to try their

hands at plant breeding. Under them auriculas with names like OAdonis,π and

OCiceroπ appear. These names presuppose acquaintance with the classics. In

the second half of the 19th century auricula names increasingly announce

formal education and imply the social circumstances that favor it. By the

end of the century we have auriculas named for royals such as OQueen

Alexandra.π

Auricula breeding had become middle class.

11

Nineteenth-century iris names follow the same path. The first

experiments in iris breeding took place in Germany and France in the early

19th century.

Iris breeding arrived in England during the second half of the nineteenth

century, by which time ornamental plant breeding was already on the road to

respectability. Consequently from the start iris names in England reflect

middle-class values and concerns : ONeptune,π and OPrincess Beatriceπ are

representative.OKashmir Whiteπ and OAmasπ, for Amasra in Asia Minor, are

named for places in the East where bearded iris species originated, but also

reflect late Victorian fascination with the Orient.

Iris breeding came to the United States shortly after it began in

England, and flourished during the first decades of the 20th century.

American iris names from this period reflect a set of values and

expectations

very similar to those of middle-class English breeders, but with less

emphasis on aristocratic titles. ONew Albionπ and OLent A. Williamsonπ are

typical American names from before World War I.

12

The 1920s mark a watershed in iris names. The prewar practice continues

of giving iris hybrids names such as OQuaker Ladyπ - names that evoke

traditional values - but the name OMelodramaπ is the harbinger of the

future.

As consumer culture moves into its mature phase entertainment moves toward

the center of consciousness. Over the next few decades iris names

increasingly announce the commodification of life, and its chief imperative:

fun.

In the US contemporary irises have been named for so many different kinds

of fun that we need a taxonomy just for it. Leafing through iris books and

catalogs, Iπve found nine major categories of fun: daydreams, travel,

popular entertainments, food and drink, beautiful women, love, illicit sex,

social status, and ruffles. Letπs take a quick look at some of these.

For Americans, tourist destinations and travel fantasies are reflected

in iris names like OGala Madrid,π OFly to Vegas,π and OTahiti Surprise.π

Islands are very popular, and Hawaii the most popular of all. We can buy

clones of OHawaiian Holiday,π OHawaiian Moonlight,π and OHilo Shore.π Such

names have nothing to do with irises, which do not grow well in the tropics.

Iris names celebrate almost every kind of popular entertainment. There

are television irises such as ODesigning Womenπ and OLawrence Welkπ, and

circus irises like OP.T. Barnum.π Visual arts irises include OGraphic Artπ

and OBeaux Art.π Among comic book irises are OSupermanπ and OMighty Mouse.π

There is a ORingoπ iris and a ORock Starπ iris, along with OSantana.π

But theater and movies lead the way. One can grow a garden full of stage and

screen irises including OBroadway,π and OOff Broadway,π OShow Biz,O and

OActress,π ODress Rehearsal,π OTinsel Town,π and OPink Starlet.π

Another inspiration for iris names is food and drink - or rather,

desserts and soft drinks. OBanana Creamπ and OGingersnap,π might share a

border with OOrange Crush,π ORaspberry Ripples,π and OLime Smoothy.π If one

prefers alcohol, there is OMulled Wineπ and OLilac Champagne.π What all

these have in common is calories. OSugartimeπ sums it up. We have a genetic

susceptibility to sweet things. We were evolved on the savannah, where sugar

was always in short supply, and so we never needed need to say no, until

now.

Capitalism, which moved onto the world stage with trade in sugar and

tobacco, exploits our genetic weaknesses. We are the animal who plays tricks

on itself. Consumer culture is the trickster spirit incarnate. Iris, too,

exploit us. They have evolved forms that seduce us into caring for them, and

giving them new homes. However, no iris is named OOpium Trade.π

Contemporary iris names show that women are as popular as desserts. By

internet one can order ODream Girl,π OMiss California,π and OHomecoming

Queen,π along with OPlay Girlπ and OFemme Fatale.π Love is consumer-friendly

with OCupidπs Arrowπ and OChapel Bells.π Add OLingering Loveπ to the

shopping cart, along with OSpanish Affair.π And how about OStreet Walkerπ or

OSatin Satan?π

Homosexuality is probably implicit in some iris names. In the United

States gays are to ornamental horticulture as blacks are to basketball, but

plant breeding is unfavorable to coming out. Plant breeding requires land,

which is much less expensive in the country than in the city, so plant

breeding is easiest to do in the country. Rural Americans tend to be

intolerant of overt homosexuality, so country homosexuals have to be

discreet. Perhaps this accounts for how few direct references there are to

homosexuality in iris names, although there is a ORuPaulπ named for one of

Americaπs most famous transvestites.

Unlike rural homosexuals, those under the spell of social status do not

need to be discreet. They announce themselves in iris names such as OSocial

Register,π OGold Cadillac, and OStately Mansionsπ. Contemporary America is

sharply divided by class, and with the ascendency of Ronald Reagan and the

Bush dynasty the hereditary economic elite has enjoyed sufficient public

approval that occasional iris names such as OHis Lordshipπ indicate

nostalgia for feudalism. But plutocracy is more American than feudalism, so

more irises still have names like OMillionaireπ and OBillionaire.π

The only category of fun that has anything actually to do with irises

is ruffles. Ruffles are irregularities that distort the petals of many

highly bred plants, giving them an appearance like crushed candy wrappers.

Few wild irises have these irregularities. With rare exceptions they come

from breeding, but not from just any kind of breeding, only from careful and

sustained selection. Even as late as the 1940s, by which time bearded irises

had been selected for 3,000 years and intensely bred for a century,

relatively few highly bred irises were ruffled. Today, however, almost all

new tall bearded iris introductions are heavily ruffled. Some have so-called

≥lace≤ as well, minute irregularities along the petal margins that give

flowers a crimped or frayed look. For just a few dollars one can grow

OBubbling Lace,π OFloradora Flounce,π and OPorcelain Frills.π

Ruffles are found not only in highly bred irises, but in highly bred

pansies, daylilies, cattleyas, petunias, and many other kinds of flowers.

All have been bred to look somewhat alike. Ruffles amount to generic

prettiness,

genetic kisch. They are crafted in the spirit of the global shopping mall.

Here everything is for sale and everything is disposable, including life.

This is nihilism with a happy face, or maybe itπs just fashion. But unlike

hairdos or popular music, genetic styles tend to last for decades.

13

Artists are latecomers to naming life. Edward Steichen, who was the

first recognized artist to claim plant breeding as a fine art, probably did

not name any of his hybrids until the 1920s.

He believed that plant breeding was akin to poetry, and named delphinium

hybrids for poets. Among Steichenπs hybrids are OCarl Sandburg,π OWilliam

Carlos Williamsπ, OArchibald MacLeishπ, and OPaul Claudel.π Today only one

of Steichenπs hybrids is still commercially available, the sky blue

delphinium OConnecticut Yankee,π named for Mark Twainπs novel A Connecticut

Yankee in King Arthurπs Court.

By naming delphiniums for poets, Steichen affirmed the seriousness of

ornamental plant breeding. The cultural context in which Steichen exhibited

delphiniums at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936 was a struggle within the

American art world to define modern art. There was no consensus about

whether fine art included such things as mass-produced laboratory glassware,

household furnishings, or office equipment, much less hybrid delphiniums.

However, there was general agreement that certain forces were

antithetical to art. The critic Paul Rosenfeld spoke for many in the 1930s

when he stated that ≥The main enemy of art [is] modern mercantile

advertisement.≤

Today that assumption no longer holds. Art, like the rest of cultural

life, has had to accommodate itself to advertising and to market forces that

reach almost everywhere. As a consequence, the old lines between art and

entertainment, art and fashion have blurred. But not entirely: art has a

long memory, and many cunning strategies, as well as its own trajectory and

inertia, affected by, but separate from the marketplace. For example, the

poet Joseph Brodsky said that he created for the past. I interpret this to

mean that he created for the approval of spiritual ancestors. These

ancestors deliver blessings and curses that awaken us from the present.

14

Since the 1930s artists have been exhibiting live works, and for roughly

the last fifteen years artists have been giving names to living things.

Sometimes, as in the case of Heath Buntingπs Superweed naming seems to

happen almost inadvertently, because live works need titles just as works

made from nonliving materials need titles. But sometimes naming is separate

from titling. The best known instance is Eduardo Kacπs fluorescing rabbit,

which he named Alba. But the project of which Alba is a part is titled GFP

Bunny.

15

In the fall of 1992 I did an installation titled Mirror for Marylhurst

College in Oregon. Mirror consisted of 18 named daffodil hybrids purchased

from mail-order catalogs. I planted the daffodils in a bed along a sidewalk

that led to the Collegeπs art gallery, and I labelled each daffodil with a

new name. For example, OErlicheer,π a fluffy double white narcissus,

became OMashed Potatoesπ because thatπs what the flowers look like to me.

OKing Alfred,π which is still the most popular daffodil in the world more

than a century after it was first bred, became OGenetic Folkart.π And so on

with names like OPatent Number 3252A,π OFun Life,π OMalice,π and ONeurotic

Rose.π I wanted to re-introduce an element of darkness into plant names,

something lost during the twentieth century. Plant names today are too

uniformly light, too fun. As Paul Klee said, art without darkness is like

mathematics without odd numbers.

16

Artists can title works however they want, but in the United States for

a plant name to be accepted among horticulturists, the hybridizer must make

formal application to the appropriate national plant society. The society

then either accepts or rejects the name. Rejection occurs when the proposed

name is already in use for another plant of the same type, or when a hybrid

too closely resembles an existing named plant. For example, last summer I

proposed to name an iris for my wife, but the name OKateπ

had already been taken.

The registry system has a three word maximum for any name, but under

rare circumstances will allow one additional word. This made it possible for

me to name an iris for a friend with four names, ORainer von der

Schulenburg.π

However, a five-word plant name would be out of the question. Under the

registry system we will never have a flower named The Bride Stripped Bare By

Her Bachelors, Even.

17

I have followed Steichenπs example and named plants for poets, including

OJohn Witteπ and OAllen Grossman.π I have also named plants for artists. I

named a streptocarpus OEdward Steichen,π and another OMark Tobey.π Irises

include ORobert Smithson,π OEduardo Kac,π and OOlaf Stapledon.π Stapledonπs

1930 novel, Last and First Men envisions civilizations based upon genetics,

with genetic art the highest form of expression.

Last year I named an iris OSnowy Donkey,π after the great Chinese

artist Chu Ta. He was born in 1626, a descendent of the first Ming emperor.

Because of his ancestry, he faced execution when the Manchus seized control

of China in 1644. He fled his native city and took refuge in a Buddhist

monestary. He was a monk for more than 30 years, rising to the position of

abbot. However, eventually he quit the monestary and married. His marriage

apparently failed,

and he seems to have had no children. He devoted the rest of his life to

painting. He used many pseudonyms, Snowy Donkey among them, and feigned

madness or perhaps actually was mad - art historians donπt agree. But his

spare art fulfils the Chinese ideals of being eccentric, ever-changing, and

antique.

My streptocarpuses include OLaurie Andersonπ and ORuth Currier.π When my

wife and I lived in New York Ruth had the apartment below us. She danced

with Jose Limonπs troupe, and for awhile directed it. As an artist she was

always a model of integrity. We built a roof garden together which became so

lush that the roof partially collapsed during a rainstorm.

When one names a plant for a living person, that person must give

written permission. I would like to name an iris for Margaret Atwood, whose

Oryx and Crake is in my opinion the best novel about biotechnology ever

written. But she never answered my emails, so the iris that I chose for her

does not have her name.

18

Most of my plant names are like Douglas Fir: they memorialize

individuals

and the values associated with them, but say little about the plants

themselves. I feel conflicted about this. Certainly plants deserve their own

names.

But what are their real names? Plants are perfect examples of

nonrepresentational art. They represent nothing except themselves. In

nonrepresentational art there is a tradition of not titling works.

Kandinsky, and especially Mondrian

pioneered this tradition with nontitles like Composition III. In the 1950s,

60s, and 70s there were entire exhibits of works without titles, or with

deliberately uninformative titles such as Number 99, or Four Reds. No doubt

genetic artists have much to learn from these experiments in titling.

Without a title viewers have no recourse but to look at the work itself.

I eventually named the Margaret Atwood iris OUntitled.π However, I

suspect that with plants we will tend to favor more distinctive names.

Living things, whether or not we claim them as art, are family, and every

member of the family must have its own, unique name.

19

Some things about the future are fairly certain. We know, for example,

that we will either develop a sustainable culture, or suffer the

consequences, like any creature that damages or exhausts its environment.

Names will play a role in either future because names affect how we see the

plants and animals that we are dependent on. In the years to come, we may

need to rename many creatures.

Artists have come to naming life so recently that we can only guess

what they will bring to plant and animal names. Unlike all other disciplines

the arts can tap into everything that we know and are and can imagine. The

wide embrace of the arts gives us our best chance of realizing one promise

of language, which is to bridge the gap between our minds and the larger

world.

PROGRAMA

Dissabte 7 d’octubre de 2006

11h. LLUÍS SABADELL I ARTIGA - Comissari LAV01

12 h. SERGI VALVERDE - Investigador del Laboratori de Sistemes Complexos UPF

13 h. ECOSISTEMA URBANO - Arquitectes

16h. TWA EYELINERS - Arquitectes

17h. ALBERTO ESTÉVEZ - Arquitecte i Director del Doctorat d’Arquitectura Genètica

. . .

Vista de la visita guiada a l’exposició

Sergi Valverde i ECOSISTEMA URBANO

Manuel Feo Ojeda i Claudia Collmar components de TWA EYELINERS

Alberto Estévez

Podeu llegir els textos complerts de les ponències a la secció TEXTOS d’aquesta web.

PROGRAMA

Dissabte 14 de maig de 2005

10:00 h. Presentació de la Jornada.
10:30 h. Passejant per territoris Híbrids. Conferència a càrrec de Pau Alsina - Director d’Artnodes i Professor d’Estètica de la UOC

12:00 h. Pausa
12.30 h. Naming Life. Conferència a càrrec de George Gessert - Artista i teòric de l’art de modificació genètica.
14:00 h. Dinar
16:00 h. Arquitectures Híbrides. Conferència a càrrec de Ignasi Pérez Arnal -Arquitecte
17:30 h. Taula rodona

Direcció: Lluís Sabadell

. . .

D’esquerre a dreta: Pau Alsina, George Gessert i LLuís Sabadell

Goerge Gessert

D’esquerra a dreta: Ignasi Pérez Arnal, Pau Alsina, Lluís Sabadell i George Gessert

The discovery of America, at the end of the 15th century, apart from involving the expansion of the known world, meant, in the imagination of European citizens, the appearance of a unspoilt and virgin space that had not participated in the history of the West, nor in the ups and downs that attacked the continent worn by the passage of years and war.
The New World was revealed to the eyes of all Europe as a privileged space where men could enjoy a free existence, away from the complexity of modern life and from the difficulty of surviving in a continent destroyed by religious struggles and national wars.
The emergence of the American continent awakened the dream that there, in the New Land, it would be possible to reconstruct the lives of men, away from civilization and close to the origin of the world. Because the journey to America was the journey back to a simple life, close to nature and away from the habits, laws and customs which beset the existence of those who did not participate in the privileges of civilization. The discovery of America meant the discovery of savage life, of savage man, both invested with the qualities and virtues that the Europeans bestowed on them.
America encapsulated the projection of all the desires that could not be realised in Europe, and the greatest of all was the desire to be free of any authority which infringed the rights of men demanded by humanism. There, those persecuted by the law, dissidents of any established ideology and religion, or those nostalgic for a lost world order, imagined a place that fulfilled all aspirations and permitted men their own resolution. America was, therefore, Paradise, Eden, Arcadia, the Promised Land, the only possible place where man could fully realize himself, far from decadent Europe.
In the New Land men had to be happy, as were the Europeans in their origin, because they were renewing the pact of alliance with nature, which imposes its own rhythm through the cycles and seasons. Those of the New Land were innocent and good as their existence kept faith with the will of nature and they knew nothing of the ambition and arrogance of a (Western) culture which had definitively moved away from simplicity and a primitive life, substituting it with the refinement of a civilized life.
This European dream, Arcadian and pastoral, which projected its imagination onto the lands of America, bore its fruit and crystallized in diverse literary forms, forms which had the theme of the Edenic and Arcadian dream where humanity, distanced from the values of civilization, realized its desires in proximity with nature, just as the Europeans believed was happening in America.
Jacopo Sannazaro, poet to the Court of Naples, wrote Arcadia in 1504, the first literary manifestation of this utopian spirit. The hero of the poem, called Sincere, disappointed by the artifice of the city, withdraws to Arcadia where he shares his life with shepherds; ingenuous beings who introduce him to the privileges of rural life. 50 years later, Montemayor’s Diana appeared which shows the desire of Europeans to rediscover the primitive values of natural life and their need to return to the ancient world, where the values of humanism prevail. And finally, Arcadia by the British Sir Philip Sidney, a poem that led to the taste for pastoral themes in poetry, theatre, fiction, opera, painting and architecture.
With the discovery of America the debate on natural man developed in Europe and the myth of Arcadia and Eden were modernised. The travellers to the Americas offered Thomas More the materials for his Utopia and inspired Shakespeare’s Tempest and the New Atlantis by Francis Bacon. In the same way, the island where Robinson Crusoe stayed for so many years is located on the coasts of America, at the mouth of the Orinoco. And Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin and Hegel imagined and pondered on what this place must be, identical to thought, which they called America.
The European ideal of a virgin land where man could realize his ideal of humanity reached North America, above all New England, in the 17th century, with the arrival of the Puritans, obliged to exile themselves from England after their defeat in the religious wars. This protestant sect hoped to create the Kingdom of God on Earth; not like the Anglicans who sought to ensure a place in heaven after death. The vision of the world of these new Americans was still theocentric, but their expansionist impetus and the desire to see their dream realized were the elements that provided courage and strength to bring about the ideal. An ideal that at the same time crystallized in the will to create a mission. Thomas Shepard’s Autobiography, a British Puritan who arrived in New England in 1635, makes it explicit that “in America, and not in Europe, I will be able to find my own realization as a political subject… The Lord hath shown His affection for me… leading me to the Land of Peace, the judgement place. Where the Lord hath made the savage Indians who conspired the death of all the English…”
The awareness that they were in a new world where something of supreme importance was being played out, of which they formed part, made the Puritans heroic and exemplary. Their first desire was to flee from England from a power that threatened them, and they knew that by settling in the New Land they would be able to construct the religious institutions according to their taste and need.
Seen from Europe, America offered governments perspectives for a rationalization of space and of social relations impossible to realize on the old continent, petrified by traditions and feudal law. America was, for the Puritans, the Promised Land to construct the Church of the Saints. For them the New World, where they settled without any inclination to return to their place of origin, was superior to the nostalgia for returning to the Old World, as it was constructed in the image of utopia.

Soon after arriving in America, the utopia, cherished for so long, was revealed as an ill-fated place. Nature was in all senses inscrutable. The land, in many places still virgin, resisted the rudimentary tools with which they wished to tame it and confronted men in their unconscious and irrational arrogance. The forests, rivers and prairies were infinite and full of danger. Nature was considered an enemy and adverse to the aims and will of men. The forests of the east coast were the exclusive dominion of the natives, savage, uneducated, Godless and without conscience. Terror, which in England manifested itself through the ecclesiastical authorities, here, in America, was shown in the face of the native who, after an initial close and friendly relationship became the danger that hid in the forests of the east coast and established itself on the interior prairies. For almost two centuries, from the early 17th to the end of the 18th, the indigenous American Indians were massacred with an indescribable rancour and brutality: the only possible way of controlling the terror was to push the natives towards the West and level the forests and prairies where evil grew strong.

In order to establish a Christian colony not only was it necessary to subdue nature but also the inhabitants that populated it; men and women who in no way matched the image the new settlers had of them, an image that was the result of a tradition that went back to the Renaissance and that made the naked native the icon and the graphic representation of the new continent and of its peoples. To make the white American the true American, the European colonists rejected this traditional representation as an erroneous conception and achieved this by giving the first inhabitants the name of “Indians”, moving them from America to another hemisphere, to another people with dark skin and to another place of the British Empire. And they portrayed these natives, as Mary Rowlandson described them, in the midst of wild beasts with which they shared the land.
Mary Rowlandson, wife of a Puritan minister, who was kidnapped and held by the Indians, tells of her experience in the book The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, published in 1682. Written to praise the goodness and mercy of God, Mary Rowlandson composed a painful and terrifying text that reaffirmed the Puritans as God’s chosen people and excluded the Indians from the human race and confirmed America as the Promised Land of the Puritans. She describes the natives “as black creatures of the night”, “savage bears”, “ravenous wolves”, and “inhumane creatures” who live like “beasts scattered through the forest”, and who “search among the filth” to feed on “filthy trash”. For her the New Continent was an uncivilized, savage, immense and bleak country and with sinister swamps where the American Indians “roam”, ”roar”, “howl” and “destroy and devastate”. This text published in Boston, republished in England, was rediscovered in the 19th century and continued to be published until the early 20th century as the paradigmatic account of American captivity and the nature of the natives.

Just after arriving on land they had to resolve who those lands belonged to, given that their Anglo-Saxon traditions and agricultural practices were based on property of the individual, not of the community or tribe. Some of the recent arrivals affirmed that the owners were the natives but they were expelled, murdered or sold as slaves. Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts declared that all uncultivated lands should be of public domain, according to the unwritten law of England. In other words, they belonged to the king. Finally, the colonists decided to seize all lands, without consulting the natives, but with the representative of the crown, in other words, the governor.
In the Connecticut Valley the Puritan priests quoted the Epistle to the Romans 13:2: “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” The colonial governments formed an armed force of 240 men under the charge of John Mason. They were joined by a thousand Narragansett warriors. The historian Francis Jennings writes: “Mason proposed avoiding an attack against the Pequot warriors, which could overwhelm his inexpert and faithless troops. The battle itself was not his purpose. The battle is one of the two ways of destroying an enemy’s capacity to fight. The massacre can achieve the same end with less risk, and Mason had resolved that the massacre would be his objective.” Indeed, in less than ten years the natives of the east coast, from Florida to New England, were completely massacred and their lands burnt and devastated and their forests completely levelled so that they could never shelter their old inhabitants in their shadows.
The Puritans adopted a verse from psalm 2:8: “Ask of me, and I will give the nations for your inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth for your possession.” From then, the colonising European states declared that their conquest was the will of God. The European immigrants seized the lands and set the natives to work as slaves. By 1637 there were already around 2,000 English colonists and once all the tribes settled on the east coast were massacred they decided to continue advancing inland, conquering new lands and annihilating the natives.
.
As the colonists penetrated the continent, obliging the natives to abandon their lands in the East and move to the West, the colonists, to avoid any settlement of the natives, burnt and destroyed everything in their path: cultivated fields, prairies, forests, leaving desolation and desert behind them.

For many long years the efforts of the colonists were exclusively dedicated to taming nature, at the expense of its destruction: nature, with its secrets and dangers, was the primordial enemy that God had put in their destiny as another test for achieving the way to perfection. There were many years of struggle with the natives, who had to be prevailed upon to abandon their lands and the lands, with their vast extension, their forest vegetation and their violent orography, resisted the new owners, who with their inadequate resources did not retreat from the impulse of nature.

Once dominated by the perseverance and necessity of the new Americans, and with all risks not yet overcome, a new relationship emerged with the defeated enemy. When nature ceased to be hostile for man it transformed into a “landscape”. The landscape is a construction which has passed through symbolic filters, cultural legacies, old memories, ancestral memories, aesthetic experiences and literary presences. It is a complex form, and the more elements that contribute to it the richer it is. We can say that the landscape is at once reality and the appearance of reality. It is reality insofar as it is made up of real things; but it is also appearance insofar as the things are only manifested through imagination and the delusion of our senses, given that our senses, rather than transmitting reality to us, to some extent produce it.
It is necessary that the vision of nature is not conditioned by shortage and need so that it can awaken other interests, whether artistic, symbolic, religious, aesthetic or scientific. And in the new landscape the new Americans projected their desires for simplicity, solitude and authenticity and transformed it into a symbol of a transcendental nature that maintained the originating principles of truth and virtue unharmed.
After decades of struggling with the land, of casting out and destroying the natives, nature gave way and began to offer its generosity. Eden opened to life and showed its beauty and magnitude and, after the tests that God put in their way, he awarded them with a favourable and fertile land which fulfilled all the expectations that man had of it. Nature was considered the natural temple of America, and “the miserable need for destruction” of the early days was compensated with religious veneration; given that nature was considered the revelation of the holiness of God, and the natural spectacle and its phenomena was offered to him as a theatrical performance in which all were its protagonists. Sydney Andrews, writes: “I do not think that that I will ever contemplate anything as beautiful before finding myself in the celestial city. The columns of this temple sublime as nature were not constructed by man, but were the result of the intervention of Providence, growing inexorably, until the chosen people discovered them, in the heart of the promised West”. As appears in this painting by Leutze,

After the War of Independence, the new Americans took the forest as the cradle of the nation and transformed the Puritan legacy in secular terms. The poets, novelists and painters of the first generation took the infinite extension of the landscape as the theme for their works: savage nature offers a tutelary benevolence to those who know how to recognise in the mountains, valleys and rivers the most precious of themselves. Theology transformed into community ethics, and religion into philosophy and aesthetics of nature. In the retreat of the forests is found the forgotten truth. The painters Cole, Durand, Bierstadt, Church, the novelists Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth, Hawthorne, Thoreau, the philosophers Emerson, Longfellow, and the poet William Culler Bryant, narrated the adventures of the first pioneers and glorified the almost eternal trees that, as symbols of freedom, populated the millenary forests. As in this fragment of the poem The Antiquity of Freedom, by Bryant, intimate friend of the painter Cole: ”Here are old trees, tall oaks, and gnarled pines…/ In these peaceful shades / Peaceful, unpruned, immeasurably old / My thoughts go up the long dim path of years / Back to the earliest days of liberty.”
Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson School, of Puritan training and ascendance, inaugurated the genre of American landscape painting. Certainly Cole’s natural surroundings were not at all appropriate for the Edenic and pastoral vision that could serve him as a model. Sailing along the Hudson, to Cole and his disciples the panoramas that lay before their eyes were a rare synthesis between a theatrical idea of the wild and an old image of modern industrialization. Their landscapes were imaginary, it could be no other way, as what they sought would have to be found in the far east, not on the Atlantic coast.

Thomas Cole was a native of Lancashire, in England, and moved to America a few years after he was born. Descendant of an old family of “dissidents” (the old Puritans who opposed the English monarchy), he never stopped reading that kind of edifying literature typical of the Puritan sect, especially the work of John Bunyan, theologian and Puritan preacher who wrote Pilgrim’s Progress

Where he describes allegorically and on a Calvinist doctrinal basis the dangers and stages that the Christian goes through to reach the bosom of Christ.

This work, Pilgrim’s Progress, was John Cole’s source of inspiration for the series of paintings on initiation in life as a pilgrimage: from innocence to experience until epiphany.

The cycles of history that make up the vast theme The Course of Empire describe the course of history that goes from primitive Arcadia to the decadence of civilizations, when grass grows again between the stones of the fallen walls.
Asher Durand, disciple of Cole and President of the National Academy in New York, second generation theologian, decided to dedicate himself to painting in order to “reflect without compulsion on the elevated vault of Heaven.” His celebrated Letters on Landscape Painting are a perfect illustration of the diluted transcendentalism he preached in his painting.

“The emergence of our land, beyond its magnificent structure and its functions which ensure our well-being, is replete with noble and holy lessons, only learnt through the light of revelation. It is impossible to contemplate our Earth without arriving at the conviction that the Great Architect of these glorious images has placed them before us as divine attributes.”
In this work “Progress” is an idyllic and pastoral image, in the style of Claude Lorrain, Fragonard or Turner. Progress barely fells any trees, but the panorama continues to maintain the light of Puritan divinity.

One of the celebrated works by Durand, “Kindred Spirits”, is a manifesto of the sublimity of the Hudson Valley, a homage to the memory of Thomas Cole where the landscape brings together the diverse favourite places of Cole and is an exhaustive inventory of the most frequent symbols and emblems. Standing on the precipice, Cole, with palette and stick, is accompanied by the poet William Cullen Bryant. The painting shows the spiritual affinity between the poet and the painter and also the transcendence of nature for the constitution of an American identity.
The return to nature and the attention with which it was considered by Americans in the early 19th century was an idea and an aspiration that had been manifesting itself in Europe since the mid-18th century, since Jean Jacques Rousseau proposed the need to move away from the artifices of civilization which uprooted man from nature and separated him from himself. For Rousseau, as he affirms in The New Eloisa, the sensitive natural order announces “the presence and supreme intelligence of God.” The spectacle of the natural garden allows dialogue in solitude with oneself, prompts an approach to the most intimate and secret of ourselves and what we have in common with other men.
However, the idealization of the landscape in America happened when the presence of man and civilization had made their impact on the heart of nature. When the great Holm oaks, the giant sequoias, the towering fir trees and the extensive prairies ran the risk of extinction was when they aestheticized, preserved, institutionalized and consecrated. This was the case of Yosemite National Park, established by a Congressional decree in 1864 as a national sanctuary. Virgin and local nature was still preserved unspoilt in the heart of the American West – it could be in no other place – and awaited discovery as an “antidote to the poison of industrial society.” For its complete conservation the mines that had been exploited since the 18th century were closed and the Ahwahneechee Indians who had arrived from the east, fleeing from the Puritan hordes, were removed by force. The discovery of Yosemite immediately received poets, painters and photographers who venerated the place and redeemed America from the ignominious Puritan natural destruction. The photographer Carleton Watkins, the painters Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Frederick Church and the poet John Muir portrayed the forests, mountains and valleys of Yosemite as the natural cathedral of the West.
The photographs by Carleton Watkins exhibited in New York in 1862 had unprecedented success. The gorges and precipices
left the visitors astonished who, accustomed to the epic stories of Fenimore Cooper, saw the photographs as the miraculous appearance of the forests of the West as a sign from God that he had forgiven the Americans and was offering them another opportunity to understand the divinity of their landscape. Although they also showed the impact of man in such a sacred place, they marvelled at the magnitude of the sequoias and saw in them the red columns of the temple of North America.

The idea that the age of the forests is calculated in millennia, and that these were contemporary to the start of the Christian era, strengthened the feeling of its natural holiness.

A correspondent of the Boston Daily Advertiser, in an ecstasy associated with the custom of celebrating the mass of the tabernacle, which takes place in the forest, related the birth of the trees with the birth of Jesus Christ and affirmed: “What an eternity lies before us! The age of these forests is that of the Christian era; perhaps when the angels saw how Bethlehem was illuminated with the Star of the East, their seeds broke the gangue of humus and saw the light on the surface of the Earth.”

Lying in the immense territory of the United States, the national parks would be from that time great dykes that defended the wild space and affirmed the identity of the American people. Modern man, in order to be so, from that moment on had to revere the natural landscapes, as this bestowed on him a dimension close to the sacred, the exhibition and the abstraction of the profane course of life.

Albert Biersadt, of German origin, arrived in America as a very young child, studied painting in Berlin, at the height of recognition of Romantic painting and must have known the work of Caspar David Friedrich. He was the painter who from the moment he discovered the great forests of the American West took them as the exclusive motif and theme of his work, which always takes us back to the German Romantic landscape artists such as Carus, Rungew, Friedrich, Kersting, etc.

As Barbara Novak affirms, German idealism had been too intense to continue influencing the group of American artists, highly inclined to a form of visual transcendentalism.

The Romantic poets and painters liked to experience the sublime feeling provoked by nature when it ascends mountains and delves the abyss. The experience of the mountains has an initiating nature. The dangers confronted, the anguish overcome, the sorrows, provoked an almost religious exaltation.

On a trip to the West that included a short visit to Yosemite, Bierstadt had made notes on the valley and the Rocky Mountains, and back at his studio created this painting that ingenuously shows the images of a far and exotic West with the mass of the mountains of the park. An American style georgic idyll: in other words, a syncretism taken from diverse places, real and imaginary, reconstructed with the verisimilitude necessary to be admitted, if not as real, at least as possible.

Fifteen years later, as a result of the exhibition of photographs by Carleton Watkins, Bierstadt returned to Yosemite, and the character between picturesque and sublime offered him the transcendental nature he had been seeking. Thanks to the use of light and to welcoming and, at the same time, arrogant and proud nature, the landscape transformed into an originating space, in the primordial place, close to Eden, not free from the dangers that contribute to offering a secret, at once hidden and evident.

Rousseau’s reading of man and his relationship with the natural environment was developed by the philosopher Emmanuel Kant, who affirmed that nature moves us through the symbolism of its forms and colours and, as if it were an artist, does not show in its language the truth and secret it holds. For Kant, the experience of the landscape is awakened by the seduction that nature exercises on the imagination, sensuality, memory and culture of the viewer. In the aesthetic experience of nature all human complexity is placed in activity, from the most sensual to the most intellectual of our motivations.

Kant broadened the concept of beauty embracing other categories not compatible with the harmony and serenity of classical beauty. This new aesthetic trend offered a new sensibility to the landscape. From the peaceful fields and harmonious nature, attention shifted to wild and rugged places; the sea and its storms, the unapproachable rocky places, seemed to defy the presence of man by the unleashing of uncontrollable energies. The mountain inspired feelings of insecurity and anguish faced with the magnitude of the rocks suspended over the void that opened up at your feet.

32. Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872
The feeling of the sublime which, according to Kant, is manifested through the momentary suspension of the life faculties, is provoked by the aesthetic appreciation of the magnitudes. Nature is sublime in those phenomena whose intuition itself bears the idea of infinitude.

33. Moran, Mojave Wall

“Rocks audaciously suspended and threatening, storm clouds that gather in the sky and advance with thunder and lightening, volcanoes at the height of their devastating power, hurricanes that leave desolation in their wake, the limitless ocean roaring with anger, a profound waterfall in a powerful river, etc… reduce our faculty of resistance to an insignificant smallness, compared with its force.

34. Moran, Niagara Falls

However, the more fearful its appearance the more attractive it is, so that it can be observed from a safe place; and we call these objects sublime because they elevate the faculties of the soul above their ordinary middle term and makes us discover in ourselves a faculty of resistance of a totally distinct nature, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against almighty nature.”

35. William Keith

This is why we return to the natural places as places of pilgrimage. Kant affirms that we then rediscover what civilization had made us forget: the identity of the self and of the world, of the subject and the object, of the spirit and of nature. Rediscovering the lost unity, from which we had been separated is, above all, resorting to aesthetic intuition and, through art, seeing the soul of the world gradually revealed in nature and man. The philosophy of nature is inseparable from the philosophy of art, given that art is the prolongation of the work of nature on man, and in man the divine manifestation of nature is prolonged.
Together with the metaphysical aspect of German idealism, brought up to date by the philosophers and painters Emerson, Cole, Durand, Bierstadt, Longfellow; George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882) in his work Man and Nature; or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, published in 1864, decisively collaborated in the American Conservation Movement: faced with the predominant idea among geographers of the time that the physical appearance of the Earth was almost completely the result of natural phenomena, Marsh [1965(1864)] emphasised human beings as important agents of change; man changed the natural complex and the changes in nature had a decisive influence on man.
In particular, Marsh called attention to the dangers of the indiscriminate felling of forests, as the erosion and alteration of the system of natural drainage broke down the productivity of the land. He insisted that nature did not always cure itself; he did not reject all exploitative activity, but advocated a “scientific” management of resources. Human action was capable of restoring natural harmonies, and this action had to come, more than from state intervention, from the very educated interest in the vision of nature as something that worked together with man to his benefit.
As well as Marsh, the writer, philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau expressed with great acuteness the delight in the experience of virgin nature —as a symbol of the sublime—. The most influential work by Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods (1854), was written after he spent two years in a cabin beside a small lake called Walden, near Concord (Massachusetts), dedicated to covering his basic needs and to freeing himself from the rush and anguish of the cities. The freedom and charm of nature —according to Thoreau— could be found equally in the landscapes transformed by the hand of man close to the cities and in the uninhabited forests of Maine, but in any case “only in the wildness is the preservation of the world.” For Thoreau man could better be defined as a part of nature than as a member of society, and he only truly found himself in the depths of the virgin forest, achieving the unification of his mind with the spiritual dimension of nature.
This is for Thoreau, Emerson, Cole and Cooper the only way of constructing an identity. An identity that was initially forged in the search for utopia where all desires could be realized. A utopia forged with a religious, dogmatic and agonizing foundation that opened a path through the obstacles that nature interposed and which after submitting it to its needs revered it as its own transcendental past.