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Wednesday, January 5, 2011

After my visit to Tasmania...

Nature, as opposed to... culture?

What is a 'retreat' to nature, unless there was a place I was retreating from? A normative space;- Urban, anthropocentric and 'technological,' as opposed to 'natural'...

Nature as a space for hiking, camping, sight-seeing; A fetishisation of a world which has elsewhere been thoroughly colonised. Colonisation: The process of imagining and reifying duality and separateness of the Human and the Natural.

World heritage areas, national parks, etc. etc., land that is 'owned' by the government... Although they are technically permitted (by her Nation-state owners) for recreational use to all, it is almost exclusively accessible only to those who meet certain conditions of privilege (able-bodied, with spare time, capital, access to a vehicle, etc.).

Another condition of privilege is the acculturalisation into an Ownership Mentality... the ability to imagine that this land is mine, free to be explored...

But here, I renounce my cynicism.

To imagine the possibility of the 'pristine-ness,' 'untouchedness,' 'unspoiled-ness' of a land may well come from destructive drives... or from a quest for the sacred, driven by a thirst to be touched by the sacred, and in turn, a thirst to sacralise. On the one hand, sacralisation in either direction can occur only if I believe that this land is under the jurisdiction of my God, my political and spiritual convictions; that I have the RIGHT to be here, and that I am blessed with the authority to sacralise a space or my body through imagination.

On the other hand, the retreat to nature (or a space designated 'the natural') can be seen as a form of catharsis for those caught up in anthropocentric dualism; a cathartic healing from the ordination to a human worldsphere that is 'fallen.' A catharsis born from the attachment to Original Sin (we have been expelled from the pristine Garden, and enslaved to our quintessentially human reliance on technology to survive). A catharsis that is a short relief from the mundane taxation of human relations (contrasted with the solitude I seek from the Natural).

Part of the healing, therefore, is to dissolve this very distinction, this duality between the "Cultural/Technological/Un-Natural" and the "Natural," and the duality between the "Anthropocentric-Repressive" and "Catharsis." I may do this by continuing to fetishise the Natural, or I may do this by locating what it is from the Natural that I have disavowed from my participation in the Cultural/Technological/Un-Natural, what it is that I have projected upon the Natural, and begin to understand and (re)create its presence already here, already now, already present. Wherever I am.

Solitude, freedom, solace, purity, purification, spaciousness... My own mind is clear sky and still lake; my own body is protective tree and unshakeable mountain; my own breath is fresh breeze.

What am I retreating from?

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