ANNE WHISTON SPIRN

The Language of Landscape

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Landscape has all the features of language. It contains the equivalent of words and parts of speech-patterns of shape, structure, material, formation, and function. All landscapes are combinations of these.

ELIAS CANETTI

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That the letters of the alphabet still mean something, that they still have their form and weight and the power to manifest something in this destroyed landscape of belief rife with bodies; that they still remain signs rather than having disintegrated like life itself; that they have not grown invisible out of shame, and that every good sentence they are forced to compose still holds potential; that an innocent man does not hang the moment any are crossed out on this page—or could it be that they are even more damned than we are and haven’t a clue?

ITALO CALVINO

Invisible Cities

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There is no language without deceit.

DARIAN LEADERWhat is Madness?

What is it, first of all, that acts on us from outside? As infants, it is our caregivers, whose discourse we are born into. We depend almost totally on them, and our own subjectivity tends to be asserted and formed through acts of refusal. When we say no to being fed, for example, we show that we are different from them, that we are not simply their puppets. If we can do this through action, we can also do it through speech, but this is complicated by the fact that speech, initially, comes from them. We learn words through them, and if we accept that thinking relies on verbal structures, our thought, at a certain level, derives from them too.