For me, the most interesting notion Lane made in Landscape was on page 148: “Any symbolic landscape is always multivalent in its meanings. Indeed, it is when a symbol is most able to engage the imagination that is most abounding in ambiguity.”
I think this is extremely true. One of the necessary things which I believe make a place sacred, is its ambiguity. When a place becomes know for being sacred due to its history, or simply because enough people refer to it as sacred, I feel like that place loses a lot of its raw significance. To me, the meaning fades when it is know as sacred for concrete reasons and not for the ambivalent but strong hold it has on its visitors.
I think a place is most sacred when its symbolism is at its most obscure. That is when its pneumaticity has its most power over people. Lane at one point in Landscape describes a desert as sacred because of its indifferent silence and that everybody has their own interpretation if it’s symbolism. In another section of Landscape, Lane mentions the term “locus mirabilis,” which is a place that feels transcendental among the well known areas nearby. If a place loses its obscurity, how are we supposed to see as clearly just how uncommon and extraordinary it is?
Lane claims that an environment affects one’s perception of reality, while this perception in turn transforms the essence of the environment. If a place is meant to be sacred, but looks and feels and its considered the same by everyone else, and if its sacredness has been publicized to a point where it loses its ambiguous weight, then how does our perception affect us from there? And in reciprocity, how does that warped perception make us think about the original “sacred” environment?
Just a thought.
- Emily Schulz -
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