Light Traces by Sallis John Vallega Alejandro Arturo

Author:Sallis, John, Vallega, Alejandro Arturo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253012821
Publisher: Indiana University Press

9

Heights

Tristachersee

Osttirol

July

Favor is always granted to the upward look. Vision is invariably drawn to the heights, as if by nature, as if orientation to the upward way were indigenous to human nature, inscribed there by nature itself. Not even the most extreme obsession with things close at hand or with their bearing on us can render us entirely insensitive to the force of attraction to the heights. This force not only draws vision upward but also, as the heights open up, recoils earthward, comes over us, eliciting affective simulation of the sublime ascent that vision will already have traced. Transposed ecstatically to the soaring heights, we take joy in being released, even if only imaginatively, from the bonds that bind us to the earth. The limits of earthbound existence fade before the age-old phantasy of flight.

There is music that not only awakens this joy of ascent but also lets it resound, translating both vision and affection into measured tones. As always in art, this redoubling makes manifest what otherwise would merely be enacted, would simply be undergone. The tones transgress the conventional boundaries between the senses; they evoke a vision of the heights and a sense, neither simply visual nor simply aural, of the site of the ascent. As the music soars and then in a moment of exhalation prepares to soar still higher, it replicates artistically the attraction to the heights and the imaginative, affective engagement in the ascent.

There are places, uncommon places, where the attraction of the heights is visibly displayed in an exemplary manner – as at this unique site in the Dolomites where the sheer vertical face of a mountain forms the backdrop of a shallow but heavily forested area, which is bordered frontally by an Alpine lake. The forested area is so thickly packed with various species of evergreens that almost no light penetrates their canopy to the ground below. Because of their bare, but straight, slender trunks and because of the way their upper branches point, like arrows, upward to the heights, the trees display an extreme verticality. Seen from the other side of the lake, they chart a visual course that leads on up toward the cliff that appears to form the summit of the mountain. It is a natural course, not only charted by nature but also laid out as if it were addressed to our vision, as if it were designed to entice vision to take it up.

Yet how is it that even where this course is not so compellingly charted by nature itself our vision strives upward and evokes in us a longing for elevation? What is it about the heights that exercises such attraction? How is it that, even when an upward way is not visibly manifest, we project it in imagination, in speech, or in thought? How is it that, in the guise of image, sign, or idea, the heights represent primacy of rank, of value, or even of being? Does nature itself give force to such representation?

In any

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