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| AFTER WORDS 3 |
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From After Words
"Mortals dwell in that they save the earth…Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free into its own presencing. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoliation."- Martin Heidegger
- How do we tend to the land with a careful language, a language that struggles to think with the land in its simple complexity and its complex simplicity? What language does the land provide us to think with? Does it provide a language?
- It is a matter of having to think beyond language, to forge a communication that is both attentive and tentative, one that resists a monolingualism, resisting a reduction to a single language and instead opening to a singular play of languages verbal, visual, and otherwise. This would be a language that tries to respond to the land, but such a response requires that we suspend all traditional notions about what language is in order to be silent before the land.
- Dancing to the hum of some distant technology, we can not respond to the land. The land responds to us, communicating its pain, in the distance that has grown between the land and us. The land calls to us, but we do not respond in kind. Instead of bringing close what is near, we keep at a distance what is close.
- The relation between the land and language is a relation of the between. Language, like all our technologies, is something that mediates our relation to the land. It comes between the land and us and, as such, raises this question of the space between, the most provisional of all spaces.
The between is a space we sometimes manage to bridge. Sometimes these bridges are technological, sometimes they are poetic. On those rare instances, when we bring near what lays close, bridging that which is most near and yet most distant, we find and found a technology that is poetic, providing a bridge, provisional as it may be, between us and the land, a space that provisional as it may be, is the space between us.
- To the land, there is nothing specific, but the site. Save the land.
- What remains, remains for us alone.
"We live in the midst of her [nature] and are foreign to her. She speaks to us ceaselessly and does not betray her secret to us. We work our endless effects on her, yet have no dominion over her."- Goethe
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