SCAPE

Henri Bergson: “A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable.” A landscape is contained – the nature of a ‘scape is defined by its frame, and frames are laughable. Another meaning for the word scape: a shaft or stemlike object.  Picture in your mind a landscape. You see a painting or a photograph, a limited vista lacking perspective focus. A frame is the stem of the growth it contains, bearing a life (comedy) that pulses within. Our obsession with the frame is validated by the pulse. Everything we love has a pulse, and it had a pulse before we loved it. Love, like comedy, is a frame – “beautiful, charming and sublime, or significant and ugly” and also mostly just a simple shaft, a thing supporting another more spectacular thing, a stem. Bergson said that humans are animals that laugh and are laughed at, but also that laughter is couched by indifference. Bergson is wrong. Indifference is a main trait of animals. Laughter, like love, is a stutter in the pulse-scape. Remarkably “human”, everything is always being laughed at, expectations and reason always malfunctioning, and stems are voided of their leaves and flowers by the wind and animals. This is a main trait of landscapes.