IV Landscape: Time and Motion

Extract

We have already thought about how Golden Age imagery influences understanding of what landscape should be about, and we will return later to issues of chronology and temporality. Here, we start with some strategies for reading landscape as a sequence of places that can be combined to tell a story. One definition of space makes it what we experience by moving through a series of places, which we connect up into patterns by picking particular routes to follow. Using this model, landscape stories invite us to move into and around them, offering different ‘ways of going out and coming back in’, depending on how we map our route. Following the narrative flow through a landscape takes time. Time, however, is relative – and culturally constructed; depending on context and terminology, time can move at different speeds and follow different logics. Bakhtin's chronotope is helpful here. Using the natural environment to create a structure for understanding how time passes gives meaning and order to the passage of the year. For agricultural communities, it was a matter of life and death: studding the calendar with legends and myths closely linked to places, seasons, and appropriate activities was one way to ensure that good and bad ways of doing things were remembered over time. Calendars therefore engage in a complex dialogue with religious and cultural assumptions, and they also respond to scientific advances in measuring the passage of time.