BLOG/WRITING

Mount Analogue. Topographic Complexities as Beacons of Increased Dimensionality.

Perceiving and then creating pictorial space and form was my occupation for four decades and three dimensionality, x, y and z axis's, have always been of great interest to me. The possibility that there might be other axis's careening off into un-perceivable space is nothing short of astonishing. When I moved west, as an artist I was transfixed by a mountainous landscape which often seemed to have more vertical (y axis) than horizontal (x, z) topography and was far more complex than anything previously experienced. That the sublime, also of great interest to me, should be noted, and is connected but not central to this post, as I want to primarily focus on experiencing increased dimensionality. I'm a big fan of sublime 19th century landscape paintings which depict scenes that in reality might swallow or destroy you; man-eating landscapes; views on the edge, views to die for. There is much I'd like to pursue in later posts about observed (and represented) sublime subjects and their link to visual information hazards; the notion of being visually transfixed by that-which-might-destroy you, such as the Medusa or a Basilisk, or Lot's Wife Looking Back to be turned not to stone but a pillar of salt. Or, as in David Langford's short story BLIT, 'The Parrot' stencil which is a type of image produced by terrorists known as a  basilisk that is fatal to view.

Lot's Wife Looks Back in a Gustave Dore engraving.

'The Parrot' from the short story BLIT.

The sublime induces a sense of awe, not in the current semantically bleached sense of 'that's like, awesome, dude', usage which probably emerged from irony. Awesome in the philosophical sense, whereby the sublime often occupies an incomprehensible space and scale beyond than that which is merely beautiful. Sublimity is as often something of great complexity like a mountain as it might be something horrifically barren, like a lifeless desert although both should be covertly or overtly threatening to varying degrees. Interesting visual art can often allude to the sublime. At the very least sublimity should make you aware of your tentative existence and at most crush you psychically by diminishing you, perhaps even to the point of experiencing a loss of self. My sense of the sublime is inevitably personal and, when looking for compelling visual art I try to find some evidence that refers to sublime experience or viewpoint (or at the very least the uncanny) because, I suspect, mute ineffable images communicate the sensibility best. You might have, or might want to pursue, your own sublime sensibility. As mentioned, I didn't want to dwell too much on the sublime side of mountains in this particular post but rather look at increased complexity and dimensionality, but the two notions seem inextricably connected. On moving west to Vancouver Island I had previously loved the 19th century landscape tradition, and brooding, foreboding landscapes in general (I had spent a lot of time in, and painted 'the north', or near-north, in Ontario, a rugged terrain of rock, water and often stunted trees that even in summer anticipated the bitter winds of winter). I suspect Joseph Mallord William Turner would have loved Vancouver Island, and the unpopulated heart of darkness of Vancouver Island, a complex mountain topography of peaks, chasms, gorges, glaciers, rising and descending vapors and savage weather. A place where hikers disappear without a trace and aircraft disappear off radar, lost in the complex folds of the terrain. Vancouver Island's population lives almost exclusively on the periphery of the looming interior, in more pastoral conditions. It seemed most of the landscape painting was done by island artists who had had their backs to the interior and painted more the sedate pastoral landscapes or pleasant beachy seascapes. I wanted to both physically explore the mountains, and paint them, in a spirit of awe, fear and trepidation, like Turner or his contemporary Ruskin. I was shocked and astonished by the psychological effects of being on a mountain and the effort required to not panic or suffer anxiety and loss of self. I'm an anxious sort even in normal circumstances, but clinging to the side of a mountain was extremely un-normal. As you leave the less complex flat lands, and gain elevation there seems to be an increasing sense of dimension. A given area, say a square kilometer, viewed from above on a topographical map over a coastal plain would, has a given surface area to walk on. However, over a mountain's summit block the surface area of a square kilometer on a map increases enormously, not just as a result of the vertical terrain but also due to fissures, gullies and arêtes. This is not unlike the surface area of 'activated charcoal' which, as a discrete object, is perforated with countless tiny holes that essentially increase the charcoal object's surface area. This is what makes it so superb at absorbing toxins and particles, and it's often an ingredient in filters for air and water. Same could be said for lungs or gills, whereby the surface areas inside the objects are increased in order to allow for more interaction of gases; importing oxygen and exporting carbon dioxide. 

Another way, perhaps, to look at a mountain is as a highly complex Cubist object with flurries of facets, or planes, all angled slightly differently and also projecting off in to the surrounding space. When mountaineering not only was my situational awareness severely overwhelmed by a mountain's emergent surface complexity but within the terrain were innumerable perils to contend with. Getting lost in gullies, falling rock, 'bluffing out', betrayal of hand and foot holds, exposure to deadly falls. I found overcoming the actual physical risks, by practicing mountaineering skills, especially difficult when also trying to also contend with a kind of agoraphobia that grew with the increasing complexity and gaping surrounding space. I was at risk of finding myself struck down as by a god; my peripheral vision might black out, and I could literally cling to the ground to prevent being suctioned off the face of the earth by the surrounding vastness of space. Of course, this was all rather thrilling and in it's way highly enjoyable. The more climbing and mountaineering skills and experience I gained the better I became at...not eliminating the panic and anxiety...but suppressing and savoring it. I got into rock climbing as well in a late life attempt to prevent myself from becoming a decrepit old sniveling wuss afraid of not just heights but potentially this and that and so much more. I can still recall being dozens or hundreds of feet off the ground and amazed to be able to block out peripheral irrelevancies and focus on just what was in front of me and the tasks at hand. Sometimes, feeling secure, I'd look away and into the psychic abyss below me and think holy fuck where am I? Bear in mind I'm scared of heights. After a momentary spatial disorientation I would be able to re-focus on the tasks at hand. Climbing area crags are 'cleaned' rock and much safer with observable and carefully mapped routes upward, but back country mountains are larger, much more complex, chossy, and dangerous. Approaching the summit there is a lull in the anxiety surrounding route finding because the remains of the 'summit block' ahead of you is now reduced, by gradual ascent, to a few hundred square meters on the map. As well, gullies and arêtes tend to converge at the summit. But they fan out on the way back down. And this was always a sickening worry mixed with the thrill of making the summit. How the hell do we find our way back down, out of the labyrinth. I don't have great recall or memory and there is a fractal sameness to eroded mountain terrain; things look, if not the same, then very similar. There is also bad weather, which you try to avoid, but mountains are unpredictable and cloud can quickly move in and obscure distant features used to orient your direction for descent. And make the increased dimensionality of mountain blocks all the more of a mystery. That mystery has been frequently described in literature and film; Surrealist poet Rene Daumal's Mount Analogue comes to mind. There are clues to that dimensionality in the subtitle of the slim novel; Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidian and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures. Mount Analogue in the novel is on an island in the middle of an ocean and very difficult to find let alone climb. Space around it and upon it seems distorted if not hyperobjective then at least hyperbolic. The training required of the expedition to attain the summit involved psychic efforts of mind in order to slip around corners from one kind of space to another as well as mountaineering skills. Alejandro Jodorowsky made a Surrealist film based on the book, taking the preparatory measures of the expeditionary disciples to even greater and more surreal extremes; altered states as much as altered space. A trip to a mountain is a holy terror of sorts, not succeed or survive, but  those that do have their ordinary lives altered by the experience. This is conveyed effectively at the end of The Holy Mountain when the guru/guide tells the expedition 'Goodbye to the Holy Mountain. Real life awaits us.' Reality itself is a disturbing journey through dimension, through time and space, and skills and discipline obtained from psychonautical mountaineering might as readily provide you with survival skills and insights for the real world as destroy you in another world. 

The odd ending of The Holy Mountain.

Jodorowsky himself played the guru mountaineer both in the film and through his domineering direction on the set.

On the literary front, Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain is another contribution to the state of mind and perception required to fully appreciate the magnitude of mountain spacial distortions. Shepherd spent her life not just climbing the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, but living under them, and rather than just climbing a given route to the summits she covered many routes, criss-crossing the vast complexity of the landscape and it's ecosystem and writing about it. She took the time, a life time, to attempt to explore every facet of a group of mountains almost Cubist and extra-dimensional structure. 'To aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain'. 'Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular...' 

It's worth mentioning the recurrence of gurus and holy men associated with mountains. And holy women. People who have moved into other dimensions and seen generally unseen sights returning with insights.

Nan Shepherd, a guru of sorts for the Cairngorms.

I suspect vast amounts of time spent drawing allow visual artists a glimpse of the hyper-dimensional, as though through a glass darkly that is, seeing objects beyond the 2 dimensions on the back of our retina or on paper or canvas, and even beyond 3D as in being able to view an object from an infinite number of positions in surrounding space. In fact, as with Cubist artists, space and form become so inextricably linked that one bleeds into the other through a kind of continuum. Drawing and thereby observing any object from multiple points of view is the deepest pleasure of drawing, recognizing your subject as an object in space, and, as you construct your drawing of an object having it's construction lines vector off into surrounding space followed by the planes that the lines create. This is what possibly lies at the root of Cubist vision. As well, movement around an object mirrors any movement of the object itself, of motion, and motion adds dimension, perhaps of time. This seems the beginning of perception of objects as far from mundane, but as hyperobjects, alluding to complexity theory, moving through time and space accumulating history and complexity. Precursors of Cubism and the Cubists themselves could turn simple still life's

I don't begin to understand, mathematically or conceptually, just what an extra dimension really means or how it would be perceived. Obviously going into the mountains is not actually adding an extra dimension to perception, as in entering a 'fourth dimension'. Three dimensions still apply in the alpine; length, width and height on three axes. An actual fourth dimension would have another unfathomable axis. But it seemed to me that being in a highly complex, Cubist, faceted mountain-form so increases surface area and dimensionality it gives a taste of how disorienting a fourth dimension might be to experience for those accustomed to three dimensions. Mountains, emerging from a less complex 2D surface move through dimensions with three axis's to an increased surface complexity become emergent beacons of a sort that seem to project into or onto a other dimensional axis when you find yourself becoming lost and confused on their surface. Mountains seem to rise from a mundane 2D surface to enter another world, other dimensions, or 'many mansions'. Besides the experience of hyperspace, of higher dimensions, there are of course other perhaps more metaphorical forces pushing mountains to places of altered space and consciousness. The prominent visibility of a mountain by cultures from plains below. The sensation of being'above it all' while on the shoulders or summit, above the mundane 2D surface of the world. It's worth pointing out here something I notice, as one familiar with the effects of linear perspective; on a summit the base of a mountain shrinks as it recedes to vanishing points under the earth making the summit, and the rock underfoot, appear disturbingly precarious so as to seem like you are to some extent hovering or defying gravity all the while objects on the plains below shrink and move toward the vanishing point deep in the earth. As well, although many people will never physically enter mountain precincts and so only visit in their imaginations, which can be as large as the mountain itself. The echoing rumbles of landslides and avalanches, lightning being hurled from the peaks surrounded by cloud make the mountains the home of not just the supernatural but supernatural creatures; abodes of the gods. Some who visit such places only sense the hyperspace because they might be shrouded in cloud and weather, further mystifying the experience. For even greater mystery, some holy mountains, like Kailish, climbing is prohibited and there are no known ascents. Olympus, Sinai, Kailash...the list of holy mountains is long.These 'effects' listed above, and many more, both perceptual and metaphorical, account for the recurring theme of 'sacred mountain', or 'holy mountain'. I'll continue to focus on the dimensional.

So, going into the mountains, or up a mountain, is not actually going to a different dimension, say the fourth...