Tag Archives: Nature

Dichotomy?

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CJ studied fine arts for his first two years at college. In music, literature and painting he found an enigmatic similarity. Many composers, authors and painters were inspired by nature, either the outdoors or human nature. That was clear.

It was, however, the dichotomy of the critics that confused him. 

The critics’ perplexing dichotomy pitted human social nature vs the natural world, nature without humans. He wondered why the dichotomy? Were not humans part of the nature in which we all lived? Even though humans were at the top of the food chain we were still part of the chain. How can behavior, intelligence or spirit separate humans from the nature all around us?

And why have so many sought to make that ‘false’ distinction?

CJ’s own battles with this dichotomy got serious when, after deciding to major in landscape architecture, he went to North Africa, for his term abroad design study.

There he met a couple esoteric horticulturists, one Russian and the other British. They had built and were guardians of an arcane garden, the Oval Garden, behind their Hibiscus House. There they tried to educate CJ–solve his enigmatic fine arts, landscape and garden concerns.

Read about it in Tangier Gardens on Amazon. Buy a copy.

Nature and Landscape?

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Nature and landscape… CJ asked himself what was the difference? Nature ? Is it larger than landscape? He finally decided that landscape was limited by his eyesight. And nature was larger–conceptually, almost everything on this planet. That was his starting point.

But how to understand how the nature of human culture and nature at large fit together? That was always on his mind during his Moroccan adventures.

CJ? The protagonist writing his autobiography in Tangier Gardens, arcane literary fiction adventure. Buy it on Amazon via this link: https://amzn.to/3HLrtyv

Collective or Individual–Freedom?

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Do you remember the first time you felt, through your sense of sight or your sense of smell, the absolute magic of plants: trees, shrubs, flowers, leaves?

Do you?

Well, my friends, it is a joy that you can find everyday… is it not?

The glory of that experience is the story of Tangier Gardens.

Read Tangier Gardens. Re-live the fun.

How great, peaceful and refreshing are the simplest pleasures of nature’s plants.

Have you forgotten? Then read Tangier Gardens.

Genres? Nature and Weird Fiction

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I am on a hunt.

For genre, for references.

You all know I write about landscape. In my own words, landscape that takes you to the foggy edge where normal transforms into paranormal.

I have only one writer who inspired me–Algernon Blackwood. He showed respect for the observable landscape. He also felt another side of landscape–its power. Its indefinable power that, in a fleeting second, can overwhelm.

I don’t copy him. But my experience in the landscape is similar. Tangier Gardens is about a young man just making his first discoveries beyond the foggy edge of normal. Nature is like that–if you let it.

If we look at nature, in a traditional sense, we see it as a source of human inspiration.

What about landscape? Landscape is the canvas upon which nature sits.

What about landscape architecture? Now that is confusing. It is a modern profession, that in my opinion, mistakenly moves natural elements around, often losing the traditional inspirational quality of nature. Failure.

So, in Tangier Gardens, the young man, CJ, tries to find how he, as a student of landscape architecture, can impart the inspiration of nature into his landscape design. Difficult. Tons of adminstrative regulations that bind nature into some kind of measurable pop experience. Not fun or helpful.

So I turn to a Algernon Blackwood aficionado, Eugene Thacker, who writes about Blackwood’s approach to nature and landscape:

If we are to call Blackwood a naturalist, then we must do so with caution, for his sublime awe before the mysteries of nature is always coupled with an acute awareness of the indifference of what we dutifully tag as “nature.” His novella, “The Willows”, suggests something different. Perhaps what we call the “supernatural” is simply the nature either we don’t see or don’t comprehend. It is the site of myth, religion, metaphysics—and perhaps of science as well. The strangest or “weirdest” understanding of nature is given to us not from ancient superstitions but from modern science. Perhaps the natural is supernatural, and vice-versa.

https://lithub.com/how-algernon-blackwood-turned-nature-into-sublime-horror/

If you would like to see my take on nature via the landscape, read Tangier Gardens.

Tangier Gardens ebook is FREE TODAY. Get it!!!

And if you know of contemporary authors in the same vein, please include them in your comment.

And lastly genre: after you have read Tangier Gardens, tell me what genre you think it fits.