Landscape Theology, Part 1: Skyland

A way to blur the line between self and landscape is to look up at the sky. Sky is invisible space and yet it appears colorful and radiant, a medium for light and for seeing.


Skyland, shining and all- encompassing, presents some perceptual problems. Just like the landscape, sky isn’t easily “placeable:” it is near and far, figure and ground, all at once! Moreover, as the source of light, we see with it, not at it. It is not an object of perception, per se; it is the nature of perception itself. Merleau-Ponty (1964) puts it well: "we do not so much see the sky as we see in it." Related to the “mind-body problem,” the sky-earth problem persists in ecology and landscape theory (Ingold 2011; Elkin 2007). We can ponder the question, “Is the sky a part of the landscape,” forever. Likewise, we can ask, “is the landscape a part of the sky?” And to which, if either, do we belong?  Earth is a tiny marble floating in an ocean of space, but from its surface, earth is below, unmoving, while sky moves in the realm above.
       

Skylight determines the color of the landscape, and it reaches from the horizon to the eyeballs and beyond. Emerson uses it as an analogy for the We: “From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.”  Sky and seeing and Seer run into each other for a moment up there in the light. Ingold puts it well: open your eyes, and find yourself, almost literally, ‘in the open’. This phrase captures the magic, and delirium, of vision: we live in visual space from the inside, we inhabit it, yet that space is always already outside, open to the horizon, boundless. When we see sky, the boundary between inside and outside, or between self and world, dissolves. Merleau-Ponty: “I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue.” The Chinese translation of the Heart Sutra: “Color is not other than sky; sky is not other than color. Color is exactly sky; sky is exactly color” expresses this paradox. Sky and color refer to emptiness and form, or what we might call “heaven” and “earth.” In this sense, "space,” “light,” "color," "sky," and “I can see,” all have the same meaning. Sight’s dependence of sky reminds of Meister Eckhart’s revelation: “The eyes through which I see God are the same eyes through which God sees me”. Ingold puts it another way: “Sky is openness or transparency itself, sheer luminosity, against which things stand out by virtue of their opacity or closure” (2000: 264).
      

Western phenomenology of religion operates with the notion that the self has a “glassy essence” (Rorty 1979; Vesquez 2013). Dzogchen teachers refer to the nature of the mind similarly as a clear light that appears to be whatever it is on. Seeing with the sky is similar to William James’s 1882 observation: “The first time we see light, we are it rather than see it." Bille and Sorensen (2007): Light – from old English leoht, meaning luminous, from Indo-European leuk, to shine, to see…– has been studied as lumen – light as external, objective matter – and lux – light as subjective, and interior; as sight and mental sensation.
      

Sky metaphors structure conceptions of “higher” selves, and higher potentials. Sogyal Rinpoche in his lectures on dying says, “Giving up ego is like loosing the clouds but gaining the sky.” Rilke’s vision: “Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner—what is it? If not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming." Japanese phenomenologist Hiroshi Ichikawa says people experience themselves more as a lit-up space of subjectivity and fluid spirit than as a heavy, meaty, objective body. Drew Leder also explains this phenomenon at length in his book, "The Absent Body." Our bodies are pushed into the background, out of our attentive minds, and are only foregrounded when they are not working properly. For the most part, we are what Rilke says: intensified skies. Ichikiawa might call the sky a fundamental structure.

This goes against the popular Western notion that our bodies are physical, material  objects, and we, our collective spirit, are one with our bodies. In "The Body as Spirit" (1975), Ichikawa demonstrates the fundamental unity between body and spirit not by reducing the body to spirit, but by phenomenologically describing the lived, human body (Nagatomo, 1986).  The Japanese person, who is generally a mix between Shinto, Buddhist, and Atheist, feels, as their bodies, like they are subjective light-spaces. Does this experience apply to our Western, colonized bodies as well? Is it a sign of all postcolonial bodies, considering Ichikawa, the Japanese people, Buddhism, and Asia are all heavily Westernized? Or is sky associations with heaven consciousness universal because mouth-anus, above-below, sky-earth, and light-dark experiences are universal? How do we really feel ourselves? Following this living experience of incarnation, Japanese spirituality then hinges on conceptions of higher selves, wider selves, and on an ever-present, clear and spacious "Buddha Nature." How does the Christian tradition hinge on sky-experince? 

Part 2: Fluids

Humans often want to be seen as separate from the landscape. We are figure, it is ground. Our bodies are contained, closed, solid. But if we shift our focus to body fluids, it becomes clear that humans and landscapes flow into each other. Sensual qualities such as color and viscosity can cause substances in our bodies and in our landscape to be “bundled” together, and this affects our sense of "being-in-the-world." We can then consider substances such as food, water, blood, milk, and semen to exist inside as well as outside the body, and to be transformable into each other. This will help us understand how rice can transform into a Japanese person. 

A popular example of an island culture that mixes landscape fluids and bodies is the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guiney. This tribe associate fluids in the body with an oil that comes out of a sacred hole in the forest. This association makes the entire forest a realm of immense ritual importance and spiritual power. The oil flows under the landscape itself in “the realm of the spirit world.” A ten-year initiation is required before a man can even set foot in this sacred place. The Bimin-Kuskusmin rub the oil into their skin like Greek athletes, causing it to shine with luminosity and seem divine. Poole (1986) quotes the tribe’s leader: “the oil is our blood, our semen, our bone, our heritage from our ancestors…our life.”

Hebrews also used the word semen to refer to oil (Ringgren 2006). In Israelite religion, one becomes king or high priestess when anointed with oil (Sommer 2009). A stone touched by oil can become endowed with life and with God. In Genesis 28.18-19, Jacob pours oil on the stone that signifies his vision of the stairway to heaven, and the stone then becomes a betyl, a residence for God.

Body Historian Christopher Forth (2013) ably demonstrates how qualities of fat point to important human-landscape connections. We find fat residing in humans, animals, soil, and its products. Farmers since the time of Theophrastus distinguish between “fat” and “lean” soil.  In Genesis 45: 18, abundant crops and livestock were examples of the “fat” of the land, and many times throughout the bible we read that this world is “flowing with milk and honey.”

Landscape substances intersect with body substances in ancient Amerindian mythology as well. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff  (1997) says the rock crystals that adorned Inca temples were regarded as concentrated semen. Moreover, the Yucatec civilization named their creator Itzamnaaj, which means “one who does itz.” Itz refers to “any magical secretion” such as semen, milk, sweat, tears, nectar, dew, sap, wax, and juice. Thus, the deity’s body was “a cosmological conduit of fluids that connects sky and earth.”

Sambia men of PNG associate semen with milk, mud, and white tree sap. They condition their masculinity on the secret ingestion of these fluids. For their “ritual rebirth” into manhood, initiates suck semen from the penis like an infant sucks milk from the breast. Semen lost during heterosexual sex is replenished by drinking white tree sap. Here we can be reminded of Aronofsky’s masterpiece, The Fountain (2006), where the sap found inside the tree of life is white and milky. It turns the protagonist into a bed of white flowers.

In various genesis myths, the creation of the world is conceived of in terms of body fluids. Enki ejaculates the Tigris which gives birth to Sumarian civilization. Egypt’s creator god, Atun, ejaculates the twins, time and space, and then cries sentient beings into existence. In Japan, Father Sky and Mother Earth push their “jeweled spear” into the oily ocean of chaos, pull it out, and the mystical substance drips like lava into the ocean to form the self-hardening “land-of-rice-ears.” At Japan’s Takachiho Mountain, one can still see the earth dangle from the tip of this spear, like semen from a penis. Awajishima is known as the “first drop from the tip,” but besides its place in the myth-history, there is nothing extraordinary about this island’s location, size, or topography.

This may relate to Belden Lane’s (2001) observation that sacred places are often quite ordinary, set apart through mythology to become extraordinary. Sometimes the sacred mountain isn’t the highest or greatest, and the holy river isn’t the most pristine. Likewise, holy substances of the body are often the most ordinary, like blood and water. They are sacred precisely because they are everywhere, everyday, and life-sustaining. This attests to Rappaport’s (1999) observation that the notion of the sacred is capable of attaching itself to any object, landscape, practice, or institution.Manuel Vasquez (2011) says that this adaptability allows the sense of the sacred to operate on ever changing ecological and social conditions to produce well-being for the group. 

Whether sacred or profane, body and landscape substances anchor subjective experiences in a shared material everyone knows and lives with. Without them, our relationships would be “airy as the clouds,” as Michel Serres (1995) puts it. Material substances “stabilize our relationships.”  They also concretize spiritual, more-than-personal characteristics of the self.

Because fluid substances can be divided up without their parts loosing any of the qualities of the original source (Carsten 2011), they become perfect symbols of the soul and for kinship. Prehistoric cultures pilgrimaged to rock quarries to find aspecial red ochre, which was believed to be petrified ancestral blood (Boivin reveals that some Aboriginal cultures believe it to be petrified vaginal blood). They rubbed this red mud onto their bodies as early uniforms and body art. For a community,Victor Turner stresses that “what is sought is unity, not the unity which represents a sum of fractions and is susceptible of division and subtraction, but an indivisible unity, “white”, “pure”, “primary”, “seamless”.”  

We have seen how semen and sap relate to a class of white “milk-looking” substances inside and outside the body treated as food. Likewise, white rice in Japan is understood as hardened god-semen passed down to humans via the ancestral land, itself understood as self-hardening god semen. The key role of the Emperor is not chief of the military but protector of the rice. He enacts the Onamesai, a ritual that ensures the continual flow of this divine rice-semen. Like oil to the Bimin-Kuskusmin, rice is understood as a spirit force that flows beneath the landscape.  According to anthropologist Ohnuki-Tireney (1993), white rice, and the landscape of rice fields, is the most important substance to anchor Japanese identity through the disruptive flow of cultural reformations. She underscores that rice was money, “bread”, and rice fields meant status for Lords. In Shinto cosmology, each grain of rice is a god named Uka-no-kami, and it is the only type of grain given a soul. In one myth, the deity in charge of food is ritually slain and various grains come out of his corpse: “rice emerged from his abdomen, millet from his eyes, and wheat and beans from his anus…” This is one reason why the abdomen, which also houses the fetus, is where human life is thought to be located, and why hara-kiri is the well-known cultural institution of male suicide. Opening the stomach releases the soul.

So we can see how cultures and their rituals are affected by the ways substances in the body relate to substances in the landscape. Karl Marx: “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.” 

Part 3: Tree Flowers

Here are a few more examples of how landscape elements affect identity. While in Japan this winter, I visited the Chiran Kamikaze Peace Museum, which stands at the place where all 1,038 Japanese student pilots gathered, partied, and rested for three days before dying in their kamikaze planes. The museum is surrounded by cherry blossom trees, and I took a few pictures of the cherry blossom kamikaze plane trinkets available in the gift shop. I found the focus on the flowers interesting after having read Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (University of Chicago Press, 2002).  

Ohnuki-Tierney argues that contrary to popular belief, the Japanese government appropriated the symbolic power attributed to cherry trees and falling cherry blossoms to convince the student pilots to kill themselves. These kids were not stupid, but they were brainwashed into the symbolic power and logical weight of the falling cherry blossom.  This is a good review of her book, and her interview on youtube is fantastic! I strongly suggest you read it if you are at all interested in Japanese history or in the way substances from the landscape influence social and personal identity/behavior.  Her 140 page masterpiece Rice as Self  is also worth a peek.

Four of the actual kamikaze planes were recovered from the ocean floor and are on display in the museum. The others are miniaturized and look like toys. The walls are adorned with black and white pictures of all 1,038 strapping young men, along with the letters they wrote while at the camp, their "death poems," and their clothes. The largest wall of the museum is covered in a picture of SatsumaFuji, the miniature Mount Fuji here in Satsuma, which was the last view of Japan the student soldiers saw before reaching Okinawa to die. My friend and I saw the mountain on our way to Yakushima.

Here we see the young kamikaze pilots holding cherry blossoms, and the cheerleaders are pictured below holding blossoms in a pretty famous photograph. 

A kamikaze plane with a cherry blossom mark. Some of the planes were named after cherry trees, and the cherry blossom symbols represented the boys through their uniforms, but also through its subconscious association with Japanese semen, soul, and rice-fields.  

We also visited the location where Ganjin, the great Chinese monk who codified Buddhism in Japan, first landed his ship in 753. The classically erotic James Bond, You Only Live Twice (1967) was filmed at the same place. The small town is conflicted, and its museum for Ganjin is mostly a tribute to James Bond. That corner was definitely the part of the museum that got the child's attention in front of us. I saw America and Japan's historic connection in yet another freaky way. The monument for the largest battle ship ever made, Yamato, is down the street, and it includes a strange stone sculpture of a young naked girl standing in solute. From that memorial site one can see where the record breaking ship sank due to American torpedoes.

We visited the shinto shrine, Kirishimajingu, founded by Jinmu, the first emperor of Japan and great grandson of Ninigi-mikoto, the first human to descend to earth from heaven. In the myth, Ninigi touched the earth at Takachiho mountain and then went to  Sastuma. We saw the place where he touched down and sticking up out of the ground is a sword, the legendary Amano Sakahoku sword of Izanagi and Izanami, the vajra phallus from whose tip dripped the islands of Japan. And in a way, you can still see the earth dangle like semen from the tip of the mythic, phallic sword. Every kid on teh island looks forward to that feild-trip day.

The sword is memorialized like Excalibur, but probably antedates the Arthurian version. Maybe not. After all, the "sword in the stone" image can reach way back. It can symbolize the stone age of man, and the power of the stone spirits and "elementals" with which we are in constant symbiosis. And we see the theme in King David and his seminal stone, or in Thor and his hammer.  We spent the afternoon at the Totoro-themed go-cart park next to the shrine. It's where all the kids really want to go.

Here, the earth is still dangling from the tip of God's vajra.

Yakushima was beyond a dream. We took a jet-boat accross the sea. Then we hiked through the "White Valley of Spirit Water," upward into the Mononoke-mori, the "Forest of Wild Things." Suddenly, out of nowhere, we reached the summit, standing on a stone outcropping not unlike the one the boar god stands on in the film Princess Mononoke. Small deer appear everywhere. I just read that the word deer meant basic "animal" or "not-human" in old English, and the etymology of the word "wilderness" contains this older version, doer. The spirit of the wilderness is visualized in the movie as a deer with a human face and huge antlers somehow connected to all life and death. The "spirit of the forest" also appears in the old Gilgamesh epic.

 Here is Hiroshige's version of our exact view from The Yanagi's house in Minami-Satsuma, I kid you not.  This beautiful print is all over the small town's tiny museum, but no postcards of it are sold, which was frustrating.

Another version with Satsumafuji, or Satsuma's mini-version of Fuji, in the background, and to the left is Ganjin's famous track to Japan.

the Deer (Wilderness) Spirit from the film Princess Mononoke.

James Bond monument across from Ganjin's in Sastuma

Hiking the "White Valley of Spirit Water" into...

the "Forest of Wild Beasts," Mononoke-mori!

 Can you find the deer?

 That sign literally says "Female God Cedar"

We did not have time to visit onsen or the legendary Jomonsugi, a 7,000 year old tree in the middle of the island.