Approach, Approach

January page, Très Riches Heures, 1410 (BN)

"aproche, aproche" - so say the golden letters in their space and ours, on stone and parchment, for feast and fascination; painted of the same golden hue as the sparks flying up from behind the fire screen, a fellow sound to the crackle of the gathering; competing with the attendant's staff for representational presence. They are spoken by the Duc (sullen, gouty, ensconced) to the monk (accommodating, reaching, possibly simpering) - we'll leave them to curry each other's favors. Or, tendrils of a curvy "r" linger over the attendant's head, the "a" folding in on itself in a frisson at the touch of a courtier's so elegant fingers. Or, the manuscript repeats its invitation to its viewer: "Come, come - behold my salt cellar and my Crusades, marvel at my fat duke and my greyhound, linger over my furs and that guy's tights, ask about my spaces and my beauties and my powers. Approach, approach - we know you won't ever entirely get here, trapped as you are in your world of consequences and contingencies, whereas here multiple simultaneous universes glide atop each other seamlessly. But approach, approach, come closer, don't ever stop trying."

The table was laden with possibilities at this year's Kalamazoo. And the approaches were multiple - experimental, convivial, brave.  Words hovered in air, ideas un-settled, and I felt like a lot was happening all at once. It. Was. Wonderful. I'll be writing on the Material Collective blog about the Material Collective goings on (an incredible combination of Future, Time, and Blunder), so it's here that I'll start to think through "Eco-Critical Approaches to Medieval Art, East and West: I (Landscapes) and II (Objects)," two panels I organized with the marvelous Nancy Sevcenko. These are more responses than summaries - the papers were rich and full well beyond my fascinations. First, if you'll indulge me, an excerpt of my super brief introductory comments:

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Conceptualizations of nature are anything but natural, and eco-criticism invites questions of the constructions of nature, the natural, and that amorphous place we have built for ourselves: the natural world. Medieval images mediate the category of the natural through their materiality (the very stuff that medieval images are made of hold agency and meaning) and their evocations (the anagogical invitation of medieval images to perceive beyond the material world). In doing so, medieval images activate the category of the natural, they frame the agency of nature – manufactured from the natural, they oscillate over and ultimately blur the built boundary between artifice and nature.

Our first set of papers are grouped around the idea of landscape: of nature as place, of nature as a built environment, manufactured by pilgrimage, patronage, and paint and re-presented to viewers questioning their place in the world. In one of his more enigmatic statements to his followers, Christ said: “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” (We have no natural home, no resting place). This restlessness of place (this need for place) is confronted by the medieval images you will hear about today, and the frameworks they constructed: the land-scapes that simultaneously created and became assemblages of place, real and imagined movement, and human bodies. 

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I love that crazy quote, "the Son of Man has no place to lay his head" - (Luke 9:58 and Matthew 8:20). One of several from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament that makes the break with nature that humanity seemingly celebrates and seeks to repair. So a first concern for the landscape papers was where and how the categories of "nature" and "art" met - for two of the three, it became where they blended imperceptibly (the stuff of the natural world being the stuff of art), for a third, it was where the two relied on each other for representation (the natural world signified in art, artistry signified by the natural world). I've only pulled one image from each talk, but I invite you to contact the speakers if you wish to know more - they are a generous and glad group, and it was an honor to think with them. IF YOU WANT TO THINK FURTHER ON THINGS ECOCRITICAL, Heide Estes has set up a Facebook group dubbed "Medieval Ecocriticisms" - find it and like it and join the conversation!

Pyrolusite from Sinai (from Anastasia Drandaki's talk)

Anastasia Drandaki made the audience gasp with this slide. She'd taken us to the Katholikon of the monastery at Mount Sinai, and we'd seen the Burning Bush (and pilgrims taking branches) and here, then, a bit of the stone from the site, pyrolusite whose dendritic crystals miraculously manifested (more than re-presented) the Burning Bush itself. Oh what Roger Caillois would have to say about this one! Nature making/being/encompassing/ Art, collapsing the two into the phenomenon of "natural beauty." Miraculous because it existed outside of human intervention, but miraculous also precisely because it could intervene in human lives, as stories of healing miracles proclaim. Independent of humans and yet deeply involved in their fate. An active land, a landscape full of possibilities. I love the problem of human perception here: it is our re-cognition of the crystals as tree branches that excite, suggest our wonder, make the miracle. Agency gets good and tricky here: the crystals are not an imprint of branches, they possess no mimicry, but they are wondrous to us in their ability to imitate elements of the natural that we have deemed as such.  Still, I interpret the audience's gasp as responding to the stone's independence from human presence: its ability to be complete, to trump and best our own representational efforts, and (simply) to be beautiful. Anastasia's talk made me want to think more about the aesthetic (miraculous?) agency of stone, about this wonderful problem of natural beauty.

Kaminaria donors and trees (from Barbara McNulty's talk)

Barbara McNulty took us to Cyprus, a place that has long held a fascination for me (no, never been there) because of its absolutely perfect liminality between East and West. I think of Richard the Lion-Hearted's obsession with it, the Lusignans!, the multiplicity of artistic endeavors, this stretch of land that makes the Holy Land almost yours, Venice certainly claiming so. This tiny church holds the remains of a fascinating fresco with a woman (a widow?) at the head of a donors' procession including three young men (her sons?). Precisely positioned between each one, at the level of their waists or the depth of a very large field, are tiny trees on sloping hills. Does a tree a landscape make? How minimal can the representation of nature be? Here, I'm fascinated with how nature is signified. I wondered out loud during the discussion afterwards about the minimalism of natural representation here, and Alexa Sand brilliantly noted the reductive power of allegory. With that, I can work in and out of representation (visual and textual). It's when a tree is not just a tree that it becomes part of a poem. The signification of the Kaminaria trees can range widely: from territorial signifier, to indicator of a mapping vision, to allegory of Paradise (the Virgin Mary is directly nearby, exerting her own aesthetic/semiotic pull).  Here again, I was confronted with the problem of human perception. The very act of seeing a landscape is an act of categorization, and Barbara's talk pushes me to try to articulate what is natural (anything? everything?) about the idea and presence of landscape. 

Terra Verde (from Amber McAlister's talk)

Amber McAlister made us prize the material experience of paint. The fantastic Summer Teachers Institute in Technical Art History, held at Yale, had brought her not only into contact with elemental art history (paints, pigments, varnishes, and more), but also into its actions (mixing, making, readying).  There are things forgotten in the age of oil paint in tubes: the tedium of grinding colors, the transformation of brute stuff into refined matter, the marvel of a representational form appearing beneath your brush. The Dominican monks of the Chiostro Verde of Santa Maria Novella in Florence made meaning when they made their choice to use terra verde to paint the Old Testament cycle of the cloister, the cheap and earthy pigment uniting Creation and creativity. Perception here oscillates between pigment and Paradise (not seeing the Paradise for the pigment? seeing the Paradise through the pigment?).  This is the rub, the challenge, the fundamental dilemma of an eco-critical art history for me, so well put forward by Amber's paper: art history has been the study of made things; alternately the study of the perception of made things. The things we are interested in thinking through are made by makers who didn't want to/couldn't leave stuff be: stone became statue, sand became glass, pigment became paradise. The transformation of matter was made, material was wrought, so that meaning could be wrought (overwrought?). I know that reading lots and lots of anthropologist Tim Ingold (and keep scrolling down his page for inspiration) will help here. Where I already see us putting a common eco-critical vocabulary into practice for objects, I find myself casting about for language with landscape. These papers push me to keep thinking beyond the representation and conceptualization of nature by art, to the materiality and agency of this actually quite strange category of human perception and physical presence called landscape.

And so, objects.

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Our second set of papers gathers around objects: things made from stuff, announced by their agency, by their ability to shape (among other things) human behaviors and desires. Eco-criticism here seeks to move the conversation beyond animism and anthropomorphism, to speak of active objects, of objects that activate; to acknowledge the agency of objects unto themselves.  Our scale shifts from earlier today: from untouchable landscape to hand-held book or relic, from all-encompassing to all-engrossing.  Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter; the political ecology of things makes a consistent appeal to move from epistemology to ontology – from what we know to what is, from meaning to matter, from knowledge to experience. These are not mutually exclusive categories, but they do shift the conversation about objects, as you will see today. 

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Quills with ink (from Heide Estes's talk)

If you recognize these quills from the Medieval Ecocriticisms Facebook page, then you'll know it was Heide Estes that set it up. (Many thanks, Heide!). Presenting an ecofeminist reading of the Old English Riddle 26 (the "book" riddle) meant rejecting dualistic thinking (which the riddle's moves and slippages from animal to skin to book, its oscillation between thing and object, rejoiced in); it meant bringing forth Val Plumwood's call to "nature as a political rather than as a descriptive category." A landscape is not a thing the way that an object is a thing: there are entirely different dynamics of participation and becoming. And the poem revels in the becoming, it fascinates us with the necessary (ordinary? mundane?) "centuries of slaughter that gave us medieval writing" (that's from Heide's paper - a phrase that's going to stay with me). Embedded in the poem was my very favorite thing: a kenning - why say quill when you can say that it was "a bird's joy/ made abundant tracks of ink over me." That's the animal skin speaking as it becomes manuscript page - the same voice, but a different ontology, as the poem progresses. I will confess to a deep yearning, when I hear this poem, for speaking objects. Art history's objects are not mute: I firmly believe we are the vehicles for their speech (through our rituals, our desires, our poems, our particularly evocative art history essays). But to hear a gilded book tell you of its animal origins, of being killed and cut and written upon, taken and covered with gold and read with fervor - that is a wonder that should course through my writing more often.

Inside the Protaton Reliquary (from Brad Hostetler's talk)

Brad Hostetler, I like to think, would find no stone mundane, let alone leave it unturned. The Protaton Reliquary gathered together four stones and aligned them into/as a Holy Land arrangement. There is no nature and/vs. art here, right? There is only presence and participation, Brad emphasizing the "EK" (from) of the inscriptions next to each stone: from the Tomb of Christ, from Golgotha, from Bethlehem, from Gethsemane.  One could start to make distinctions between the wrought metal and the raw stone, but, as Ben Tilghman pointed out during the discussion afterwards, the stone is made, too: both stone and metal are elemental, have the vibrant matter of things. The Protaton Reliquary gives me the opportunity to think about a seamless perception, one that works over the representational field without making a nature/art distinction, one that assembles matter partly for pleasure (there is something so wonderful about the careful quadrant positioning of stones from such places) and partly for salvation (the donor on the cover of the reliquary kneels in tight proskynesis).  There is a reason, here, to think of the act of assemblage, of putting these stones into this frame, as itself a devotional act, but also an act of becoming - of the vibrant matter of stone and metal and wood (the center of the reliquary, now visible through an 18th century intervention).

Ivory booklet now at the Cloisters (from Alexa Sand's talk)

Alexa Sand opened up the last object for us, an ivory booklet - a rare work whose inner leaves received, at one time, pliant wax upon which could be written prayers - and its resonances with the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux.  She explored the becoming of both: the five hundred (500!) sheep needed for a large codex; the "bark" that must be stripped from the dentine on its way to being ivory; the gestures and knowledge (which we ourselves can only gesture to knowing) that moved around the materials of ivory and parchment.  A key claim in the history of perception put forward the idea that "the origins of parchment and ivory were never entirely obscured by their processing"(Alexa's beautiful writing). The violence (think ivory and parchment procured) is "translated" (Alexa again) through our senses: the musk deposit that ivory leaves on our skins, a reminder of the animal from whom this was taken (and you can see how Heide's Riddle 26 was conjured up here); the weight and size assessed by a human perception that might well know how many animals were sacrificed. The states of being (dentine, pillaged object, luminous carving) are all simultaneous here. Alexa's work made me realize (and relish anew) that materiality does not precede and recede - it persists.

The conversations afterwards held one big surprise in the tension between queries asking for more theoretical engagements and others protesting the very presence of eco-critical theory. This wide spectrum made me realize that we are still in the process of building an interpretive community of eco-criticism within medieval art history. Ultimately, we will be post-disciplinary: we will all gather on Facebook and read each other's materials and hear each other out and meet again at future conferences. At Kalamazoo 2013, we wanted to test specific works of art/aesthetic scenarios within the ideas and challenges of eco-criticism, of the constructions of Harman's "nature [that] is not natural and can never be naturalized." As the conversation continues, and as we e-mail each other, and find each other on Facebook and Academia.edu, we'll develop that common vocabulary. This is what I have always liked about theory: its ability to create an interpretive community, a bunch of people eager to put ideas into practice - and the momentum that builds in that eagerness. I have put my "Ecology of Medieval Art" syllabus (where Jane Bennett, and Jeffrey Cohen, and Karl Steel and Alf Siewers and (the next time I teach the course) the entire cast of the "EcoMaterialism" issue of postmedieval feature prominently) up on Academia.edu and there will be more reading lists found in articles and talks put up on the site by the wonderful members of these panels, and the discussions on "Medieval Ecocriticisms" on Facebook. Another night, soon, I'll want to think through eco-criticism's revelry in literary studies and its relatively muted presence in art history. For now, bed: so as to think and write and grade another day. Materiality persists. And it insists, "aproche, aproche."

Of Toasters, Perhaps Flying

Yes, here they are

I once took an Anthropology of Metaphor class in which the professor spoke repeatedly of the connection between "emergence" and "emergency" in relation to metaphor. This little word dance of human need has ever since made (the emergence of) metaphors urgent, responsive, and present. The light of knowledge. The dawn of civilization. The shipwreck of human existence. At times it's made metaphor so present as to almost (so close) be literal - not far to reach to see the two disparate things that make up the metaphor together. The tree of life. Most car names (but especially the Lamborghini named after a fighting bull that Ian Bogost put on the table - metaphorically). The flow of thought. The Ecologies of the Inhuman symposium at GW-MEMSI this past Friday jumped into the fray of things and the sense they make or unmake, the lives they lead or hide.  Steve Mentz's excellent summary highlights that Ian Bogost had us thinking about the "reality of (all?) metaphors." The metaphor as an idea is real, is a thing. The metaphor as emerging in the face of an emergency is a thing that comes into being in times of crisis.  This symposium had both: the aesthetics of well-crafted ideas in language and the ethics of being in the presence of multiple crises in the world. I've never been to a gathering where the language was so beautiful and the struggling was so immediate.  Where there was this much honesty and "shared vulnerability" (to quote from Carolyn Dinshaw's paper) about the repercussions and applications of ideas and words and things. Jeffrey Cohen's brilliant means of introducing the speakers by reading two or three sentences from our writings set the stage for just this combination of beauty and struggle. He read us in our fervor and desire to convince and connect. And his own care in choosing those sentences established a trust and a vulnerability: our words are out there, to be taken and shared.

And so. With James Smith we considered Fluid and the flow of medieval moral anguish, maybe even the setting for its ebb and flow. With Alf Siewers, the reach of Trees, their housings for ideas, their shade. With Alan Montroso, the viral quality of Music's use of the human body, the tool being of said body. With Valerie Allen the stakes of the "proper measure," the will to measure Matter, the possibilities of a "ninhuman system." With Eileen Joy, the poignancy of articulating moments soon to be lost to Post/Apocalyptic disasters, the expressivity of aesthetics. With Steve Mentz, the possibilities of "living inside the Shipwreck," of coming to know the sea's the thing. With me, the life of Hewn things in the Arma Christi, the voice of the hewn Cross.  With Lowell Duckert, the creatures of Recreation, the life in and of parks and other spaces of recreation. With Carolyn Dinshaw, the co-existence of lush Green and drab grey, of art up high and reality right here. And with Ian Bogost, encounters between the Inhuman as objects (in and out of metaphors), and the violence that's there, and where our attention is drawn.

These are all my takes. Every person there would have a different take, a different list of things to keep thinking about. But we all joined in to the struggle in the absorbing discussion after talks: the cut that we feel prompted by ethics to make in considering (noticing, describing, championing) the inhuman. How do you make the cut? How do you decide? These two quotes from Alien Phenomenology resonate with the discussion.

Thanks to feminist studies, postcolonial studies, animal studies, environmental studies and other accounts of human relationships with nonhuman entities, we tend to doubt that some things ought to thrive at others' expense.  Today, most would accept that British men are no more intrinsically worthy of preservation and prosperity than women, Congalese, horses, and redwoods. But few would accept that fried chicken buckets, Pontiac Firebirds, and plastic picnicware deserve similar consideration (unless their existence or use might disturb people, animals or nature). When we form these theories, we mount accounts of why and how humans ought to behave in and toward the universe, but not about how other objects ought to behave in relation to it. --- 74

And, to me, a vital question:

When we speak of things, are we prepared to equate their forces with their ethics? Is what a thing tends to do the same as what it considers noble or right? --- 76-77

We will share bits and pieces of our human exceptionalism (especially as they pertain to us and our continued welfare) with certain elements deemed non-human (animals, the environment). But not with things. Why not? Why not, Ian Bogost pushed us when considering violence, consider the caramelization of bread inside the toaster? Why not consider the toaster? What would be the repercussions? (And no one is saying that struggling for the ethical consideration of things means abandoning the struggle for the ethical considerations of humans. Far from it - the two are more and more inter-related.) A quick response, an honest one, worries about the cut (a word of hewn terminology I found myself paying close attention to) that "sooner or later" / "push comes to shove" / "something's got to give" we have to make between ourselves and things. I cannot weep for the toast. What would it mean for me to weep for the toast? Ok, fine, ethics driven by compassion seem surreal. Ethics of affinity? Can we consider the toast and the toaster as they frame our human quotidian? As they set the pace of the human day? Maybe maybe. Where we started to land in the discussion thrills me no end: and what of the ethics of aesthetics? What of the aesthetics of description? Of the crackle of electricity and the sugars hissing their release? (See page 61 of Alien Phenomenology for gripping descriptions). What of the act of describing as an ethical act? What of the act of describing (noticing, noting, paying extremely close attention to, observing, sharing, proclaiming) things as an ethical act? What of (and this should be another post soon), what of the ethical exercise of ekphrasis in the Middle Ages? The ultimate aesthetic description! Always showing up at the ultimate ethical moment! (Alexander's shield, Darius's tomb, the Rose's garden).

What might happen when we notice some thing enough to de-scribe it from the invisibility of our use and make it present through language? Still a human act towards the ever-receding thing. But what if you really did consider the toaster?  Someone has done this very thing, you know. Right now, if you can, right this minute, instantly, if you haven't already, soon then, really really soon, please read The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites. While you're waiting impatiently, you can go to its website.  Can you get over the image? Thwaites deconstructs a toaster and makes it present through his act of trying to build one on his own. From scratch. In his process of describing and making a toaster, Thwaites engages in (endures!) multiple ethical acts and realizations: about the environment, industrial production, mining, labor. It's aesthetics as activism is what it is. The book is incredible (he mines mica for goodness's sake!) - it's the Thing equivalent of Jan Zalasiewicz's Planet in a Pebble which also begins with an object, recedes into its origins and re-emerges with knowledge and awe.  That's where I am in my thinking, I think - between a pebble and a toaster; grateful - deeply grateful - for the human actors and thinkers and writers in between. And for how objects defy us, for how toasters fly.

Natural Beauty/Acheiropoieta

Agate from Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones

Natural beauty is harder to define than you'd think. And I should read Kant and find out if he provides some transcendental loophole, and I should pull out Umberto Eco and see what he has to say. But here it is another Saturday morning, already later than I want it to be due to household tasks, and little time to think but a lot of desire to write. SO. This particular beauty, this category we have called natural beauty.  It emerged because of two student comments, one presenting the "inherent and inherently shared" beauty of something like a sunset; and the other offering the marvelous phrase "it seems that nature's agency is in its appeal to our senses." For good measure, I put the medieval concept of "acheiropoieta" on the table: the idea of images "not made by human hands," an idea that I can now discuss as an aesthetic concept of non-human agency (thanks to Bennett and Bogost and object oriented ontology).

Pointe du Raz, Finistère, Brittany, France

First to speak of "inherent and shared." Nobody doesn't like a sunset. You can say you don't, that you find them stupid and trite, but so what? It's there and it's gorgeous and it's expansive and it doesn't care if you like it or not, in fact it has no consciousness of you and that, claimed a student, is part of its beauty.  So we tried to articulate the appeal of natural beauty, to identify what it is that calls out - that makes students gasp when they see one of Caillois's rocks in class, the slide flooding the classroom with a reddish hue; or makes them ecstatic when we walk together on the cliffs of Brittany and the sun comes out for the first time in six days halfway through a four hour hike. All this, by the way, needed to be folded into an understanding of medieval portable altars' use of porphyry - why these expanses of visual abstraction in the midst of ritual framework? why this "rougher, less manipulated (than the wood and metal surrounding it)" stone element? More on that in a minute. The art students in the class quickly identified aesthetic principles at work: moments of symmetry, apt color, "composition even." And here, the science students came in with the idea of "madeness" as something that appeals about natural beauty. As in: natural beauty are those moments when you are presented with something that looks like it was made by "some other" agency than human.  I loved the student hesitate for a fleeting second before saying "some other" - broader than God or Nature, but still specifically not human.  Now. You could say that it is the human gaze that makes the image, that without our perception, the particular framing of that moment, you would lose composition, symmetry, and any sense of madeness.  This is where the lack of consciousness of a human audience comes in. As much as we delight in finding madeness (symmetry, composition, color, etc.) in rocks, flora, stones, water, and other things without voices (which would otherwise express intent), we also delight in being ignored by those things. You can call it the Sublime, or a kind of eco-voyeurism (ha! I saw beauty, but it didn't/can't see me!), but unmistakeably, there is a thrill in being on the edges of an expanse (rock slide or cliff hike), witnessing it, possessing it with sight, but - despite the physical intimacy of shared space and multiple other conditions - knowing that when our gaze drops the ocean will still churn, the rock will remain fervent, and the sun will continue on its trajectory.

Anglo-Saxon Portable Altar, Cluny Museum

Critique: a student (and I think Tim Morton (and I!) would agree) worried about any process of aestheticization (even the phrase and exploration of "natural beauty") and its effects on environmentalist efforts because of the distance it creates, because one day we will drop our gaze and the ocean will rise up and churn on land. So how to collapse that distance, but still acknowledge natural beauty? Enter acheiropoieta, a principle that explores the "madeness" of things not made by human hands.  One of the satisfactions of natural beauty is recognition, both figurative (and this can stretch from people recognizing things in clouds to Caillois's landscapes and other figurative forms recognized in rocks), and abstract (fantastic crystalizations, juts of colors, shapes and forms that stretch or seem placed, even without figurative purpose).  This porphyry had both for my students: they saw constellations of a night sky, and they saw a vast abstract expanse.  The classic medieval acheiropoieta is figurative: the icon of the face of Christ pressed, not painted, onto a linen surface (think Mandylion or the veil of Veronica). But (calling Meyer Schapiro), what of an abstract acheiropoieta? What of a thing that manifests madeness but does not represent anything? Do we call it an aesthetic of ontology? Images that resist iconographic breakdown? Images whose priority is to be instead of signify? I am letting myself be swayed by Marbod of Rennes (author of a lapidary that poetically presents stones' agency, its being in action) more than, say, William Durandus (who saw representational symbolism in the stone pillars of churches).  I am wondering if the stone's ability to manifest madeness (to appear to have been fashioned but not by human hands) could not also be a glimpse of the body of Christ as it becomes manifest above the altar in the midst of the ritual of the Eucharist: an absolute presence, a natural beauty.

The Caddisfly Larvae art of Hubert Duprat

Of course with ritual, the question of agency becomes very troubling indeed.  Rituals are frameworks created by humans, and enacted by them, but for the purpose of being in the presence of non-human agency (God, love, power, etc.).  And so I'll close with a natural beauty orchestrated, but not made, by human hands: the slips that caddisfly larvae make when artist Hubert Duprat gives them gold, corral, pearls, turquoise, and lapis lazuli instead of the usual twigs, leaves, and broken shells they find in the rivers of southern France. What stuns is the patterning, the band of pearls and turquoise, and the composition and the structure. It's lovely. And the problems -- of consciousness (theirs/ours), of use (can they live there? does he sell what they made?), of setting (given the choice between gold and leaves, which would they choose?) -- are fantastic.

Chi Rho Page as Electrical Grid

The ChiRho page from the Book of Kells

I hope that Jane Bennett and Alfred Siewers have met because their ideas have much to say to each other. I combined chapter two of Bennett's Vibrant Matter, "The Agency of Assemblages" with Siewer's chapter from Strange Beauty, "The Cosmic Imaginarium," for our consideration of the idea of landscape in the Middle Ages.  This consideration was also nurtured by ideas of how art historians might reconceptualize medieval landscape (as something other than a lack, or Renaissance landscapes-in-waiting) that reside in a piece I really love by Walter Cahn titled "Medieval Landscape and the Encyclopedic Tradition" in Yale French Studies 1991 (geez, just grabbing the link reminds me of how rich that particular issue is).  I'm going to have time to highlight just two observations that emerged.  The first was applying Bennett's articulated assemblage of the electric grid to Siewer's choice image of the Chi Rho page.  In discussing the massive power outage of 2003, Bennett characterizes the electric grid as "a volatile mix of coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood" (25).  And so, with Spinoza's affective bodies in mind, and with Siewer's idea of "the transfer of aesthetic responsibility from the artist to the viewer" (126), we began to wander the landscape of the Chi Rho page. Eyes, butterflies, skin, loneliness, hope, blood, cold, stone, quill, plant, orthodoxy, colonialism, Christ, perpetuity, power, sacrifice, pigment, otter, letter, curve, triumph, fear, voice.  There was more. I appreciated, in a total breakdown of the certitude of the outlook on the world/landscape of Vitruvian man (who, I admit, I have made a bit of our straw man), construction through accretion, rather than through design or implementation.  I had to let go of the art historical impulse to account for everything in the image, to explain all of the iconography, and instead be witness to what emerged in associations and connections. I had to move (ever-inspired by Bennett) from epistemology to ontology. I had to let the cosmic imaginarium of the students, when they allow themselves to be called into the Chi Rho page, do the work.  And even as I write this, I think of going back on Monday and filling them in on the cats and the mice and the Eucharist (the awesome Suzanne Lewis piece in Traditio), and I get excited to do so because of the perceptual work that will have preceded the iconographic work.  I think that I'm struggling with this tension (between the materiality of the image and the wealth of textuality I know to exist behind it) now, because I am aligning images and texts to write about about a work of art of especially vibrant matter, the choir screen at Le Faoüet. Perhaps I need to let myself wander the landscape of that choir screen as Bennett and Siewers invite me to. There's more to say here, but my own landscape stirs awake with children who have dreams to report and desires for their days.  What I would elaborate upon is Siewer's awesome idea of "inverse perspective" - of the landscape looking out at you, of you feeling called in. Here we go.