Touchstones

from The Landscape of Language by Annie Whiston Spirn

"A place is particular, a tapestry of woven contexts: enduring and ephemeral, local and global, related and unrelated, now and then, past and future. Landscape context is a fabric whose strands are narratives of landscape elements and features, both the persistent and the fleeting."

The buttons on the button board were given to me. I see within their words repetitions of history. Each button is merely a button, but the landscape it conjures up composes itself into a story.

( I have no idea what the script on the button with the triangle says.)

I thought about landscapes after viewing Oldboy Jack's blog. His picture of a sculpture that will soon come down sent me off thinking about the landscape of symbolism.

"Metaphors," said Spirn," grounded in landscapes guide how humans think and act. Some landscapes are polemical "layered with complex, paradoxical meanings."