The Aesthetics of the VAST Volume 2 : Unfinished Business
Gary Dwyer
The Aesthetics of the VAST Volume 2 : Unfinished Business
A composite map of some of the places I have tried to find my way. 2 
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When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. Freidrich Nietzsche
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hen you arrive in your sixties, as I have, large units of past time become compressed and feel much closer and nearer to the present. As long ago as twenty years now feels like a short leap and I realize that in those years, my relationship with whatever I call the natural world has undergone substantial change. In the late nineteen eighties I had become fatigued with American cities. They seemed both futile and feeble attempts at making the crowded become courteous. At best, they were showcases of culture, but mostly for the well heeled. While at worst, American cities appeared as collections of poverty and misdirection, centered on confusion, calamity, and callousness. A less harsh but not necessarily middling evaluation has revealed my deep-seated irritation that almost none of the idealistic sensibilities that surfaced in the late sixties had actually taken root and in their stead, a confused commercialism came creeping. It became a terrible wave and I found it muddy, opaque and turbulent. In response to this circumstance I sought solace in what I thought was nature. In fact, it was not nature itself, but rather my own personal interpretation of nature. Various forms of this appreciation had evidenced themselves earlier in my life. The Colorado Rockies had been central to my adolescence and this early exposure to high and open places eventually led to a long list of experiences in regions known for being distant, empty and cold. It was there that I became concerned with the aesthetics of the vast. This is not to say I was advocating a naïve return to nature or that I rejected all the values of contemporary society but that I had come to prefer being outside in many ways. Not only for the pleasure of being an iconoclast but because I preferred the outdoors. I was not against being in a building, as Thoreau seemed to be, it just wasn’t my preference. But my appreciation for nature had no depth. It was entirely superficial. I liked things like rocks and trees and fish, but real value and depth of meaning come only with the act of naming and I didn’t know the names.
College solved the naming problem by forcing me to memorize the beautiful tyranny of Linnaeus’s system of telling one thing from another. But the names were just names and I wasn’t interested in looking for depth or even any meaning. It was shallow and immature, but I just wanted to be happy and the wind in the trees made me smile. So what all this came to mean is that I tried to respond to nature. As an adult, I gradually became a member of the Design Community, (designers and artists of all sorts) I paid close attention to the things I could learn from my tenuous attachment to the natural world. Nature’s patterns, structure and rhythms provided guidance that seemed to go beyond mere design fashion or architectural dogma. This was a minority position in a time of post-modernism, but I didn’t mind. What I was not ready for was the slow but inexorable societal tilt away from production. I was used to being a citizen, a building, making, doing citizen. I’m not sure of when I began to be considered a passive observer, a mere consumer, but I still despise the term. As a design professional and teacher I spent a great deal of time and effort espousing the lessons and exemplars from nature that might be used to guide us; we designers, we supposed arbiters of taste. The trouble was that the public was not listening to their tastemakers. Instead, they were following their urges for instant gratification via retail therapy. The voices of design theory and environmental responsiveness were drowned out by the incessant chants of Esprit and Gap. Everyone simultaneously forgot that BMW used to make Hitler’s motorcycles and that the fighter planes which attacked Pearl Harbor were made by Mitsubishi. And so, this collective, this unconscious amnesia, led us to the place where we are being told we are what we like, forgetting the centuries proving that we are what we make, we are what we do, and we are what we leave behind. In regard to my outside position, my desire to be watching the stars in the night sky rather than on television, I was neither self-righteous nor indignant. Instead, I was perceiving two interconnected transformations. Neither one took priority but seemed to occur with even handed simultaneity. One was my increasing delight in simple distillations of experience. The Sound of rain on a metal roof, the smell of fresh cut Douglas fir, my late afternoon shadow on a wall. The second was that I had to
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live in the larger world. A world where credit cards purchased gasoline and the miles earned meant a flight to New York for my kids. Where my supermarket decided to devote an entire aisle to chips and my neighbors began to believe that they were what they drove. I could see what had the dominant hand in these two transformations and what I thought about the Pleiades at night began to pale against the endless dawn of Starbucks and CNN.
Yet doing the dance of the disconnected does not mean I am pleased with my circumstance. Mere recognition has never been a solution and of course I think there is value in reducing the distance between our selves and the wisdom of the clouds, but I am alive now and like almost everyone else today, I get weather predictions by looking at the web and not by being able to tell the difference between mare’s tales clouds and a mackerel sky.
Any grousing about this transformation is liable to place me in the camp of growling old geezers and I would rather address how these changes in myself and society have affected my perception of my relation to nature and to places vast.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if systems worked? Instead, systems appear as fragments, uncommunicative individual chunks of beliefs, with no possibility of ever being universal. Modernism (as a design philosophy) was going to use the principles of industry to produce more vital, more responsive cities and it failed miserably. Architects used to be considered the ultimate diviners or wizards but today, they have declared themselves to be part of the solution by now being green. The term ‘environmental architect’ is like the partnership between the pimp and the prostitute and the result is the same. In fairness, architects did not create a society of consumer greed, we did. And I think it was because we got lazy. We discovered it was easier to buy something than it was to make it and we didn’t find any particular virtue in making. What we forgot about along the way was the joy that comes from making, the satisfaction of seeing tactile results of our actions; finding glee in leaving something behind. A drawing lasts differently than a video game score and I think what I am trying to see, through my haze of two decades of locking backward, is to discover a more rewarding melding of culture and nature. I guess what it comes down to is I want something that lasts.
First, the world of looking, lusting, buying and using is everywhere and inescapable. It is as much a part of me as I am of it. Just because I find it vapid and shallow does not mean it is going away. Second, I must now make pilgrimages to nature, or whatever is left of it, as it now has seldom the capacity to present itself. Instead of living in open country, I now live in a small town, a small city actually, one with a rather benign climate and surprisingly most of the big city problems. Yes, I have sidewalks to walk on at night, and no, I can’t see the stars. What this has come to mean is that I am, like most of us, a contradiction. We live in what passes for an automotive version of cities and fly to distant countries so we can see birds and hand woven fabrics and be delighted with what we so glibly call diversity. At one time, not terribly long ago, Western civilization seemed to believe we humans were part of nature. Now, nature is other. More than ever before it is separate from us. Distinct. Nature has become something we pay attention to from a distance. Of course we surf its waves and suffer severe storms, but we always climb back in our SUV’s and plug the ipod in our ears. Disconnecting is what we have learned to do and we do it with a vengeance. Me too. That’s right, the distant stargazer, I do the same. Just because the singular, quiet, photographic image occupies more of my present world than video games does not make me either superior or right, but merely in the minority.
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My interest in the aesthetics of the vast may have germinated in high, cold and distant places but the places themselves were only a vehicle for what I was after. More than twenty years ago, I spent some time in the remote mountains of Asia and I did not hear the sound of a motor for more than three weeks. Not the whine of a battery operated camera, or the roar of an overhead jet. Nothing. Only a handful of people in my generation can remember such a time and almost no one in the present. Part of The aesthetics of the vast has to do with the place and the obvious sparseness of the setting and the small number of elements vying for my attention. The biggest thing in all these places is always space itself. Emptiness. Nothing. The Void, and in the end it is the only thing that lasts.
We live by telling ourselves stories. Mostly stories about where we are going and how things are going to turn out. This image is not just an arrow, it is a map showing how the river Seine moves through Paris. The vast always lets us down. It never points a direction and it doesn’t tell us what to do. The vast tells us that we are supposed to figure it out.
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Volume Two
The preface
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he essayist Crystal Williams said, “...discovery requires humility.” I think it requires stolen time, quiet and seemingly endless space.
o be able to see the vast, you have to take away from something else. In fact, spending time with the vast is an act of theft. It has no purpose.
here is a ringing in my ears and I don’t mind it because I only notice it when it is quiet.
There are only two forms of quiet. One form of quiet is the space between sounds. Like the space between the beginning of a Chopin Nocturne and the moment when you actually start listening to it. It is the same quiet when Lester Bowie plays, “I only have eyes for you.”and you know nothing of what you are hearing because you are filled with feeling. This kind of quiet is the distance between looking and seeing. The second form of quiet we call “dead” quiet. It is the kind of quiet where we never participate, we only observe. This quiet always resides with distance and its most common companion is fear. Dead quiet is far too lively to be called dead for it is often with elation or delight, but most commonly associated with the ceaseless racket going on in our own minds. I told a friend that when I first arrive in a new and distant place that it usually takes three days of being in that new place to actually be there. For the dust to settle, you might say. In the outback of West Australia I saw a truck-train. A huge diesel truck pulling five trailers at seventy miles an hour on a rutted and wash boarded dirt road. That truck-train was hurling a rooster tail of red ochre dust at least fifty feet in the air. I waited at that spot for half an hour. Only the heat shimmered in the distance. Nothing else moved and it was very close to being dead quiet, except for the haze of dust settling at the horizon and the constant ringing in my ears.
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riter John Jerome told me that, “Fists get shaken at mountains.” I think what those fists are complaining about is the incessant verticality. Mountains always make everything harder. Except perhaps, going down, and even then, it can be painful, dangerous and deadly. Paraphrasing George Mallory, mountains attract us because they are there. They also attract us because there are fewer of us in the mountains and we use mountains to get away from other people. The usual trade off for less people is difficulty in breathing, cold, sudden storms and all manner of dangers. Often they are in ranges so there is more than one of them to deal with. Yet in spite if the problems we are still drawn to the high and lofty, even if it is for very brief periods. I don’t think it is an accident there are so many monasteries in the mountains.
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ibetans, who are given an air-burial, are placed on a tall ramada-like platform and left for the birds. The most common birds are lammergeiers and they are the winged scimitar of the skies. The belief is that the birds will take you and your spirit to the sky and to heaven.
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o, it turns out that mountains are as much about sky as they are about granite and ice. Often people in the mountains spend most of their time looking at their feet or other mountains You can’t see a mountain when you are on it, but you can always see the sky. The most important thing to know about mountains is that you are in them.
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The Enormity of Mountains
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Maona Kea Big Island, Hawaii
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Talus Slope (Where’s Waldo?) Dolomiti, Italy 12
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Summit Ridge Mount Lassen, California
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Summit Ridge Dolomiti, Italy 14 
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Pasang Sherpa, uncharacteristically resting, before going into the Annapurna Range Two days above Pokhara, Nepal
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6623 Meters (If the weather holds, you will need three weeks.) Thamserku, Nepal
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Mount Thor (Where’s Waldo?) Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada 20
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The spine of the Andes Patagonia / Argentine side
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Mount Osorno Frutillar, Chile 22 
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Medivac Chopper (Injured climbers) Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada
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Summit Lake (Just before Penny Glacier climb.) Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada
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Owl River Valley Auyuittuq, Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada
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Franz Josef Glacier Westland Tai Poutini, New Zealand
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Perito Moreno Glacier Santa Cruz, Argentina
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Summit Mont Blanc France / Italy 32 
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Mount Etna Catania, Sicily
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Mount Cook (Aoraki) Tasman Glacier, New Zeland 34 
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The San Bernadino Mountains East of Los Angeles, California
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Los Andes Torres del Paine, Patagonia, Chile
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Los Andes Torres del Paine, Patagonia, Chile
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Los Andes Torres del Paine, Patagonia, Chile
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E
ntering a certain Buddhist meditation room (called a Zendo) is always a problem for me. There, at the doorway, is a wood beam acting as a threshold. It is about eight inches wide and the same amount higher than the floor level so it is impossible to ignore. I can never remember if the protocol is to step over the threshold or to step on it. Regardless, the real purpose of the threshold is to get your attention.
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e humans, with our geometrically increasing numbers and our rapacious activities, have passed over many thresholds. But so far they have not gotten much of our attention.
beyond our imagining, our capacity or interest in doing much of anything about it. At the time of this writing there is no indication we will stop or change anything humans are doing to ourselves or to the planet. Two generations in the future we will all be fighting over shortages of everything. There will be mayhem in the streets. How’s that for vast?
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LIVING (way too)
LARGE
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Toxic Superfund Site Abandoned Petrolium Tank Farm - unused, fenced off for forty years. San Luis Obispo, California 44 
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McMansions verses farmland I have never seen a proposal to tear down a subdivision in order to build a farm. Have you every tried to eat a stucco house? Pismo Beach, California 46 
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Ever Onward ! We have been suckered into believing there is never going to be a cultural recession. Museum of Comparative Anatomy 48 
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Paris
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Western Terraces This culture disappeared from drought, not invasion. Machu, Picchu. Peru 50 
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The City of Ragusa The gymnastics required to find a parking place was colossal. And these Italians have cars too. Sicily
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Namche Bazaar The only industry in this village is tending to the needs of trekkers and climbers. There is potato farming and grazing but more than half of the population is always only passing through. Being nomadic and permanently transient might not be such a bad idea after all. Above the Dud Kosi River, Khumbu Region, Nepal
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Oil Fields McKittrick, California 56 
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One street town As I walked through this town, I felt that the people actually enjoyed living here. It seemed to be a community of shared interests. Naudanda, Nepal
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Abandoned Berber Village When there is drought or plague, the Berber’s abandon their villages. When favorable conditions return, they come back and rebuild. There is no going back to Detroit. Atlas Mountains, Morocco
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A great city on a normal day. When your tires wear out, the rubber from those tires has gone onto the highways and the rain washes the rubber down the drain and ends up in The Bay. Forty thousand tons of rubber go into The Bay, every year. San Francisco
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What comes here, stays here. We know the Arctic is a desert, and nothing rots in the desert. When the ice melts far enough for the easy access to oil, the Arctic will see what garbage and danger really look like. Pangnirtung, Eastern Arctic, Canada
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Five thousand tons of dust from the Sahara fall on this city, every day. Because the Aswan Dam blocks the diurnal flooding of the Nile, there is no flushing of many of Cairo’s canals. They fill with garbage and breed mosquitoes. It looks like the Bronx, but it doesn’t smell as sweet. The population is 17 million, 50 thousand of whom live in the cemeteries, without water, sewage or electricity. Cairo 66
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City, after city, after city. Just when you think you see the end of the city, another one appears. Half the population of Argentina (15 million) lives here and it is growing by almost 10 percent a year. Buenos Aires 68 
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