2. Landscape and Map: Experience and Form

To live is to move through a landscape — a continuous unfolding of sensations, impressions, and responses. The ground shifts, the light changes, the wind carries different scents; all of it composes a field of experience that is immediate, undeniable, and alive. This is the terrain we inhabit long before we name it.

But to orient within this field, we draw maps. We form concepts, stories, symbols — ways to compress the richness of the terrain into usable representations. These maps let us navigate, predict, and plan. They give us the ability to step back, to imagine alternatives, to say “this means that.” Without them, experience would dissolve into pure flux; with them, we can move coherently through the world.

Yet every map, no matter how precise, is a kind of dissociation — a functional separation from what it describes. To make a map, we must step back from the immediacy of experience, flattening the depth of being into lines and contours we can hold in our minds. This dissociation is not a flaw but a gift: it allows for manipulation, imagination, and play. It’s what lets us call a turtle an elephant, to build narratives that link the two, and in doing so, to expand the boundaries of what can be conceived.

Still, there is a tension. The landscape draws the map back toward integration — it “pulls” on the forms we invent, testing their alignment with what is. The map, in turn, stretches the landscape toward abstraction — fragmenting and reconfiguring what’s given in order to discover what might be possible. The health of our being depends on the balance between these two forces. Too much mapping, and we lose touch with the living terrain; too little, and we drown in immediacy.

Higher vantage points — whether intellectual, spiritual, or technological — promise us a broader view. They let us see patterns we couldn’t perceive from the ground. Science, in this sense, is a tower built upon the plain: a structure that elevates our perspective, enabling us to observe, measure, and predict with greater precision. But a higher view is only as valuable as what we do with it. What matters is not height but integration: whether the knowledge we gain returns to enrich our lived experience or remains suspended above it, detached and inert.

Equally crucial is the journey into the darker and denser regions of the terrain — the shadowed valleys and the quiet undergrowth of experience. These are the places that resist mapping, where what we think we know falters. Yet it is here that new forms are born. Exploring the landscape itself, rather than merely surveying it from afar, teaches us to feel its rhythms and limits. It grounds our abstractions in the soil of lived reality.

Curiosity is what propels this movement between landscape and map. It is the energy that both ascends and descends — climbing the tower to see farther, then descending again to walk the ground and test what was seen. Curiosity, when nourished responsibly, guards against both delusion and stagnation. It ensures that our maps remain porous and our landscapes, alive.

Art, in this framework, is the field where these two dimensions — experience and form — meet in conscious interplay. It neither escapes the landscape nor abandons the map. Instead, it lets us see the act of mapping itself, the oscillation between immersion and distance, knowing and not-knowing. Art is where the map bends back toward the landscape, where form rediscovers its origin in experience, and experience learns to see itself through form.

The artist is not merely a mapmaker, nor simply a wanderer. The artist is both: one who moves between terrain and symbol, between the immediacy of sensation and the abstraction of meaning. To encounter art is to join in that movement — to remember that knowing the world, and knowing ourselves, is always a matter of walking, pausing, looking again, and redrawing the map.