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Bruno Gadrat - mai 1998 - Résumé de
conférence CELA98
Traduction de John MacLeod - version
française
A thin layer of ice is glued to delicate branches in the first light of morning.
Which branches? What ice? Betula, Forsythia, Spiraea, hoar frost,
freezing rain.
Botany or climatology?
Two consecutive days of killer freezing rain. The blur of
glistening twigs becomes a design wettened and engorged by the gray
warmth of day.
How do we "catch" this subtle knowledge without destroying it in the
depths of a data base? Do we have the right to ignore this
potentially fundamental element of wildness: wildness first perceived
in the company of a guide?
Tracks, favorable conditions, then patient waiting to seize fleeting eternal moments.
This wild untamedness in the landscape, does it belong to criminology, ecology or the science of patience?
To see, to see it again, then to return again perhaps to tame it.
Freezing rain continues to fall, improbably, immoderately, wild. The savageness stops us short, frozen in fear of being devoured or mauled. Esthetics of the sublime or social control of statistically probable panic?
Trees snap, branches fall, trunks fail under the weight of
built-up ice.
What trees? Acer, Tilia, hydro-electricity pylons, television
antennas.
The nights of sodium-yellow clouds are dead. Night has come alive again, wild with the undisturbed shining of a million stars. The trees finally silent, moonlight pierces the luminescent mantles of the blades of yellowed grass.
What grass? A Hosta's dried flower stalk, a Sedum spectabile's
rounded head. Two millimeters of stem thickness and ten millimeters
of companion ice.
Optics, acoustics, strength of materials?
How do we appreciate the beauty of the wildness of the landscape
when this savageness has destroyed the countryside?
Sociology, ecology?
Is all of this scientific knowledge a sufficent basis for us to create landscape wildness without giving up the country - a minimally livable country but one that comes with electricity and hot water on each floor?
It snows huge flakes all night, visibility is drastically reduced. The lynx which was biologically extinct from the Montreal region shows up in the snow-sculpted bark of the forked trunk of an Acer saccharinum in the heart of the city. The wildness of the landscape is there, visible to the initiated, perfectly safe, with no danger to the rare lynxes living elsewhere in the country.
Is the garden not the most rigorous and efficient means of generating this knowledge?