Heading west on Interstate 84 in eastern Oregon, the route passes through the Rockies in an unusual way. Rather than trails and roads finding their way through passes between the mountains so as to see the valleys between, which is what happens later on in our route to Seattle, when the lush valleys can be seen suddenly uncovered in their sunshine and shadows, idyllic places rather than the rough places of the peaks that are higher by far than where the roads go through it, Interstate 84 instead finds its way on top of the mountains, moving from high point to high point, these not apexes but extended ridges where the trees to both sides are of the same elevation as the road, no cliffs to see, nor the valleys either, because the trees are enough to prevent looking at a gap or offering a clearing. The result is that the passing cars offer a sense of being on top of the world, a continuous thing that goes for a long distance and so making the whole vistaless view seem miraculous, a deep insight into how there is nothing higher but nothing depressed and so offering a very little angle of vision. This experience is remarkably pleasurable partly because it is so unusual a vantage point, or rather the lack of a vantage point, and even more so because the whole scene seems to float without a top and a bottom, as if there were a natural equality in which people (or trees) were embedded, rather than a natural inequality whereby something is always either higher or lower, these the differences in geometry about something very fundamental about social life, which is that equality and inequality are the two natural states of social existence with inequality the predominant quality. We all float amidst the unusual sight of the equal society of trees surrounding one another and those who observe them rather than some more elevated than others, looking at other companion trees rather than in the distance. Isn't equality grand?
That is a deep interpretation, perhaps the deepest, of what natural representation can create, but the experience precedes its meaning. It is an aesthetic preternatural perception rather than an intellectually arrived at one, and so allows the viewer to re-experience a sense of life and nature more directly than when meanings are introduced to explain them. That is the way some scholars deal with place as when Henri Frankfort in “Before Philosophy” argued that the flat spaces of Palestine gave rise to a different set of experiences than did the mountainous places even though, much later, Jerusalem would be made a capital for a kingdom precisely because it was in the mountains rather than on the plain. That experience of a high but equidistant ridge line is not offered, as I say, in many experiences of the outdoors. In fact, I was not able to find an accurate account though there are many photographs of Route 84 in that area. All insist on offering a vista or a car crash. The best I could do is a picture of Deadman’s Gap, it of an ominous title, but forget the sight of Mount Hood on the upper left of the picture, just the flat and the sense of height. Mine is not the perspective taken by those who painted the Oregon Trail of not very remote historical memory. Alfred Bierstadt created a painting entitled “The Oregon Trail” that is in accord with the usual and perhaps more natural perspective, which is to think of highs and lows allowing things to be seen in between. He is famous for having a clearing next to a lake where Indians can gather while in the background are high peaks and a quickly elevated rise to the right so that people can descend onto the clearing. Civilization is between the spaces allowed. In “The Oregon Trail”, there are trees to the left of the painting and there are mountains to the right and the action of the painting takes place between them, wagons walking forward as accompanied with riders and cattle, all these events in the foreground of the picture.
What does it mean to recognize what I call the visuality of equality? It is difficult to say and maybe that is why equality as a concept seems to be an intrusion on the natural order, which is that there are taller and shorter people, stronger and weaker ones, more influential or ruthless or wiser people than others. Who imagines a natural equality? Rousseau tried but that became confused with the feral or primitive. Equality seems only a state of mind, a concept. A very different fundamental image alongside the rarer one of the top of the world is available in darkness, when the auto passes by occasional lights in an almost continuous darkness, one house after the other a lamppost of civilization sheltered like cavemen in their now constructed one story independent homes, battened down for the night until the dark passes and so people can walk abroad. Only certain places, such as major cities, have large parts of them illuminated throughout or almost through all of the night and so defy the dark. In that case, people in the dark, however equal in their vulnerable condition, are not on the top of the world. Rather, they are on the skin of the world, just barely surviving in that way, subject to the immensity of space and other forces. I suspect that the idea of evil is bred from the sense of night because of what dangers can lurk there, unknown and hopeless. That is only the equality of weakness and victimhood and that is no basis for commity.
Then there is the radical departure of avoiding a natural equality or a natural inequality or a natural evil and posit instead a principle of pure concept rather than a derivation of nature. That is what happens when people develop organizations. I think of the longstanding sociological insight that the basis of a city or a community is not people having fellow feelings, which is natural and possibly useful and available and satisfying, but thinking of cities and lesser communities as having a set of institutions which allow them to prosper and expand their individual selfhoods. Before reaching eastern Oregon, we passed through Boise, Idaho, which is a small city but where there are within ten blocks so many of the institutions that make a geographical place into a civilization. There is a university, an art gallery, a set of churches, a library, a hospital and a city hall and the state capitol. Add an economy and make it work. The saloonkeeper may have been the first enforcer of law to a settlement derived from agricultural workers and cattle hands coming off their ranchers, and then may have come a lawman, but the place had become a town when there was a schoolmarm to tend her one room schoolhouse. That provides stability and also equality in that all the kids are rising up to whatever their possibilities are. The same is true in other cities. Jerusalem, as was often noted, had a hospital and a university and a symphony orchestra before the Jews took over political control in 1948. They were a nation before it was a nation.
The thing about cities which violates its sense of independence from distance, its natural conceptuality, is that these institutions are close together and so proximity creates strength through collective action, like de Tocqueville’s New England towns where people congregated on business or market days so as to also transact their political activities, very different from the Southern plantations that were separated from one another and had no need to engage in an equality within themselves however much the collection of the aristocrats were themselves equal freedmen. De Tocqueville’s sense is that democracy is made possible by environmental factors, when his core is that people are interactive or not, which is a conceptual rather than a geographic matter. But you can do without both the physical and the geometric-- and even with the place centered idea of a community, which is a collection of people who have fellow feelings. It is the organizations that make you democratic, which means to be free.
There is one exception to the conceptual nature of cities. Geometry plays a role because these organizations and even their physical residence have to be close together, those institutions in Boise being in a ten block radius and residential and commercial buildings in cities with layers and layers of places and people on top of one another. Cities expand to the distance it goes to quickly travel between them and so New York City expanded to the Bronx when it became a suburb for the working class in the Twenties because of the extension of the subway lines. Some will say that after Covid people will all work at home and so cities are obsolete, but I don’t think so. People need more than nightlife, which means nightlight everywhere in its vicinity. Cities also need interaction of disparate and many people. You can’t do away with subways and busses.
One of the most profound observations of the relation of distance to institutions is offered by Jacob van Ruisdael’s “View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds” (1670-75). (Remember that it is an observation rather than an interpretation or an analysis. Words rather than pictures are needed to provide explanations.) There is a long shot of Haarlem at a distance. It has a number of small buildings close together as well as a major structure. Close on in what might be called a suburb of the town is a house next to which is laid out a bleaching field, which means linen cloth stretched out to dry. The bleaching field is presumably at a distance to the town center because it needs a considerable bit of property to spread out the cloth. Behind the field is a large house that might contain many people but only one is visible. That area to the left foreground seems commensurable in that its proportions allow everything needed to take place regardless of whether Holland is big or little, and Haarlem is not a Lilliputian place because Holland is small, even as Oregon and Washington are vast and have the sense of that even if their coastal edges are crowded with people and things. Moreover the distance of the bleaching field to the town is also neither crowded nor remote, just a sensible difference between places, the town concentrated with people and places and lessening of that until the bleaching field, which is noteworthy for its organization of space around its house.
The town and the suburb are on a similar scale but still offer up the two very different experiences of closeness, the factory aligned by its purposes even though, ironically, it takes up space, while the distant town has multiple purposes. Both town and suburb are natural in presenting actual distances. Ruisdael, whether through the elevation of his perspective or else the items portrayed, accomplishes the single dimensionality that might have been accomplished by either portraying the closely set of houses inside a Dutch town, as happens in Vermeer, or giving a scale appropriate for he distances of a long tree lined road, as is also available in Ruisdael. The worlds of organization and of land are therefore rectified rather than restricted to one or the other. The industry of bleaching is an organization placed on a particular piece of land, as we wonder whether Boise is remote from civilization because it is distant from urban centers, or has supplanted distance because of the internet, in that its art museum is filled with national and international pieces as well as regional ones. There are distances between parts of the suburbs and the downtown in Ruisdael and ever since but he gets to put the two together. It is hard for any of us to get our heads around having both things at once, and so we see either Boise or Route 84 but not the two of them together as the same sort of thing.
