version

Well-known member
The rapidly industrialising environment of Red Desert sends Monica Vitti mad. An alien landscape's sprung up about her and is exerting immense psychic pressure.

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And there's something about the woods themselves in Twin Peaks that pulls and probes at the town.

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version

Well-known member
My dad used to go round Europe on his motorbike and visit historic battlefields, concentration camps, and the like. He said there was one particular camp he visited that was in or near some patch of woodland and that the whole place seemed to be dead, not even any birds. It was as though what had been done there had left some sort of wound on the landscape that even the animals could pick up on.

This is a variation or different strand, I suppose. The environment isn't an active agent, but receptive and part of a feedback loop. Mark talks about a similar idea in 'The Weird and The Eerie' when he brings up Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape.


The Stone Tape Theory is the speculation that ghosts and hauntings are analogous to tape recordings, and that mental impressions during emotional or traumatic events can be projected in the form of energy, "recorded" onto rocks and other items and "replayed" under certain conditions.

 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
This is a variation or different strand, I suppose. The environment isn't an active agent, but receptive and part of a feedback loop. Mark talks about a similar idea in 'The Weird and The Eerie' when he brings up Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape.


The Stone Tape Theory is the speculation that ghosts and hauntings are analogous to tape recordings, and that mental impressions during emotional or traumatic events can be projected in the form of energy, "recorded" onto rocks and other items and "replayed" under certain conditions.

In Seth Speaks, Seth says most hauntings are of this type but that they are usually triggered by the corresponding spirit thinking about the corresponding trauma in the discarnate realm.

In the classic of psychometry, The Soul of Things, the proposed mechanism behind sensitives being able to relive episodes from an object's past is that everything is making a permanent impression on everything else through reflected light.
 

version

Well-known member
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

 

version

Well-known member
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.


You can pick any sort of of feature like this, a river, a military installation, proximity to the sea, mineral deposits, and build out from them to create layers and layers of maps of a given location. Someone might choose railways as their organising principle, another oil. You could conceivably keep stacking them up indefinitely until you end up with an impossibly dense latticework mapping everything, or you can zero in on one and posit it as the key to the others.

Pynchon does it across the three big books. In Gravity's Rainbow, it's the military-industrial complex. In Mason & Dixon, it's the surveying. In Against the Day, it's mining and the railroads. Each one creeps across the landscape like a network of veins, bending things to its will.
 

sus

Moderator
The expression I hear constantly in coastal urban enclaves (describing parties, bars, dates, relationships) is "the vibe shifted." The vibe the mood the atmosphere is this emergent protean shifting thing, a quasi agent, a ghost, the gods, ambient ancestors' approval and anger, which gets to Solaris or Crater Lake
 

version

Well-known member
What does wherever you live stir in you @version

Boredom in the peopled areas. Once you get out into the country, it's a different story. I like an open sky and panoramic view. There's a flatness that can be dispiriting though. You look out and see miles of treeless hills and fields. Somewhere like the Lake District or Glen Coe in Scotland really lights a fire in me in a way farmland and new build estates can't.
 
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