THE JOURNAL

The following entries, along with those incorporated in the main text, are segments taken from a sketchbook and journal that I kept as I traveled from one place to another.  The creation of this text and its existence amongst the rest of these writings has a place in the ideas of Timo Maran’s notion of a nature-text.  A philosopher of semiotics, Maran studies how landscapes, as represented in a text, symbolize the experience of the intersection of environment, text, author, and reader or participant.  Usually one would think on this idea in relation to a piece of literature, making the environment one of the imagination.  But in a way the landscapes here, in each of these entries, did the writing for me.  I felt the earth speaking to me in some ways or others, and wrote these musings upon the pages of my sketchbook as I traveled.  These texts are reflections of the environments they discuss, and though I did write them, I wonder if the landscapes are actually playing the role of authorship.  Looking back on them, I find myself acting as the reader, an outsider experiencing these places once again through the writings of a distant me, one engulfed in the existence of each place.