Letter from the Editor

I am this hand that would raise itself against the earth and I am the earth too.

It's an experience of blankness that feels like falling into a lost world. Being in a landscape with no roads or buildings. Open vistas radiate into the distance, but there is no feeling that they lead anywhere. There is no storyline — it could be a moment or it could be forever. The promise of endlessness, or fulfillment, is but a mirage because something is missing.

Blankness can be a nothing or a void, but it can also be a placeholder for something that had been known, or that can't yet be known — in the way that we cannot quite pinpoint an internal experience but know it is there. When this happens, I might get up and go to the bookshelf, hoping to locate and better understand through poetry, theory, or fiction this experience that I cannot yet put into words. Or I might take a long walk through a nearby parkland, knowing that open vistas and the rhythm of meditative exercise connect me to elusive parts of myself.

In his short essay on the mirror stage, Lacan (1949) recounts this dream: a subject is “floundering” through open spaces, outlying areas of marshland and “rubbish tips,” in the quest to get to a fortress or stadium that sits atop high ground. He observes how these distinct areas represent “two opposed fields” (p. 5): the lofty, fortified castle and the mushy, ill-defined estuarial spaces that are simultaneously land, water, and trash.

Landscape is one place where cultural experience is located. Unlike “scenery” or “nature,” landscape takes on meaning as we turn our gaze upon it. One meaning of the Lacanian dreamscape is that the structure on the hill organizes and orders the land sprawling away from it. It has definitional force. In Heideggerian terms (1977), the built structure “gathers the earth as landscape” (p. 151), as if the building causes the land to be formed around it. This is how new forms and different realities get generated — as opposites