Read "How to Make a Landscape" by Carlos Drummond de Andrade online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
This landscape? It doesn't exist. What exists is vacant space, to be planted with landscape retrospectively.
The view of the mountains, the springs, the cecropia trees? What view? That all comes later.
Twenty years later, just like in dramas.
For now our seeing doesn't see; it gathers slivers of road, strands of horizon, without knowing that one day it will weave them into tapestries, like photographs, of visited lands we didn't grasp.
A landscape takes time. It begins as a blank space tinted by green, brown, and gray, but the color doesn't stick to surfaces, doesn't shape them. Stone is only stone from the distance of much maturing.
And the water from this stream does not cool naked bodies: it cools them later.
Water is a project of living.
A gate opens. Creaks. Meaningless.
A cow in its silence. I don't even notice.
One day this cow's silence, this creaking, will strike me in their phenomenal perfection, wholly tangible, in front and at the back and from the side. Someone next to me asks: What's with you? And it's nothing except the gate's sound, the silent cow.
Landscape: a land made from thoughts of landscape in the creative distance of space-time, when things, without any prints or documents, exist more fiercely than we do: they colonize and watch us, stare at us. Submissive objects of regard, we are their pasture. We are the landscape's landscape.