July 2025, 11 Minutes

Topographies of the Soul

On Landscape and Time

Time is buried.

How, you may ask, is time buried? Well, look about - it’s buried all around us. It’s buried in the soil, in the stone, in the organic residue of the past.

The past doesn’t vanish, not in the way we conceive of disappearing. Rather, it sinks, layer by layer, into the landscape, becoming part of the terrain. It is woven into tree rings and fossilised in abandoned buildings. In this manner, every landscape touched by humanity (for good or ill) is an archive. Beneath the field lies broken pottery, tools long ago rusted, bones, bleached and de-marrowed. All of these things tell stories no library could ever hold, and they all hum with emotion; we bury our yesterdays under today, but they don't vanish. They muck into who we are.

The land buzzes with what once was. And it also hums with the potential of what might one day be. In The Poetics of Space, French philosopher of poetics Gaston Bachelard, observed how intimate spaces retain emotional resonance; the same is true when scaled up to include nature with a capital N. A landscape, even when empty of people, can therefore feel full, full of the past.

Thus we witness that when a person returns to a childhood home or a site of trauma, the landscape hasn’t changed, though they themselves have. And yet the feelings can return, as sharp and as fresh as ever, cutting deep with festering blades. These places feel thick with time, the air like memory molasses.

In this way, the earth is a great clock; Grandfather Time’s grandfather’s grandfather great-grandfather’s distant ancestor. Any geologist would chat your ears into a bloody mess explaining this in accurate, rocky terms, but this is not an exploration of that undervalued science (for one, I have no qualifications to speak with authority on that topic). Instead, this work is an attempt to place the myself into the in-between, and to have a good look around. Because nature is absorbing the entirety of human experience, and it is our job to unbury it.

Language and Story

In fiction, as in life, characters often encounter landscape not as neutral ground, but as deeply psychological terrain.

The setting of story is not just background, it becomes a reflection of identity, a vault of memory, and sometimes even a character all by itself. In Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, the American wilderness (in this case Idaho) and water become metaphors for loss and impermanence. The lake on which her characters’ lives are perched is vast and cold and quiet, and it swallows – bodies, secrets, and remembrances.

In her excellent story (truly; it’s a short read and a shorter listen, so it won’t chew into your life too much. I myself only listened recently on audiobook, and felt bad that I had missed it for so long; it was also the spark that inspired me to write this piece of mine), water, like time, becomes both reflective and engulfing. Crucially, Ruthie and Lucille, the novel’s sisters and main characters, interpret the same landscape differently, but both interact with the environment in meaningful, sometimes spiritual ways, regardless of subjective preference.

This mirroring recurs across literature. In To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Virginia Woolf uses tides, islands, and coastlines to articulate time’s ebb, the dissolution of identity, and the persistence of grief. Likewise, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn walks a similar path (literally) where the narrator’s physical journey through coastal Suffolk becomes a hushed act of mourning. The landscape is a palimpsest of history and disturbance, and the silence he finds there is anything but. Walking, for Sebald’s narrator in this blend of fact and fiction, is not just bipedal locomotion, but an elegy to a world gone by, and a mind quickly following.

Cormac McCarthy’s worlds are similarly sparse yet saturated with chronicle and potential. In The Road, the scorched land and omnipresent ash form a kind of negative space, an afterplace where silence is not the emptiness of noise, but a deafening place of loss. The places of post-apocalyptic America are haunted not by ghosts but by human emotion, in its raw, primal ugliness. The land feels oppressively heavy with what has been, from rusted out trucks to abandoned playgrounds, all covered in a perma-ash of the mind. McCarthy’s world is not dying, it’s already dead, and the land the father and son stalk is feasted upon by maggots. Man and boy are witnessing the process of decomposition, and the end of the story implies the boy may live long enough to see the re-fertilisation.

“You have to carry the fire.”
“What fire?”
“The fire inside you.”

So, as we have seen, sometimes the land is literally wounded. In The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro places us in a fog-drenched post-Arthurian Britain where memory is lost to mist (I will go deeper into this setting later). Time here is buried under collective amnesia; only through ritual and confrontation can it be retrieved. Characters walk in circles, dig into the ground, return to forgotten places. Each action is a narrative expression of layered collective feeling. The morte of Arthur acts as the death of God, consequenting in an inner wasteland where we are left to fend for ourselves. The results are, predictably, mixed.

Such layering of time and memory is not exclusive to Western texts. In Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, a boy flees into the forest, which becomes a threshold of dream logic. The forest is not only a hiding place - and one may argue it is not a hiding place at all - it is a psyche turned in on itself, recursive and unreliable.

I am tempted to go on here, mention Faulkner’s beautiful South as a metaphor for familial breakdown, or the wind-bitten moors of Heathcliff’s inner workings, but we must move on…

One last note, though. Nonfiction participates in this literary haunting, too. Robert Macfarlane’s work invariably explores how mythmemory dwells beneath and within the land. If you are heading to the bookshop or library anytime soon, and I could urge you to pick up one author, it’d be him.

A Land in Mourning

It’s impossible and rude to speak on such things without reference to the mythopoetic origins of story. I’ll present a plethora here, from across the European traditions.

A spectral cavalcade storms through forests and skies. Chariots rumbling, steeds baying and braying, great axes swinging, and ox-horns roaring. The Wild Hunt appears across European folklore, from the Norse Odin’s ride to the Germanic Wotan’s chase and the Celtic Sluagh. Those caught witnessing it are either cursed, abducted, or forced to join its ranks (my personal preference).

Psychologically, the Hunt becomes a metaphor for repressed collective violence and ancestral rage, instincts too large, too righteous, too terrifying to be confronted directly.

The landscape the hunt passes through is not simply a backdrop, it is an accomplice in the ritual. It echoes with hooves and howls, and is statically charged with a numinous energy. The haunting action becomes a vessel for that which is often hard to say: generational wounds, buried wrath, and the residual chaos of wars unremembered and yet impossible to forget. We see this elsewhere, too. In fiction or in dream, being pursued through wilderness often suggests being chased by one’s own past, be that personal or a bloodline.

The tale of musical Orpheus’s descent into the underworld to retrieve his beloved Eurydice is often read as a tale of grief and recapturing memory. But, to reframe it, it also serves as a voyage into the psyche, with the underworld here acting as the unconscious.

Orpheus’s failure of self-control, that fateful backward glance, is not just romantic weakness, but a truth that is so true, it is almost unbearable to think about: that grief resists closure. The past will not stay behind us just because we command it to. As long as we live, it lives with us, and after we cease, it persists. Love meant that Orpheus could never save his wife. That irony is, I believe, the greatest ever conceived by the human heart. And it is the one that strikes me deepest.

The terrain of the underworld manifests as an architecture of loss. It too is liminal, and everything echoes. It is a labyrinth of caves and pathways to nowhere. Our mourning hero spelunks fearlessly through the landscape, finds light in the darkness though his craft and his love.

The Fisher King is hurt and cannot heal. The land of the Fisher King is hurt and cannot heal. The mirror is held aloft. The magical Brythonic lands, so fecund and bosky, have become barren and wasted. A weeping land of what once was.

Hence, the landscape of legendary Britain is diagnostic. It manifests the condition of the soul. Only the pure-hearted Arthurian knight, Parsifal, who asks the right question, “Whom does the Grail serve?”, can initiate healing (it is also a timely reminder of how crucial asking the right questions is. Judge thinkers not by their answers, but by their questions). This is the power of mythic landscape - it doesn’t just describe; it demands to be seen. It turns the internal pain into something visible and traversable, even if that traversing seems impossible (as it did, and so often was, in the case of Parsifal).

This idea also reflects the Jungian conception of the inner wound being externalised. When something vital is broken within, the environment withers too. This feeds back on itself, and risks creating a negative loop for the psyche. Loops, like chains, demand breaking.

Returning to the great frozen north, we find a tree. A tree of life. Yggdrasil, the great ash tree, connects the nine realms of Norse cosmology. It is not only a physical bridge but a spiritual and psychological one, too, acting as an axis of being. It is a symbol of the universe and the self. Its roots delve into the well of fate (Urðarbrunnr), and its branches stretch into the divine, and even the dead.

This Nordic cosmic map becomes a mirror of psychological integration, with each realm representing a state of being or emotional truth, from the fire of Muspelheim to the ice of Niflheim. The tree endures suffering (rudely, dragons gnaw its roots and stags strip its bark), yet it sustains, and in doing so it sustains the world. As such, Yggdrasil reflects the self as a wounded but enduring organism, where trauma, fate, and growth are entwined. Once more we see Jung’s Wounded Healer archetype (a topic I have recently written on, if you are interested), this time galactic in scale.

Closer to home (for me) Ireland’s Cailleach Bhéara (KAL-yukh VYAR-rah; “The Hag of Beara” – from where Beara Island, the place of her regenerative bathing, derives its name) is the ancient hag-goddess of winter, a landscape entity who shapes the mountains and rivers with her staff or her heavy steps. Like all great gods and goddesses, she is at once creator and destroyer. Her body is often synonymous with the land itself (myth as geology), and in the Irish pantheon she is associated with death, cold, and deep time.

From a psychological perspective, the Cailleach embodies the raw, elemental forces of aging, forgetting, and dormancy. But she must not be thought of as evil, however. No, no, no, not our beloved goddess. Rather, she expresses the necessity of stillness before the possibility of renewal. Her myth, echoing that of the Fisher King, reminds us that some landscapes, especially barren or frozen ones, are not empty or devoid after all, but gestating. To stand on a windswept mountain shaped by the Cailleach is to stand in a godly place, the weather front of myth. It is to stand in a place that remembers longer than we do.

In Metamorphoses, Ovid tells us about the nymph Daphne, who flees the god Apollo, who, driven wild with lust, pursues her. At the moment of her capture, she transforms into a laurel tree. Literally. Her flesh turns to bark. The myth captures a moment of crystallising trauma - a moment so unbearable that the only escape is radical transformation.
Here, nature has become a sanctuary and a scar, both a protection and permanent mark. The laurel is not just symbolic of Apollo’s shame or Daphne’s escape; it is the physical manifestation of an instant exhausted with emotion. In this, the myth prefigures how trauma is often buried in the body, and by extension in the landscape, where it becomes part of the topography, even when the story is forgotten by human minds. But it always rests there, waiting to be rediscovered, a simmering caldera for the poet or the painter.

Lastly, we find ourselves in the aftermath of one of the world’s great wars.

Homer’s Odyssey is a journey. It might even be the journey. He and his ever-loyal, ever-suffering crew cross impossible seas, face storms that their ships had no right in surviving (interestingly Homer gives his hero’s numerous boats no names. This has always struck me as odd. If you can think of any good suggestions, for why it might be, or what you personally name them in your head, lemme know!), world-eating monsters, and islands that promise shelter and salvation, and yet…. Each stage and stop is more than a geographic incident or detour. Every island is a moral or emotional crucible: the land of the Lotus-Eaters is forgetfulness, time is munched; Circe’s island brings us seduction and transformation; the Underworld is a confrontation with loss and ultimate fate.
Therefore Odysseus is not just navigating the Aegean (and the other unnamed seas he finds himself floating on), but his own psyche. His voyage is an extended return to selfhood, with landscape functioning as a series of psychological tests. Each place challenges a different part of his humanity: desire, memory, loyalty, grief. By the time he returns to Ithaca, and his beloved Penelope, he has been remade through terrain.

Thus, the map is also a mirror.

Caspar and the Conquistadors

Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and painter Caspar David Friedrich, two men separate by time and medium, both transformed landscape into a space of spiritual and psychological reflection. In Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Nostalghia, ruined and desolate spaces are turned into inner sanctums - liminal zones of the mind that mirror the soul’s yearning for meaning and, in this case, redemption. The landscapes are more than setting; they are sentient - they live as much as you or I, and maybe even more so.

Similarly, Friedrich’s Romantic paintings (which I have discussed before, and I will undoubtedly discuss again) depict lone figures dwarfed by vast, sublime environments such as cliffs, forests, ruins, tempestuous seas, places where nature reflects inner states of awe, melancholy, or reverence. His work, like Tarkovsky’s, suggests that the external world is inseparable from the emotional and metaphysical experience of the observer.

Both artists depict the landscape not as a backdrop but as a participant in the human experience; a “being” bearing witness to grief, longing, revelation, transcendence. Another filmmaker who utilised this motif was the German madman, Werner Herzog. In Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the jungle is an overwhelming force. It’s beautiful. It’s terrifying. And, crucially, it’s indifferent. It consumes Pizzaro’s forgotten men one by one, and it does so by allowing them to consume themselves.

So, it turns out the inner and outer self are not so different after all, and the land around us helps us to better understand that metaphysical space.

Time as Emotional Sediment

Unlike the linear time we dreary modernists labour under, the time beneath us is cyclical, seasonal, embossed onto the world. A wild field grows over a ruin, a flood smooths a man-made scar, and each new layer whispers the echo of the one beneath it.

In this view of time, the past does not vanish; it composts into the present, it is the fertiliser of now. Just as tree rings encode years of drought and abundance, human landscapes contain rings of memory, concentric circles of experiences (our own droughts and abundances) laid down over time.

Therefore, we may view storytelling as excavation, the pen a JCB.

If landscapes bury time, then stories are a form of unearthing. Literature digs. Writers use language to lift the layers, to show what has been hidden in plain sight. For instance, a pot, a silly little pot, can capture the essence of a place where love once flourished, describing not just how the lovers felt, but what they saw, what they felt, the smells, the sounds – how senses enhanced their experience of love.

This is not always a happy experience, of course. But it is typically redemptive. Sometimes what is uncovered is pain, trauma, or loss. But the act of excavation gives shape to what would otherwise remain formless. In this sense, literature does what landscapes do: it holds time, preserves emotion, and allows us to walk with straighter backs and fuller hearts.

The Land Remembers, For it Must

Time is not gone; it is buried: in art, in our own experience, as well as in nature itself. But nature also holds that which we cannot. It remembers for us, often against our will. The field where a great battle happened, the tree planted after someone died, the path worn by habit or love - these are all places where time has sunk beneath the surface.

The land does not forget. It carries time like the pack mule carries its cargo – unrelenting, uncomplaining. In the end, we are not walking on neutral ground; we are walking over the layers of our own past, and the past of others. We are walking where time is buried, its great gravesite. And one day we will be buried with it, beneath it.

So, tread softly, and carry a big pen.

Photo by: Andrey Grushnikov