A horizon that only offers disarray Erected beneath the advertised shelter of the White Corries in Glencoe, the floor of the tent converged into the top and the sides as each gust of wind contorted the tensile structure into violent patterns of punches and rolls. My fingers struck out from the top of my sleeping bag to grasp white knuckles around something stable, but instead slid down the slick layer of plastic on the ground. I had only this slippery ground to touch as the next squall prepared to crash over the edge of the corries above. Occasionally the wind changed into past tense and the release of tension in my body felt like I had let the gusts ricochet through my fingers. I opened the tent door a fraction and looked down into an abyss of clouds. The steep iridescent contours of the northlands were offering to bleed upwards into the sky, draining the landscape of all colour. Whipped into thin strings of grey, the clouds moved in spiralling fractals through the perpetual gloam of the midsummer sky.
	I lay down and listened to the wind racing across the landscape in a circuitous merging of future, present and past. To calm myself I imagined I was a celebrated victorian painter trying to compose a triptych that would contain the storm in a gilded frame. I decided to disrupt time by placing the past as the the last panel and the future as the first. It was possible to hear an impending gale long before it rattled the tent, even as the tent rattled with another gale in the present. I considered detailing the future panel with this unsettling apprehension of the dark approaching wind. A descending wash of charcoal black draining into grey. When the wind broke and put the tent down, it started a fearsome rage over the featureless expanse of Rannoch Moor. This final panel, of the past, would picture the terror of this galloping grey baritone over a wide smudge of verdant moor. Taking centre stage between future and past, the panel representing the present would be double the size of each encasing panel. I hoped the larger scale would highlight the constant disorientation created by the billowing force of a faceless tormentor. In the storm, the present felt like a precarious atmosphere to inhabit as the tent rolled on through the night, as if drafted into high seas on dry land. Under the guise of the fictitious painter I’m still perplexed, even now, about how to train the eye of the viewer onto a horizon line that only offers disarray. This panel remains empty, as if the tumult was so powerful it swept itself off the canvas. Maybe I didn’t really want to paint a flat triptych, maybe I needed to consider the construction of an object that was perpetually flailing and reaching back on itself. Like the majority of anglophone Scots, I know nothing of the meaning or pronunciation of gaelic names on maps that describe our landscape. As I’d walked to Glencoe I’d noticed the mountains in the distance change between hues of grey, green, blue, violet, black and brown and I wondered if their names too, would shimmer with this quality. So, later during that trip I perused colours in a pocket english/gaelic dictionary in a highland bookshop. I learned that the gaelic word ‘gorm’ can mean both blue and green, an unexpected blend of two colours in a single word. English had only taught me that blue and green had distinct edges around each other; where the separation of sky and land, land and sea are linguistically defined on a colour wheel. My perceptions were unsettled again, in the same way the wind in Glencoe changed the inevitable directions of past, present and future as it punched the tent into different dimensions. I thought back to the empty central canvas that was causing such a problem for my imagined triptych. I became preoccupied with how art-historians and critics and writers would attempt to categorise it. I wanted my viewers to experience an overwhelming combination of terror and awe; to make their stomachs drop and their mouths open. This melodramatic reaction would be described as the sublime, where the representation of nature is intended to overpower and conjure a fervent disorientation in the viewer. The imagined painting would follow in the tradition of Caspar David Friedrich’s Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818), where jagged white cliffs frame a blue bowl of sea and sky. At the very bottom of the painting, three figures lurk on a grass ledge with their backs to the viewer. Off centre the man in the middle is lying face down with his head jutting over the cliff face as his hand is held out trying, but failing to grasp onto something that has fallen into the unpictured abyss below. Following the line traced by his hand, I can feel the terrifying rush of falling over the precipice. My empty hands trying to hold on to a never ending drop where colours lose their boundaries and the blue of the sky and the sea forever rotate into the green of the land. I’d had an encounter with the sublime in Glencoe as I felt and saw the wind unleash across the open land, but that wasn’t my day-to-day reality. I was a visiting tourist, walking the West Highland Way 97 miles from the fringes of Glasgow to Fort William, trying to reconnect with a landscape I had left behind a long time ago in exchange for predictable claustrophobic city air. I could wander the National Gallery in London looking for old paintings that have wild skies, churned seas, tall mountains and long descents, but a framed painting that will neatly stay in a lattice of columns and rows on a museum wall contrasts with the unpredictability of a mountain squall. I wanted to know where the language of the sublime seeps into our daily life today, two-hundred years after Friedrich painted Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818). One thing I have noticed is that we are apparently ‘deluged by data’, receive ‘torrents of information’ and have to ‘navigate a world of constant white water’ when we inhabit the internet. These phrases, reported by the media, make it sound like we are unable to hold on to anything tangible, and unlike the paintings of cliff edges, apocalyptic storms and small boats on high seas these deluges and torrents and white waters are what inform our understandings of our realities. It’s not entertainment or a philosophical exercise in aesthetics. Recently, the words of the late Hannah Arendt have repeatedly surfaced out of the squalls of information battering our screens: “in an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” When shared Arendt’s quote understandably causes a rolling boil of terror and hysteria. It is lifted from the book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which primarily interrogates the propaganda and ideology of the Nazis. In my liberal art-world bubble, this quote is popular. It reappears every so often to illuminate the storm we are trapped in, where we struggle to locate a space for ourselves, our motivations, our meanings, our thoughts. New information constantly buffets against where we think we are and what we think we know. Hanging over this uncertainty is the foreboding that residing in this space can only end in violence, which Arendt’s quote supports. We are certain of this future because of what happened in the past, a strange rotation where the future is no longer unwritten but, is prophesied as the past. We are free falling in the space where land turns into sky, green melts into blue, sea turns into land. Laura Davidson, 2018