Edensor, Tim (2010). Arora Landscapes: Affective Atmospheres of Light and Dark. In
Lund, K.A. & K. Benediktsson (eds). Conversations with Landscape. Farnham: Ashgate
(227-240). (Chap 15)
AURORA LANDSCAPES: THE AFFECTS OF LIGHT AND DARK
INTRODUCTION
This chapter focuses upon tourism in Iceland to see the Aurora Borealis in order to
investigate the experience of landscape in the light of recent theories. The aurora, or
Northern Lights, are a diverse array of shards, veils, ribbons, curtains, cascades,
flashes, beams and numerous other effusions that constitute an ever-shifting panoply
of light in the Northern skies of the world. A widespread desire to witness them has
given rise to an expanding tourist sector where visitors travel to an increasing number
of destinations within or near to the Arctic Circle. Iceland is one of the most popular
destinations, where aurora tourists either reside in urban centres and venture into rural
settings at night on organised trips or stay in rural settings where the lights may be
witnessed in situ. Sightings, however, cannot be guaranteed even if the ideal wintry
conditions of clear skies prevail. The aurora have become an integral part of Iceland’s
tourist branding and they intersect with broader notions about the experience of its
landscape, as we will see.
In tourism and more extensively, depictions of the aurora borealis revolve around
rather prosaic scientific explanations. The lights are caused by great streams of
electrically charged particles blown from the sun by the solar wind at enormous speed
that are attracted to the earth's magnetic poles. These potentially devastating electrons
are shielded from the earth by its magnetic field but glow when they collide with the
gases in the ionosphere (that part of the earth's atmosphere that roughly extends from
60 to 600 kilometres above the surface). The dancing lights are caused by the
magnetic field buckling as it is hit by high-velocity gusts of these particles.
However, technical depictions of the Aurora are usually regarded as insufficient by
those who experience them, and this is acknowledged by the Iceland on the Web
website: ‘by all means don't let any scientific explanation spoil your appreciation of
the beauty of the Northern Lights. They are a truly impressive spectacle, whatever
their cause’. Savage similarly remarks that ‘(T)he aurora is not just a puzzle to solve;
it is a mystery to experience’ (2001: 129). Indeed, the magical qualities of the aurora
typically shape appeals to those who might be tempted to come to the North to
witness them:
Mystery and wonder shroud the northern lights, otherwise known as the aurora
borealis. Mesmerizing, stunning, other-worldly are just a few words used to
describe the experience of watching this spectacular phenomenon. When
conditions are favourable this fantastical display lights up the Arctic and subArctic
regions, leaving all who catch a glimpse of this magical wonder
(Discover the World website)
In what follows, I explore the ways in which representations of sites and
recommended strategies in tourist literature highlight particular approaches to the
experience of landscape. After this, I investigate how a consideration of the much
neglected relationship of light to landscape, and specifically the aurora, might add to
broader understanding. This is followed by an examination of the more-than-visual,
sensual, embodied apprehension of the aurora, before exploring how vitalist notions
of landscape can be enhanced by considering the Lights. Next, I consider how these
experiences might inform an appreciation of the relationship between landscape and
affect, before concluding with a discussion of the excessive qualities of landscape and
the limits of representation as exemplified by responses to the aurora.
TOURIST DOXA AND SENSUAL EXPERIENCE
Entry into any form of space or landscape is surrounded by a host of conventions
about what that realm is for, what modes of comportment, communication and other
forms of bodily practice are appropriate. For instance, it is frequently imagined that to
walk in rural settings is to cast off the cloak of self-consciousness and expressive
identity that may accompany urban pedestrianism (Edensor, 2000). These conventions
of practice and performance also resound throughout tourism (Edensor, 2001; 2007),
which might be conceived as a habitual way of being in the world, accompanied by a
common-sense understanding that it is a cultural right and a normative leisure practice
to go to other places in order to witness different cultures, historical sights, food,
natural histories and landscapes. This doxa, with its focus on belonging (to the world)
and becoming, with a high value placed on forms of self-development, is replete with
unreflexive, practical, embedded codes of performance, and when collectively enacted,
particular place ballets are produced whereby regular routes and stages of experiencing
place are consolidated in tourist landscapes (Edensor, 1998). The specific practice of
sightseeing is a tourist endeavour informed by doxic understandings about what kinds
of social and somatic practices should be undertaken in the realm of ‘nature’ in order
to consume landscape (Adler, 1989). In western tourism, Urry argues that such
confrontations are conditioned by the imperative to enact a solitary, romantic gaze
(1990), where the landscape is appraised according to particular aesthetic criteria, sites
and scenes are photographed, noise minimised, and a sense of wonder and
appreciation is communicated to fellow tourists.
However, the expansion of tourism into ever more spaces and practices has produced
numerous ways of experiencing the landscape alongside this distancing visual
apprehension. For instance, the rise in adventure sports tourism means that the
landscape in destinations such as New Zealand is appraised and experienced as a
realm for physically intense escapades, of visceral plunges, immersive engagement
and tactile enervation in which the visual senses are relegated to a subsidiary role.
More broadly, we might question this over-emphasis on visual consumption by
acknowledging the host of other sensations that are produced when tourists interact
with space and landscape (Edensor, 2006). The graininess of sand and the swelter of
sunbathing, the swash of the waves and sound of the seagulls foreground non-visual
sensations in beach tourism. Accordingly, it is crucial to acknowledge the different
forms of landscape that proliferate throughout an expanding tourism, recognise the
conventions through which they are pleasurably experienced, and take stock of the
affordances within which tourists are enmeshed and that inculcate ways of being and
sensing. For tourists, like other people, reproduce space through the reiteration of
conventional performance but they also sense with the landscape. Emphatically then,
despite the unreflexive consistencies of tourist doxa, practical embodied conventions
do not necessarily restrict phenomenological, sensual, social and imaginative
experience, for they are always apt to be confounded by the excessive or ineffable
qualities of landscape as I will later discuss. In order to explore these affordances in
more depth, I now explore the unregarded energies of light and dark in conceptions of
landscape.
LANDSCAPE AND LIGHT
Light is an integral part of space yet the very word landscape seems to exclude the
celestial, focusing upon that which is of the earth, the realm that extends away before
us, the landforms, contours and configurations, geomorphologies, natural histories,
cultural inscriptions and distinctive features of particular kinds of terra firma. This
absence becomes even more glaringly evident when we investigate notions of the
landscape at night for as Jakle notes, ‘landscape has been conceptualised primarily in
terms of daytime use’ (2001: vii). Despite the fact that most forms of familiar space
are illuminated for much of the time, depending upon season, theories invariably
focus upon that which is perceived during daylight, although the landscape at night,
with its illuminated and dark areas, possesses enormously different qualities and is
apprehended in very different ways to the daylit landscape. The lighting of modern
cities has transformed nocturnal urban experience, the distribution of artificial
illumination producing cityscapes of regulation, hierarchical selectiveness,
consumption, fantasy and imagination (McQuire, 2005; Edensor and Millington,
2011), yet thus far, academic writing has focused upon the cityscape by day.
Similarly, the luminescent qualities of the non-urban landscape have been wholly
neglected although a brief consideration of landscape painting reveals that artists have
expended much effort trying to ‘capture’ the effects of the light: for they ‘know that to
paint… a “landscape” is to paint both earth and sky, and that earth and sky blend in
the perception of a world in continuous formation’ (Ingold, 2005: 104)
Nevertheless, the relationship of the sun, moon and stars and more evanescent
illuminations caused by lightning, rainbows, will o’ the wisp, fireflies and a range of
atmospheric phenomena are rarely discussed in conceptions of landscape. This is
despite the ways in which sunsets and sunrises bathe landscapes in glowing hues,
transforming the perception and feel of space, as exemplified in popular depictions of
landscape in relation to the effects of the sun, where people talk of a pitiless glare, a
rosy glow, or thin shafts of winter sunlight. Moreover, regions and nations acquire
associations related to the qualities of the light with which they are suffused. Toxic
but spectacular sunsets differentiate Los Angeles from the impassive sun beating
down on the dunes of the Sahara or the ever changing panoply of cloud and sun in
North-West Scotland’s skies.
In conceiving of the intrinsic entanglement of landscape and light we can draw a
parallel with Tim Ingold’s discussion of forms of weather, elements which equally
lack the solidity associated with illumination. Like light, wind, clouds and fog have
frequently been ontologically conceived as the immaterial opposite of the concrete
earthliness of the land, around and above which they swirl and float. Ingold draws
attention to Gibson’s notion that the features of the earth – as opposed to more
evanescent qualities of the sky – are akin to 'furniture', as if the earth is always already
equipped, like a stage set, with its fixtures and fittings. However, he argues, this
congealed, static understanding of earthly fixity misses entirely the state of flux in
which the world is always enmeshed, the ‘dynamic processes of world-formation in
which both perceivers and the phenomena they perceive are necessarily immersed’
(Ingold, 2007: s29). A refutation of the distinction between material and immaterial
qualities foregrounds instead a conception of the landscape as a fluid and becoming
entity, an indivisible field. Stars, cloud and sunsets, are not objects but
rather an incoherent, vaporous tumescence that swells and is carried along in
the currents of the medium. To observe the clouds is not to view the furniture
of the sky but to catch a fleeting glimpse of a sky-in-formation, never the same
from one moment to the next (ibid: s28).
Similarly, the land is similarly continuously in formation, despite the illusion of
stability. Moreover, the whole landscape is a heterogeneous medium of sensual,
affective and emotional experience in which the light, the weather and the ground
underfoot are not merely external objects available for inspection and perception, for
the perceiver is inextricably entangled with that which is perceived:
(T)o inhabit the open world, then, is to be immersed in the fluxes of the
medium: in sunshine, rain, and wind. This immersion, in turn, underwrites our
capacities respectively – to see, hear, and touch. (ibid: s30)
These media thus condition the limits and possibilities of what can be apprehended
and in this realm, light is a medium of perception productive of ‘the experience of
inhabiting the world of the visible, and its qualities – of brilliance and shade, tint and
colour, and saturation (Ingold, 2005: 101). Light is thus ‘immanent in the life and
consciousness of the perceiver as it unfolds within the field of relations established by
way of his or her presence within a certain environment’ (ibid: 99). Crucially, the land
is not ‘an interface’ separating earth and sky but is a ‘vaguely defined zone of
admixture and intermingling' (Ingold, 2007: s33). Similar to weather, the light
continuously enfolds and is enfolded into the world to produce the ever-shifting
qualities of landscape and provide the means through which it is perceived:
However, having discussed light, and insisted that it is an integral part of the
landscape and not separate from it, we also need to explore its absence, for to see in
and with the dark is to see otherwise, to apprehend space as an entity that lacks the
complex configurations sensed by day, to not see certain features of the landscape at
all, but to see others vividly.
The expansion of electric lighting across most spaces in the West has resulted in what
is increasingly regarded as an over-illuminated world, where darkness is hard to find.
For instance, the growing Campaign for Dark Skies points to an aesthetic loss as well
as the environmental, social, health and economic problems produced by poor and
excessive electric illumination. In the countries of Northern Europe, with their very
short periods of wintry daylight and contrasting summers filled with 24 hours of
daylight, light, or its lack, is central to seasonal experience. In winter, across scantily
populated tracts of land there is the promise of a kind of darkness that lies beyond the
reddish glow of human settlement. This Northern darkness attracts those who wish to
move away from over-illuminated landscapes, and to experience a denser darkness
against which the Northern Lights may be witnessed. Indeed, as is emphasised in
promotional literature and by those who watch the Lights, the ideal conditions for
viewing are when the land descends into a black darkness away from the glare of
urban centres.
A striking feature of the aurora is the extent to which it dominates space, especially
when there is little light cast by the moon. Where this is the case, the land is
contrastingly a dark gathering of matter, with few features perceptible save for the
marked horizon that seems to enclose this murky mass. The constant play of light
above this shadowy earth rarely suffuses the land with a warm glow as with the sun
but seems to constitute a separate realm that confirms the existence of two opposite
realms: light and dark. The interpenetration of light and earth is minimal and the
apparently quiescent, unilluminated land seems dormant in contrast to the dynamic,
shifting panoply in the heavens. It is with this surrounding darkness in mind that we
can interrogate Wylie’s citation of Merleau-Ponty’s point that the seeing subject is
always also intertwined with a consciousness that one can be seen as part of the
‘landscape of visible things’ (Wylie, 2007: 152), as an observable as well as observing
subject. This double consciousness, further emphasising the ways in which people are
part of, and not apart from, the landscape is less evident for all that may be visually
perceived are perhaps a few vague outlines of the self and others. However, the
presence of others is not primarily signalled by a visual evidence but by the coos and
murmurs which are uttered as the aurora is beheld, the breathing and sighs, and a
sense of bodily warmth and tactile presence. Here, underlining the non-visual
apprehensions of landscape, we sense the presence and energies of fellow humans and
generate noises and tactilities of our own through which others sense us. I will return
to the effects of these inter-human sensations shortly but firstly focus further upon the
impacts of the lights on spectating bodies.
THE STILL SENSING OF THE LANDSCAPES OF THE AURORA
As Ingold insists:
our experience of the weather, when out of doors, is invariably multisensory. It
is just as much auditory, haptic and olfactory as it is visual; indeed in most
practical circumstances these sensory modalities cooperate so closely that it is
impossible to disentangle their respective contributions (2005: 97)
Of course, the tourist conventions of consuming the aurora persist in that it is
primarily consumed visually, the eyes fixated on the swirling lights, and this usually
occurs as a solitary practice in the presence of other fellow tourists involving little
talk, although with non-linguistic verbal communication as I have mentioned. Yet
while the visual consumption of the aurora predominates, non-visual apprehension of
the lights and the broader landscape of which they are part emerges. For in addition to
the non-visual sensations produced by other people, the landscape is surrounded by
the effects of weather, the particular temperature, the wind, the sounds of rivers and
streams, the levels of moisture in the atmosphere, all of which contribute to a wider
sensual apprehension, though largely unreflexive.
Another sensual dimension is produced through the ground upon which one stands.
While consuming the cascades of light in the skies, stance is dependent on the textures
underfoot but primarily the feet remain rooted: ‘For the aurora watcher, the
experience is mesmerising’ (Akasofu, 2009: 7). Although the experience of the aurora
involves movement from a light to dark place via mechanised transport, once the
sights are beheld outside the standing stillness of the observer contrasts with the
whirling illuminations overhead. Falck-Yattr quotes Norwegian polar explorer
Fridtjof Nansen: ‘I went on deck this evening in a rather gloomy frame of mind but
was nailed to the spot the moment I got outside (and saw the aurora)’ (1999: 10). This
motionlessness testifies to the immersion of bodies in a landscape in which they are
stilled, spellbound by the flows of light. The eye moves, the pulse races. This is a
stillness that is not epitomised by fatigue or lethargy (Bissell, 2009) but by being
transfixed by another (heavenly) body. In contradistinction to the often hyperbolic
depictions of travel and tourism as synonymous with mobility and flow, animation
and flux, we might consider this stillness to be a touristic ‘attunement’ (Bissell and
Fuller, 2009) through which the body’s ability to sense landscape is enhanced. Peter
Adey (2009) contends that the adoption of stillness might be conceived as a sensibility
and a technique through which bodies become ‘finely attuned to their exteriors…
apprehending and anticipating spaces and events in ways that sees the body enveloped
within the movement of the environment around it’ to produce ‘a heightened and
contemplative sense of the moment’. In response to the capacities that inhere in this
space of light and dark, a lack of self-consciousness evolves through absorption in the
scene, sense-making recedes and onlookers become detached from ordinary rhythms,
compulsions and anticipations, as the aurora become a moment in the flow of events.
Yet connected to the huge dark land that stretches beyond the immediate spot, there is
a further sense of the mass of the earth to which we are tethered by gravity. And these
feelings of stillness, of connection to earth and landscape, combined with an
awareness of the sounds and touch of other humans, and the shared absorption
through which the tour party collectively beholds the aurora, can heighten a
particularly human shared sense of communitas (Cocker, 2009).
Finally, there are numerous accounts, mostly dismissed by scientific research, that the
Northern Lights also emit a sound as well as illumination. Whether this sense is
identifiable seems dubious although some experienced observers swear that the noise
is clear and audible. However, this may be an example of synaesthesia whereby the
overwhelming visual impact of the lights, the pulsing and flowing, provokes deceptive
sensations of noise, highlighting just how the landscape is experienced in a multisensory
manner (see Savage, 2001). Other forms of agency are also attributed to the
lights, notably that they carry a physical potential to threaten, that they might catch
you and enfold you into the sky, a sensation particularly remembered by those who
experienced the aurora as children. Why, Akasofu writes, ‘does it seem at times that
the aurora is reaching down?’ (2009: 8). This is perhaps unsurprising given the force
of the uninterrupted energy emitted when the lights are in full flow, as well as their
otherworldiness, and these sensations are both informed by and inform the production
of myths discussed shortly. It is to the extraordinary and vital energies of the aurora
that I now turn in the light of recent vitalist conceptions of landscape.
VITALIST LANDSCAPES
In 2003, in his history of the ways in which landscape has been conceptualised within
geography, from the Sauerian interpretations of cultural landscapes, to humanist
readings of subjective meanings projected onto landscape, to the understanding of
landscape as a power-laden realm that is textually read and a material expression of
dominant, but precarious ideological meanings, Tim Cresswell sceptically critiques
the notion that landscape retains utility as a concept. Since it is presented as a ‘text
already written’ (ibid: 270), he contends that landscape ‘does not have much space for
temporality, for movement and flux, and mundane practice’ and lacks an appreciated
that space is processual (ibid: 269). Yet though he rightly laments the ways in which
landscape is conceived as being visually apprehended, as ‘an image… as fixed form
of ‘framing’ (ibid: 275), he subsequently suggests that it might be retrievable through
being conceived through a more fluid understanding that also foregrounds how it is
subject to multi-sensual apprehension. In the light of this critique, it is notable that
landscape has indeed recently been rescued from such immobile, visual framings,
with the emergence of vitalist ideas that emphasise the processual, immanent and
emergent (Wylie, 2007). In these conceptions, landscape is alive with energies,
eternally fluid, its rocks, earth, vegetation and climate continually undergoing change
as elements from near and far, and from different times, are entangled and folded
together in a continual making. This re-vitalisation of landscape thus moves away
from sedentarist, static, visually apprehended notions of landscape that suggest being
and permanence.
Strikingly, such vitalist conceptions resound in the representation of Iceland’s
landscape, a brand identified by an appeal to non-human energies that secures a
specialist niche in the global tourist supermarket. Accordingly, the lure of the
Northern Lights chimes with the special emphasis placed upon the wild landscapes of
Iceland, as epitomised by the following claim by the Iceland Tourist Board: ‘the
youthful exuberance of the land boldly greets travellers. The landscape is alive with
the restless play of nature's forces’. Within this vitalist conception, the aurora further
supplement the image of Iceland, the ‘land of fire and ice’, as a site for a more
visceral engagement with landscape. With its glaciers, geysers, volcanic eruptions,
rocky peaks and geothermal pools available for physical encounter or immersion, this
is a wildscape that can be traversed by means of canoe and raft, crampons and icepicks,
swimming costume and backpack, a great outdoors in which bodily immersion
and exertion are required. This young landscape, seething with geothermal, volcanic
and climatic energies at an earthly level, is complemented by the unearthly energies
which churn above the earth.
As I have emphasised, as we apprehend landscape we are immersed in the currents
and energies of a world-in-formation. Plunged into light, weather and earthliness,
bodies are situated in the continuous and generative becoming of the world, and any
sense of a discrete embodied condition separate from this realm is deceptive.
However, illusory sedentarist and reified apprehensions of landscape are produced
through the persistence of dense cultural histories of representation and practical
conventions about the proper disposition to adopt towards particular kinds of space.
Moreover, besides these social and cultural conventions about how to read and
practice landscape, the ontological conditions of human existence also curtail the
ability to perceive the vital seething of certain (elements of) landscapes. Many
agencies are invisible or overlooked – consider the constant recreation of the soil and
the movements of bacteria and fungal spores - and numerous processes of change are
too slow for human perception. They can only be apprehended over longer periods
than that of the short visit or even the human life span. Because the appearance of
nature seems to be constituted by particular discrete agencies - the cascading of rivers,
the bending of trees in the wind and the flights of birds – the connections through
which all elements within the landscape are reproduced and transformed is
imperceptible. Yet the seething animal, plant, geological, chemical and climatic
energies that are in constant occurrence often only become apparent when, for
instance, time-lapse photography reveals the dynamic (but slower) processes through
which a flower blooms and fades, corpses decay and fungus grows. Such human
limitations thus foster representations of landscape as a passive realm available to the
gaze, an inert surface upon which human action takes place.
Ben Anderson (2009: 78) points to how certain features such as clouds, winds and
rainbows are ‘associated with the uncertain, disordered, shifting and contingent – that
which never quite achieves the stability of form’. The same is apparent in the everchanging
configurations of waves and curtains of the Northern Lights. These
profoundly visible phenomena echo the less evident energies that suffuse all elements
of landscapes. With the aurora therefore, the contrasting darkness and the relative
seeming quiescence of the land produce the illusion that the heavens are alive whilst
the earth lies dormant. The earthly topologies embedded in the relationalities, flows
and networks through which the world is continually (re)produced seem absent. While
the aurora emerge out of the relationality between sun, atmosphere and the earth’s
gravitational pull, these forces all seem far removed from more grounded connections
that make space, place and landscape. In other words, it is difficult to conceive of the
aurora as being enfolded within earthly networks. This sense of disconnection
contributes to the affective power of the aurora, which I now discuss.
THE FANTASTIC AND AFFECTIVE QUALITIES OF AURORA
LANDSCAPES
In the promotional literature that advertises the charms of the aurora to tourists, a
series of phrases and words recur: the aurora is magical’, ‘spectacular’ and ‘mystical’.
It is striking that such accounts have drawn upon fantastic, supernatural and mythic
explanations and these continue to resound through contemporary narratives. The
oneiric qualities of the Lights are characterised by mystical tales of how they
ethereally reflect the ghosts of virgins or the murdered, constitute human spirits
playing with walrus skulls, are the dancing spirits of the deceased, the energies
released by celestial and supernatural wars (see Akasofu, 2009; Falck-Ytter, 1999;
Savage, 2001)
These myths contribute to stories of the aurora that are related and consumed prior to
a period under their spell. Yet though such ideas feed into the immersive experience
of the aurora landscape, they tend to be rather swamped by an immanent affective
field in which only shreds of representation may interweave with other, stronger
intensities and feelings about landscape. Dominant here is ‘the emergent and fluid
dimension of how place is sensed and experienced’ (Adey, 2007: 5). The notion of
affect is useful here because it highlights the transpersonal relations between elements
within particular contexts and provides a broader, more-than-human concept of the
social. In decentring the individual from analysis, it prompts us to think about how
different configurations of objects, technologies, energies, non-human life forms,
spaces, forms of knowledge and information combine to form ‘affective fields’ that
are distributed across particular geographical settings (Conradson and Latham, 2007).
These affective fields can also be depicted as ‘temporary configurations of energy and
feeling’ (ibid). They are characterised by affective atmospheres, which McCormack
describes as being ‘something distributed yet palpable, a quality of environmental
immersion that registers in and through sensing bodies whilst also remaining diffuse,
in the air, ethereal’ (2008: 413). Such atmospheres, as Böhme suggests, ‘seem to fill
the space with a certain tone of feeling like a haze’ (1993: 114). Affect is thus
generated by immersion in an atmospheric environment that folds subject and space
together, occurring ‘before and alongside the formation of subjectivity, across human
and non-human materialities, and in-between subject/object distinctions’ (Anderson,
2009: 78). Such notions summon up the effects of the weather and the qualities of
light (and dark) as they pervade space and the bodies that perceive them. Clearly, light
and weather can be powerful contributory elements within these affective
atmospheres. Lam (1977) asserts that electric lighting possess unique power to
intentionally and unintentionally produce mood affecting qualities, from feelings of
safety to urban liveliness, but the affective power of sun, stars, moon and aurora
surely transcends these human-produced illuminations.
In the confrontation with the Northern Lights, the affective realm is constituted out of
the elements already identified, above all, the swirling aurora, but also the pervasive
dark, the black mass of the land, the temperature, the quiet, and the sounds and
gestures of human bodies. This affective landscape provides an environment of
energies and capacities, a context within which a body feels and acts. As Brennan
notes, the transmission of affect alters the biochemistry of the subject so that the
‘“atmosphere” or environment literally gets into the individual’ (2004: 1). These
sensual and biological responses to the landscape are thus further productive of the
affective atmosphere. The affects generated by the coalescence of aurora, dark,
temperature, silence and closeness to others thus penetrate the body, enfolding it into
the field.
As I have described, the disposition of most visitors is to assemble and watch the
heavenly dancers in stillness, and largely in silence apart from the odd expression or
sigh. Such conventional tourist procedures and habits and the immersion in an
affective atmosphere generate an attunement to space. The expression of such an
engagement further promotes a kind of affective contagion. The gestures of bodies,
their postures, and especially their stillness, set the tone for the experience and
practice of the landscape, acting upon other bodies to maintain the collective
disposition. As Sarah Ahmed insists, affects and emotions ‘are also about
attachments, about what connects us to this or that’ (2004: 27) and to other people.
They also prevent a sense of detachment from others. Bound together with the
landscape, the affective sense of communitas mentioned above is engendered through
a connectivity to the landscape and to others under the spell of the aurora
THE INEFFABLE, SUBLIME LANDSCAPES OF AURORA
I have highlighted the perceived disconnection between the numerous scientific
explanations of the Northern Lights, and the experience of them and the tendency to
seek recourse in mythological accounts. The aurora is thus an excellent example of
the ways in which the experience of the excessive qualities of landscape confounds
attempts to represent it. Encountering the Northern Lights dramatises the ineptitude of
words to capture the apprehension of their affective and sensual qualities, although
mythical interpretations symbolise their powerful impact upon observers.
One mystery contributing to their ineffability concerns the perceived location of the
aurora. Are they part of the world or otherworldly? And how far are they from the
earth? The stars are regarded as being unfathomably remote from the earth and part of
a borderless immensity, and our own star, the sun, is understood to be a great distance
from the earth, though it gives it life. The moon, although now reachable, is conceived
as being outside the orbit of the earth, although phenomena of illumination that are
enclosed within the earth’s atmosphere, such as rainbows and clouds, are apprehended
as much closer at hand. The perception of the distance of the aurora is informed by
their seemingly minimal impact on the earth, unlike the weather with which the earth
is inextricably  entangled. They neither heat the earth nor bestow much light on it like
the sun, but seem disconnected from all else, impassively aloof from earthly
immediacies. The impression is that the aurora belongs to a space to which we do not
belong, and it thus has no relationship to the endless production of the landscape.
Similarly, it belongs to a temporality that transcends human history and the formation
of the landscape, blurring notions of past, present and future.
This impression of the aurora seems to disavow the conception of the landscape is a
congeries of relationalities, endlessly reproduced through a vitalist, dynamic
materiality, as discussed above. The notion of landscape as constituted out of
manifold, earthly connections that are intertwined in continuous and dynamic
production can acknowledge the connective tissue that connects sun and earth, the sun
being a part of the landscape whose every feature has depended and continues to
depend upon it. The gaze of the observer, which has a propensity to follow the
contours of land, the windings routes or distinctive features of the landscape, might
look upwards and consider how the landscape is not bounded by the earth but is partly
produced by the connective flows between solar system and earth. With the aurora,
such connection seems obscure, cannot be perceived or understood..
In a different vein, the consumer of landscape frequently imagines the histories and
lives of those who have forged the land and continue to dwell within it. Apprehension
is intimately related to the attempts of humans to identify evidence of the social and
cultural processes that have produced a lived landscape. However, the emergent
landscapes of Iceland lack such signs of human agency. Yet despite this, the observer
may empathise with other aspects, for eye might try to recoup what it might be like to
feel the texture of rocky land underneath, the visceral force of the raging torrent or the
splash of icy water. But the evanescent spectacle of the aurora allow for no such
apprehension, since there are no recognisable forms of matter into which the body
might imaginatively insert itself. Unlike weather, the aurora suggest no wind, heat or
cold, wetness or dryness. Its ever-changing configurations are the embodiment only
of distant light, lacking any phenomenological grasp.
Nevertheless, as I have emphasised throughout this chapter, despite these sensations
of utter disconnection, the aurora are part of the landscape, which cannot be contained
or bordered by what merely lies upon the earth. And I have drawn attention to the
multisensory apprehension of aurora landscapes and the peculiar qualities of light as a
medium for perception. Despite the ways in which we can understand responses to
these landscapes of illumination as evocative and interrogative of conceptions and
perceptions of landscape, the numinous qualities of the Northern Lights are
responsible for the confounding of modes of representation. We are here in the
landscape of the ineffable. The other-worldly, uncanny effects of the aurora devoid of
tethering landmarks save the horizon of the earth, provokes a conscious struggle for
words and an awareness of their limitations. Overwhelmingly, accounts of the aurora
discuss being overawed and unable to depict the phenomena. Akasofu avers that
‘published accounts, then and now, seem unequal to the subject matter’ (2009: 7). He
cites polar explorer William Hooper from 1853 who reports ‘ language is in vain in
the attempt to describe its ever varying and gorgeous phases’ ,and he similarly points
to the limitations of pen or pencil’ (ibid: 12). Words can’t suffice and it seems as if we
have entered the realm of the sublime, which according to McHugh ‘is an experience
that exceeds our imaginative powers to comprehend in sensible form. The sublime is
an aesthetic of immensity and excess that disrupts and disturbs’ (2009: 215). Ben
Anderson emphasises these excessive qualities of affective atmospheres, and this
particularly applies to those atmospheres generated in the experience of viewing the
aurora foreground. There is an inability to contain such immersion in thought or
express it through language, since it is always lies beyond as a ‘kind of indeterminate,
affective excess’ (2009: 80). More broadly, landscape in general resists such
representation and we can see how the conventional representations and performances
of tourist doxa are transcended by the plenitude of the aurora landscape.
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