“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

anything I'm exploring something that's already explored before by Frost, in his early
poems, in that tendency we have to read in to nature. You know, that lovely poem of
Frost's where he has the God's pan appearing somewhere in the New England landscape,
and then he says, at the end of the poem, the question is asked, 'play, play', what should he
play? What should he play in this new landscape? And there's this idea that we impose on
to, we find the landscape and impose upon it religious, mythical, sentimental, romantic -
you know longings that we have, and I'm interested in that process.
OV: projecting on to -
JB: projecting on to it, and the finding what you came to find as opposed to what's there.
Which is what often we do. It's not unforgivable, it's a human tendency. Marx said the
forest gives back what you cry or shout in to it. You can leave the German forests alone!
But you know, he's pointing out that we tend to go into the natural world and we find out
what we want, and it's usually a consolation for what we don't find in our day to day life.
But I think in German culture, the German history of looking at the natural world, that's
not been that way, in the same way. I think it's more, I think there's something more
integrated about it. And I think in particular I'm interested in following, in reading
Goethe, in reading nature and about science and what we think science is.
OV: do you feel - related to that -, this is held in the ways you've looked at that
encounter with myth and landscape has often drawn on art itself, like Brueghel? Do
you see that as a bridging of that gap maybe between a scientific way of understanding
and observing the world, and art as this kind of other way of encountering a landscape?
JB: yeah, well, obviously painting is one way of observing the world and making field
notes is another way of observing the world. Writing a poem might sometimes be another
way. But, I guess the reason I've used painting imagery so much in my work is I really
would have liked to be a painter myself. There's something I wanted to do when I was a
teenager. And I ended up finding I didn't have any aptitude for drawing or anything. And
I started taking pictures and photographs and thinking, well, if I can't draw at least I can
take pictures, and somehow make images that way. But you know there's something
lacking in me in terms of making an image myself
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