Glen Nevis
A Photo Essay by Chris Short
This place is to be viewed: the backdrop for film productions,
a viewing post to control the Scots, a place to see.
I can see nothing but what's to-be-seen.
Everything presents itself as a view, reduces itself to the already seen.
But look more closely, and things do just the opposite.
They refuse to be seen.
The more we look, the more the mountains disappear.
They become dark, absent and non-visible.
We're taken to their depths where light has no place.
There, only inert matter, sheer mass.
No space for life, deaths accumulated over millions of years.
The surface draws us in; depth refuses and terrifies, an unimaginable compression of nothingness.
Surface bears life, but death is always close at hand.
Close to collapse.
Between darkness below and light above, this thin layer is a battleground.
An abandoned graveyard: darkness, noumenon.
Bodies return to the mountain what they took from it.
Death and the sublime.
Glen Nevis © Chris Short, 2011. All rights remain with the author. No part of this essay can be reproduced without written permission of the author.
