ART, NATURE, AND MEMORY IN ETEL ADNAN’S JOURNEY TO MOUNT TAMALPAIS

In her Journey to Mount Tamalpais: An Essay (1986), the Arab American painter and poet Etel Adnan (1925-2021) contemplates on the relationship between art, nature, and memory by focusing on the act of perception. Adnan’s text tells of her inner journey towards peace in contrast to her other work that responds to the Lebanese civil war, from which she had to flee in the 1970s. The centrality of perception reveals an intertwining relationship between art, nature and memory. In this relationship, the subject is intertwined with the object, self with the other, the perceiver with the perceived, which traditional Western thought separates as binaries. One of the prominent figures in phenomenological approach, Maurice Merleau-Ponty has focused on perception that is compatible with Adnan’s text. His concepts of “reversibility,” “chiasm,” “dehiscence,” and “flesh” are useful tools to analyze the essay both in its conceptual and cultural dimensions. As a work which incorporates verbal and visual treatments of the mountain, in which Adnan excavates the hidden histories and memories, retaining their differences, Journey to Mount Tamalpais proves to be a manifestation of “the intertwining—the chiasm” as Merleau-Ponty attempts to map. In relation to perception, memory emerges as a preeminent concept due to Adnan’s engagements with cultures and linguistic worlds such as Arab, French and American, and her witness of colonial wars. This article proposes a reading that captures the conceptual and cultural dimensions of the text, which ultimately leads to a new visibility of the mountain. The ultimate manifestation of Mount Tamalpais is the image of a wise and wounded old woman. When the process of perception that produces this image is analyzed from Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, Journey to Mount Tamalpais reveals a way of thinking about the chiasm of art, nature and memory in which the boundaries between subject and object, perceiver and perceived, and background and foreground collapse.