Documenting our Landscape

How do I describe what I saw with mere words? Language, especially spoken language, is as fleeting as the moment in which it exists. Say something and that something is always already departed, gone from the present, existing only as a trace embedded in one’s memory. Write what I might say and, so long as the writing, the text, exists I lend permanence to the words I may have spoken. Written text takes on a force of permanence, of an existence of its own without regard for the authorship. But language, spoken or written relies on the metaphor to convey descriptive connections to the signifides it attempts to describe. Derrida questions the connection of language to signifides claiming that the relationship is inadequate at best. To deconstruct as a method of making meaning one must go beyond what is there to re-present that which is hidden, located at the margins, disconnected from power through erasure and so on. In the end there is no guarantee that language alone can adequately describe the visual except by listing details and, even then, there is no real guarantee that one will touch everything.