Landscape, absence and the geographies of love John Wylie Working out from an encounter with a series of memorial benches at Mullion Cove, Cornwall, this paper develops an account of landscape in terms of absence and the non-coincidence of self and world. Arguing that recent work on the topics of landscape, embodiment, perception and material culture has tended to stress presence in various ways, I seek to explore instead here motifs of absence, distance, loss and haunting. The paper further attempts to combine descriptive and experiential accounts of the memorial benches and the views they open with conceptual arguments regarding the limits of certain phenomenological understandings of self and landscape. In particular, Derrida’s critical reading of Merleau-Ponty is outlined and explored. The final substantive section of the paper then takes a further cue from the memorial benches to discuss what it terms the geographies of love. The argument here is that such geographies constitute a fracture forbidding any phenomenological fusion of self and world, entailing instead a simultaneous opening-onto and distancing-from. It is within the tension of this openness and distance, perhaps, that landscape, absence and love are entangled. key words landscape Mullion Cove Derrida phenomenology vision love School of Geography, Archaeology and Earth Resources, University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon EX4 4RJ email: J.W.Wylie@exeter.ac.uk revised manuscript received 17 March 2009 … to be an ambulant point of view is a familiar mys- tery, but the existence of infinities of untenanted points of view is a destabilising thought. (Robinson 2006, 68) The landscape begins with a notion, however vague and confused, of distancing and of a loss of sight. (Nancy 2005, 53) The memorial benches at Mullion Cove (on the Lizard Peninsula, South-West England) The light ahead was so compelling that we were unstrapping our seatbelts, reaching for the doorhandles – we were halfway out of the car before it even came to a stop, turned into a small gravel recess there by the cliff-edge. Sometimes you’ll turn a corner and a view will surprise you, but we ran right up to this one, and then stood, together and apart; different angles on the same encircling scene. We were standing high above Mullion Cove in the clear early morning, looking down into the cove, southward along the coastal cliffs and canyons, and far out to sea. We’d driven for some miles through nondescript farmland to arrive, suddenly, at this vivid, vertiginous scene. And now before us the mass of the sea in particular was a previously unseen and unthinkable electric blue, in response to which all the other colours of the spectrum – and all of the other visible blues, too – shone bright and true. Parts of this could at least be described: pools of bottle-green near the rocky coast; further out, seams of indigo stretching across the water’s surface. And out on the horizon blue sea and blue sky were pasted up absolutely proximate, abso- lutely distinct. The overall impression of the scene, though, transcended all particulars. The outlines and shad- owed depths of the cliffs seemed archetypal: in all the transience of things, somehow this moment revealed the true and original textures of the Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 34 275–289 2009 ISSN 0020-2754 Ó 2009 The Author. Journal compilation Ó Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009