ABSTRACT
To reach this conclusion I shall proceed in three stages. I show, first, that a ground populated solely by people and objects, and a sky that is empty but for birds and clouds, can exist only within a simulacrum of the world, modelled in an interior space. The second stage of the argument is to show that in the open world, beings relate not as closed, objective forms but by virtue of their common immersion in the fluxes of the medium. The process of respiration, by which air is taken in by organisms from the medium and in turn surrendered to it, is fundamental to all life. Thus, finally, to inhabit the open is to dwell within a weatherworld in which every being is destined to combine wind, rain, sunshine and earth in the continuation of its own existence. I conclude with some remarks on how, in modern western societies, the environment has been engineered, or ‘built’, to conform to expectations of closure, but how life always, and inevitably, breaks through the bounds of the objective forms in which we have sought to contain it.
