Marc Davis

As late nineteenth-century French astronomer Camille Flammarion might have imagined, early nineteenth-century British Romantic landscape painter J. M. W. Turner will be reincarnated on Mars in the mid twenty-first century and paint this scene of a Martian dust storm over Utopia Planitia.

Sometimes at night, when I look out at the Martian landscape, its desolate, brooding, dark emptiness feels like I'm inside a Caspar David Friedrich painting--not any painting he ever made, but rather one he would have made had he been here on Mars with me. The 19th century Romantic sensibility, the experience of the sublime in nature, applies perhaps even more to Mars than it did to Earth. The austere, overwhelming alienness of the landscape is a metaphor for our relationship to that part of ourselves which is vaster than we can comprehend, which is unknowable but constitutive of our identity, the great uncharted continent of the unconscious. The Martian landscape is a painting of the human unconscious, a mirror we hold up to that alien part of ourselves, and in that mirror, darkly, is revealed the shape of our destiny.