And here we come to an item that ties it all together here. Colin Bennett brings to our attention the ancient magical connections between Mind and Landscape which is in opposition to the sterile materialist view of reality. The only question, of course, is whose mind? Bennett writes:
Forster’s Marabar caves, Hamlet’s castle at Elsinore, and Thomas Hardy’s Egdon Heath are all aspects of crypto-geographic personalities; they live and breathe as huge animated forms and penetrate human awareness the way ivy weaves through an old house. These suprahuman forms are quite conscious, aware, and active. In West Virginia, Keel found the local ‘system-animal’ had its own agenda; it ‘spoke’ through simulacra and weather, atmosphere and geology, coincidence and dream.