gardens
by uzwi
I like gardens, but I suspect them too. Gardens pretend to be outside, but their secret is that they are not. A garden is a place you can’t have, a state that doesn’t exist. It’s a door that won’t open. The sightlines of gardens are designed not to deliver, designed to promise precisely what’s not–precisely what can’t be–on offer; their exteriority exactly resembles the reliability promised by a BT Broadband ad, or the empathic altruism featured in an ad for the Halifax Building Society. The heartbreaking quality of the best gardens is that they are a form of nostalgia for something that doesn’t exist; & the worst never achieve that but signal, from the start, Built Environment.
the m john harrison blog 
Ours already has a roothold on the kitchen and front porch, with feelers appearing in the lounge. And judging by the amount of dirt on the kitchen floor, half of it comes in at night. Scared of the dark, perhaps, or maybe just trying to avoid all that early morning sparrow shit.
Do Not step on the grass. Do Not feed, touch or look insistently at the animals. Do Not pee on trees. Nature is not a video game – it’s not ‘interactive.’ The only real cows are the ones in the history manual. All the rest are drawn from the artist’s imagination.
“Do Not step on the grass.”
The first such sign I see I’ll move far to the east.
If you decide to go further east than my eastern european country, please Do Not step on the grass.
I was in the sightlines of Hampden Court gardens the other day, and very nice they were too. Families played, geese walked, people in tudor costume swept past.
And bird nests and badger sets are not Built Environment?!
There is a noticeable difference between our drab cities and bird nests, if you take the time to notice. There is such a difference between the former and the beautiful towns of 18th-century Germany, each with its own distinct architecture and character and houses built to last a thousand years. Modern people are not self-aware enough to hate their environment of asphalt and rock sand. It’s not that they lack a point of comparison or a standard. It’s that, like gelded beasts, they are too weak-willed to compare and make judgements in the first place.
In for a penny…the subject was gardens, not tower blocks. I was trying the uncover the pretense, which figures frequently here, that somehow human beings and their works are despicable and unnatural, like. You show me a box hedge, and I will show you sullied nature, transformed into something misshapen and chaotic and overwhelming that might as well be fibreglass and mercury. You reveal this yourself – “gelded beasts” – not even worthy of reproducing. I just note this self-loathing. I have come across bird nests that have had natural and man-made fibres in them; who is to say what is beautiful, are we running some Platonic Death Camp here, with Abodes that last a Thousand Years patterned against some Unfailing Metaphysic?
Do we have to build it so ugly? like birds who use whatever material is the easiest/cheapest to use? Asphalt? Surely you jest. There is hardly any need for an authority to consult, since the difference is not difficult to tell.
P.S. The original post may have been only about gardens, or it may have been about gardens and other things than gardens, or it may have been about other things than gardens altogether. In any case, things change, so I felt like pointing out how ugly our architecture and roads are compared with lots of other things, man-made or otherwise, mainly in the past (which turned nostalgia into a weapon of green progress, and probably twisted MJH’s original idea in ways he didn’t expect and couldn’t plan for).
Hi MikeM & Matrixless
Though undeniable, the common right of birdsnests & the Sydney Opera House to describe themselves as “built” seems like a sophistry to me in this context. It’s fun. It’s like watching the body of a highjumper curl round the bar: a beautifully technical evasiveness. I can’t disagree with the logic of it; I just can’t really agree with it as applied here.
Of course I’m not interested in running a “Platonic Death Camp”. I’m more interested–I think it’s clear from most of my posts in the category “landscape”, not to say most of my books–in the complex weave of possible oppositions.
That there isn’t an outside any more, especially in the UK, doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly controversial statement. My metaphor of the garden as a transitional zone (between inside & outside, cultured & not-cultured) which no longer has an “other side” could as easily have been made with the Country Park–or one of those Welsh honeytraps designed to make profits & keep mountain-bikers off the hills–as the example. Non-places constructed in imitation of a vanished precursor; or to replace a “natural” condition with a cultural statement.
The opposite of the honeytrap, perhaps, might be the debuilt environment, sagging back into the landscape. Left to itself for a thousand years or so, Hadrian’s Wall becomes a vertiginous revolving door of landscape/not landscape. But as soon as it’s cleaned up & operated as a heritage resource it turns back into built environment. To what degree does the abandonment, & subsequent recolonisation as an outdoor climbing wall, of Millstone Quarry (Sheffield), mirror the same process ? How is it reinscribed by a fingerlock or a smear ? How did Tarkovsky’s choice of an abandoned, toxic industrial site as the venue for “Stalker” change the site itself ? How did the site change further when it became, briefly, a venue for Tarkovsky tourism (ie, what has it in common with Holmfirth & the Summer Wine Country, a country which exists only in a TV show) ? To what extent do these changes of use, & our reception of them, enshrine absolutely the relationship between culture, economics & landscape ?
For me, anyway, it’s the tension between these elements & more that’s attractive. It’s too late, in a sense, to be for or against anything in this context; the pooch is screwed, it was already screwed in the Bronze Age. Neither am I really interested in the postmodern argument against authenticity; or the assumption that, because there’s “no difference” between animal culture & human culture, the built environment is just another kind of “natural”. This seems like part of the accelerating conspiracy between the built, virtual, political & economic environments to persuade people that nothing else can exist–that the cultural landscape in all its forms will, from now on, always trump the actual one. See “honeytrap”, above. Or, if you enjoy a bit of a chill, see this–
http://tinyurl.com/pt6869
–& this–
http://tinyurl.com/n2fykm
If those articles describe something which is happening in a real world, then it’s extremely evasive to argue that a birdsnest is “built” in the same way as the environment that produced this unwelcome situation. The fix, if there is one anymore, is in reality, not in discourse. It’s fun for a birdsnest to be as built as the Houses of Parliament; it’s an entertaining & perhaps inarguable notion; but is it any use ?
PS: I don’t think there’s any self-loathing in my landscape posts, either. I’ve enjoyed my conflicts around this issue since I was eight. & even if there was any, what of it ? Anyone who didn’t feel a teeny bit of self-loathing when they contemplated the Sargasso Sea of Garbage & its direct relationship to the built environment: well I’d wonder about them.
That said, I’m not sure I can entirely go with “gelded beasts” either…
I was expecting to read: Non-places constructed to replace a natural condition or a cultural statement.
It is that type of construction that really annoys me, but I admit I’m still living in a garden town, one of those places between the present and the past. Perhaps that is why stepping outside is such a perpetual shock to me: everything is a constant reminder of a still ongoing death struggle between two forces that clearly can’t occupy the same place at the same time without the result being terrible disharmony to the senses.
What I’ve always found amusing about the popular forms of postmodernism is the hidden but fundamental reliance on authority figures: that since they are now all dead, we are inevitably doomed to a chaos of more or less inaccurate and objectively perfectly subjective beliefs and speculations. Anyone who has ever wanted to really change the world and overhaul it in a big way would have appreciated an educated class this confused. There would have been no need to persuade these people in the first place.
uzwi
Apologies, I was forgetting basic signs: I was responding to matrixless’ rejoinder more than directly to the piece you wrote. Germany, built environments of the folkloric kind and nature have a certain political resonance (The Conquest of Nature by David Blackbourn is atop my desk at the moment): I did not resist the pull to be awkward, and let fly.
I am not there either; I used to be a ‘deep green’, leave-no-trace Woodcraft type of person; I dreamed of buckskin and foraging for years, and could never get the high Humanism of scholars who jumped up and down on the emergent Green movement, seeing in its symbols and cult of youthful revolt an overall similarity with the irrational precursors of German fascism. I was so incapable of getting them that I spent 7 years refuting this connection in an academic setting.
I am too petulant still by nature to be able to say I have grown up since then but there’s to my eye an unavoidable streak of willing de-humanisation in the active consideration of nature, be this of the wild wood or the window box; as though the contemplation of nature is only the occasion to embark on a bout of self-denigration, where that self is the collective personality of human beings.
It would take a month of Sundays, a few drinks, a revision of what I rehearsed over those 7 years and a few good camping trips to even begin to do this justice beyond angry brain-fart territory but – what is “place” without the human creature, observing it, and observing the observation of it? There isn’t any and hasn’t ever been any such thing, whether pre-Bronze age or not, whether pristine or not; it’s an articulation, not a reality but most of all, the real biology of importance is inter-human; where are you going to thrive, in a bunker with your brothers and sisters, or going it Fatu-Hiva alone? I am not proud of destruction, and anyway, environmentalism is really just good bookkeeping but the greatest destruction of man is of other men, and all the subtle reasons and devices that enter the minds of men that allow them to reap and winnow amongst their own kind, the solution that says “If only this type of person did not exist…or did not carry on replicating themselves…”
I am also bemused I suppose with the obsession with mediation; I live in a place that is a product of the Garden City movement – one of the most incredible aspects or effects of that movement was on the visages of children who were taken out of their slums and led into nature; well, yes, walls and bars do not a prison make; the way that the ravages of anxiety and overwork, their isolation and atomisation were seen to dissolve away by a chance to play in the open air – the photographs are quite amazing. Would it be of concern to these children that the media caught on, and train companies emblazoned the way to new leisure opportunities? No, not a bit of it. There may not be any pure experiences any more, but beyond your conscious mind the grass grows and the spring comes by itself, as they say, and on a certain level if you cannot feel the grass between your toes without thinking Sunday Supplement or International Capitalism, well, blimey, is all I can say; if we admit that we as individuals cannot be our own mediators through all our senses, our own attention, then we are all several levels of Hell more downward than I supposed. A green field may yet get some possibly hard-wired evolutionary biology all fired up, it may mean you get some fresh air not fetid, but it’s also a place where it’s broad enough to perform, dance, sing, have games, and be in sight of each other. Nature is only worth something, then, when it qualitatively provides for the betterment of human relations, and human health. An allusion to Nature whose purpose is that it highlights what is supposed to be almost congenitally wrong with man is no better than landfill.
But playing man’s best friend, I am barking up several trees, and cannot decide which one to piss on.
hello-are there no gardeners out there? OK, I’m one. I’m also a painter and a reader and a voyeur (audience). Gardens are art–some good some not so. They are in physical flux, though, unlike other forms such as the printed word or a finished painting or sculpture….perhaps more like music that changes every time it is made. Of course they are unnatural–so is ballet. Or maybe not–being that we are sprung from the same source as the weed and the beast. I’m all for the sandpaper that makes us make art…
Hi Mia
I like gardens, as I said at the top of the post. But they make a good symbol for Acts of Enclosure…
Really, I was more interested in the idea that the spectrum of inside to outside, the built to the “natural” (I put that in quote marks to show that I understand the arguments), is no longer complete. I enjoy the clusters of complex oppositions in the way people view that now: but I’m anxious, all the same, that areas of the UK a little further along the spectrum towards outsideness seem to be suffering a contemporary form of Enclosure, by educational quango, local council & outdoor leisure industry.
Forests ought to be large enough to die in. (And cities too small for the purpose.) Mountains too tall to climb etc…. I believe the Enclosure is a symptom of control madness, which is repressed and misdirected will-to-power. Control madness is ultimately a fatal condition in a person and especially in a group of persons. The clearest of its early symptoms is the prominence of weak surrogate activities that never stop nor come to a conclusion because they never properly satisfy the basic need for the power process. The immediate result is the unconscious culture-wide or person-wide death wish which receives its clearest expression in our non-culture’s grey structures of cheapness: everything we build is meant to satisfy only the bare minimum requirements, “because we aren’t worth it.” As all truths, this one, too, is an unpleasant thing to accept, and hence all the symptomatic noise to the contrary…
Perhaps you would like Tyger, a short film by Guilherme Marcondes. It’s on Youtube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LsMoUtBlDk
Many thanks for that, rreugen, I did enjoy Marcondes’ film. NeoPlatonism on a stick, especially the end.
I wondered, in context of the surrounding comments, to what degree it’s an unacceptable appropriation of the animal’s image ? It would seem we’re happier to have the tiger as an icon of power, mysteriously fecundating our boring urban lives, than we are to maintain wild spaces occupied by genuinely powerful, fecund tigers. So despite–or perhaps because of–this tiger’s wonderful macho bombast & tygerness, it seems a little tame compared to the real thing. (That tamedness perhaps summed up by having visible operators of the puppet ?)
MikeM:
I bellowed with laughter when I read that. Excellent.
Otherwise, we probably can’t agree. I respect your history & your conclusions, but I reject anthropocentrism & I’m deeply suspicious of the “self loathing” argument. What’s the opposite of self-loathing ? Something like self love ? Let’s reinscribe that as narcissism. What’s good about loving yourself when what you’re doing is stupid & wrong ?
I also think it’s wrong to make an argument to under-privilege when we are all actually so privileged. Anthropocentrism in the developed world seems to me to be not a matter of ensuring that the sad deprived human children get some sunshine; more a matter of stuffing down one more air-imported gelato before the walk-in freezer jacks it in forever.
The challenge to anthropocentrism is very recent, & has been issued in a time of great change & anxiety. I think we’re both a bit surprised to find ourselves so outright about this. But I do, as I say, respect your history around the subject.