Book of Gardens

C

catalog

Well-known member
Modern culture is a garden culture. It defines itself as a perfect arrangement for human conditions. It constructs its own identity out of distrust of nature. In fact it defines itself and nature, through its endemic distrust of spontaneity and its longing for a better and necessarily artificial, order. The order, first conceived of as a design, determines what is a tool, what is raw material, what is a weed or pest. .. From the point of view of the design, all actions are instrumental, while all the objects of action are either facilities or hindrances
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More from Bauman. He's great, one of the very best sociologists.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
i can't remember which jim thompson novel it is, maybe the kille rinside me, or the grifters, but there's a line where someone talks about the definition of a weed and how it is "a plant out of place" that's it - it's not necessarily a malign influence, it's just not in the right place.
 
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william_kent

william_kent

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The Tale of Genji, the Japanese epic novel also features gardens as a literary device:

Gardens in this tale offer profound insights into both how Heian courtiers related to nature and the structure of its protagonists’ relationships
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Much time in The Tale of Genji is spent in, or looking at, gardens. Gardens amplify and prompt the emotions of the tale’s protagonists.
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That gardens in Heian Japan occupied a liminal position between the world of man-made objects and phenomena and materiality of the natural world is attested by Iroha jiruishō, which puts gardens in the category “earthly forms.” Like pavilions, gardens are man-made, yet form part of a scenic view as a collective manifestation of natural phenomena. Motonaka Makoto has shown that Heian assessments of gardens focused on two core concepts: the grounds or the lay of the garden (chikei), and the view (chōbō).19 With “view” Heian courtiers often referred to what was visible beyond the residence and the garden itself. In other words, gardens combine ideas of a represented natural world and of viewed landscapes. Japan’s oldest extant treatise on garden design, the twelfth-century Sakuteiki (On creating gardens) opens with the exhortation that garden designs are best modeled after “landscapes in their innate disposition” (shōtoku no senzui).20 It becomes apparent that landscape’s inherent state lies less in its details than in the idea of an essence it embodies. Gardens must strip the natural landscape down to express it satisfactorily. As Thomas Keirstead observes, “The garden must mirror nature, but a natural landscape is emphatically not the desired result.”21 Gardens represent “nature” as summarized in a landscape so much more capably than nature itself manages, precisely because of their artifice.
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In The Tale of Genji, the natural world as mediated through and exemplified by gardens provides an understanding both of courtly cultural attitudes toward “nature” and of the emotions of the tale’s protagonists as well as their respective relationships. A Heian garden presented nature broken down into the material and the tangible as well as landscapes reduced to their elementary constituents through stones and water. This nature was extremely codified and as such intimately connected with the human realm: the natural world explained as well as triggered emotional response. A garden’s views and seasonal plantings combined to stress a hierarchy of seasons and of protagonists and to underscore dramatic moments.
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from: Genji’s Gardens - Negotiating Nature at the Heian Court

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Kunichika Toyohara, Prince Genji in the Garden
 
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luka

luka

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Seems about right. I think you've covered the major points though. The wall is vital. The fact that it's neither nature nor man-made but a nature selected, pruned, nurtured, managed, also vital also covered.
 
luka

luka

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For me the garden often stands in for the fragility and beauty of the schizoid mind which is always threatened with invasion by mass-mind, the bovine herd, the despoilers who want to level it and make it co-extensive with consensus reality
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I went to Seville 3 or 4 years ago and staggered around the Alcázar Palace Gardens in the 38 degree heat.

I saw how the concept of the garden must be so – different? or heightened? – in the desert world. Especially the fountains and ponds.

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"We've got to get back to the garden"

 
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luka

luka

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Ronald Fairburn, if you read that for instance, it's terrifying and violent in its hostility towards the sanctity of the schizoid mind
 
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Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
luka said:
For me the garden often stands in for the fragility and beauty of the schizoid mind which is always threatened with invasion by mass-mind, the bovine herd, the despoilers who want to level it and make it co-extensive with consensus reality
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There's a good Auden poem about sitting in a lovely garden with a high wall and feeling guilty about all the horrors going on outside it.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I was sitting in a friend's garden the other weekend, as it goes, feeling very jealous of them for having it. A spot of relative seclusion where you can quaff mushrooms and stare in beatific wonder at flowers.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
I went to Seville 3 or 4 years ago and staggered around the Alcázar Palace Gardens in the 38 degree heat.

I saw how the concept of the garden must be so – different? or heightened? – in the desert world. Especially the fountains and ponds.

===

"We've got to get back to the garden"
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I had a similar thing in Delhi where a walled garden offered a respite which clearly wasn't available to most people for whom there was no escape from the noise and crowds and general assault on the senses
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
There's a good Auden poem about sitting in a lovely garden with a high wall and feeling guilty about all the horrors going on outside it.
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Yeah exactly. That's the side of it that's represents queasy privilege.
 
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Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's nicer sitting in a park sometimes, the scale of it and the people. But there's always that suspicion of other people, the fear and repulsion.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
It's nicer sitting in a park sometimes, the scale of it and the people. But there's always that suspicion of other people, the fear and repulsion.
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That's right. A large part of lockdown for me involved becoming more at ease being visible and doing my own thing in public space. But it's never entirely relaxed. Some oik might hurl a chip at your head at any moment. A devil dog might go for your nuts.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
mvuent said:
sometimes the hero's journey involves venturing in an unfamiliar garden. one that belongs to someone more powerful, more evil/unfettered, and/or more learned. gilgamesh to neuromancer. the hero escapes, with something gained from trespassing, but the fog of war hanging over most of the garden's secrets never lifts.
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very arabian nights this. sneak a peek at the sultans daughter. hide in a rhododendron bush.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
As I remember it the sultan catches his wife cheating, chops her head off. Then decides to marry again, consumates the marriage and then - to anticipate her cheating - chops his new wife's head off too. Finding this arrangement satisfactory he repeats it every day until he's married, fucked and killed every single eligible woman in the kingdom... except for the daughter of the grand vizier. So he marries her, but she is smart enough to tell him a story ending on a cliffhanger that intrigues him enough to let her live... and she does this a thousand and one times until they fall in love.
 
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