sus

Well-known member
The archetypal hero’s journey is out of the garden, the mapped, familiar world and into the uncaring wild, into the dark of the map. Outside its walls he gains knowledge (of the dark spots, “here be dragons”) or else resources (icons, totems, herbs and stones) or else experience (changed by combat, changed by miracle, changed by contact with unsheltereds). He brings these acquisitions back to the garden on return.
 

sus

Well-known member
Imports imports imports. For bringing a piece of the new world into the old world, the hero is paid in prestige.
 

sus

Well-known member
But the garden, often as not, is ruined for him. It is too slow, too uneventful. Life is change; stasis is morbid, he tells his neighbors, who cannot understand. The local sense of time is different than that outside the walls. The garden’s pleasures no longer delight him.
 

sus

Well-known member
Perhaps his perception is too fixed to the disorderly, his nerves on edge. He has a structure of expectation which is geared to the unexpected, which privileges tail-risk in an ergodic environment. In an extreme case, and ancient archetype, the soldier returns home, bringing with him an adaptive jumpiness which while useful on tour, causes him to hear gunshots in slammed doors and backfiring engines. We can look back to Euripides’ Herakles for a portrait: He comes home and, perception befogged by madness, mistakes his children for enemies, slaying them with poisoned arrows.
 

sus

Well-known member
Either way, the cowboy loses the Shire. He sails or rides off to the ever-receding horizon line of the New, or the Nothing, or the After.
 

sus

Well-known member
A variant of the archetypal journey switches out literal return for a symbolic one. (Time as a circle: moving forward to get back, memory guiding choices.) The hero ventures past the gate, into rocky soils with a knapsack of humus and seedlings and there builds a new garden. From whence does he derive the humus and seedling? From others’ gardens, of course.
 

sus

Well-known member
The difficulty is knowing when to settle—a trade-off called explore-exploit. And the related problem: picking your patch of land. Perhaps: picking your co-gardener. There are formulas for this, called “stopping algorithms”: multi-armed bandits, Bellman equations and Bruss algos. Secretary problems, parking problems, halting problems.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Domus and agrios is a take on the human need to make distinctions between nature and culture. The labyrinth (as maze) reflects both but it can be subterranean too, ie subconscious

A garden in the British sense is like the last bleached out remnants of our old, dead gods, deities of place and function now long forgotten like the habitats they populated. Cernunnos would be fuming
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The difficulty is knowing when to settle—a trade-off called explore-exploit. And the related problem: picking your patch of land. Perhaps: picking your co-gardener. There are formulas for this, called “stopping algorithms”: multi-armed bandits, Bellman equations and Bruss algos. Secretary problems, parking problems, halting problems.
I find these things interesting but mainly beyond me now
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
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.
 

jenks

thread death
Been doing a bit of reading on gardens as I’m teaching The Merchant’s Tale:
the idea of your own private, prelapsarian Eden where you can frolic.
Priapus, apparently, is the classical god of gardens which makes a kind of sense.
Mary is often depicted being visited by Gabriel in a garden, she herself being an enclosed garden herself.
In the Romance of the Rose it a locus amoenus - an idealised space for the chivalric to demonstrate courtly love virtues but in Metchant Chaucer uses it as a place of earthly desire with the heroine duping her husband while up a pear tree with his servant.
 
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you

Well-known member
Been doing a bit of reading on gardens as I’m teaching The Merchant’s Tale:
the idea of your own private, prelapsarian Eden where you can frolic.
Priapus, apparently, is the classical god of gardens which makes a kind of sense.
Mary is often depicted being visited by Gabriel in a garden, she herself being an enclosed garden herself.
In the Romance of the Rose it a locus amoenus - an idealised space for the chivalric to demonstrate courtly love virtues but in Metchant Chaucer uses it as a place of earthly desire with the heroine duping her husband while up a pear tree with his servant.

There's definitely introspective eroticism associated with the English walled garden, or the estate garden. Think of Mr. Stevens' awkward discussions about the 'birds and the bees' in Remains of the Day. The Secret Garden. The erotic subtext of the garden in The Go-Between.

There must be a book focussing on this. It's almost a Merchant-Ivory trope.
 

you

Well-known member
Been doing a bit of reading on gardens as I’m teaching The Merchant’s Tale:
the idea of your own private, prelapsarian Eden where you can frolic.
Priapus, apparently, is the classical god of gardens which makes a kind of sense.
Mary is often depicted being visited by Gabriel in a garden, she herself being an enclosed garden herself.
In the Romance of the Rose it a locus amoenus - an idealised space for the chivalric to demonstrate courtly love virtues but in Metchant Chaucer uses it as a place of earthly desire with the heroine duping her husband while up a pear tree with his servant.


Death and Garden Narratives in Literature, Art, and Film: Song of Death in Paradise
by Sabine Planka looks promising.

Samuel Hynes, in The Edwardian Turn of Mind, opens with an examination of the quintessential Edwardian garden scene, it's a metaphor that frames the book, a prolegomenon. I've started reading this.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Gardens play a part in Chinese literature as well - there's an interesting ( to me, at least) essay on jstor - The Image of the Garden in Jin Ping Mei and Hongloumeng by Mary Scott ) about the symbolism of gardens in the classic novel Chin P'ing Mei ( the protagonist uses the garden as a display of wealth and as a space where he can seduce his various mistresses, concubines, and valets )

Some extracts:
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catalog

Well-known member
Monet's garden

Claude Monet did not like organized nor constrained gardens. He married flowers according to their colours and left them to grow rather freely.

With the passing years he developed a passion for botany, exchanging plants with his friends Clemenceau and Caillebotte. Always on the look-out for rare varieties, he bought young plants at great expense. "All my money goes into my garden," he said. But also: "I am in raptures."


Also Zygmunt Baumn the eminent sociologist, RIP, talked about gardening a bit in his classic text, 'Modernity and the Holocaust'

Using the simple and easily grasped image of the garden (society) and gardener (social-engineer/manager), Bauman highlights the interrelated concepts of order and control. These are perennial concerns of the gardener, whether s/he is a real gardener pulling up weeds or a metaphorical social gardener rounding up human beings in the interests of a managerial plan. Drawing upon and extending the thinking of Hannah Arendt (1951) and Adorno and Horkenheimer ([1944]1997), Bauman's critique also warns us that attempts to equate society and nature and to manage the former according to the principles of the latter, have yielded catastrophically cruel results in the past. Bauman's thinking -- and my own resultant research -- is primarily concerned with the philosophical and ethical implications of the gardening metaphor. T he imagery has obvious crossovers to the realm of (critical) environmental management/managerial ecology, and this paper discusses few of these possibilities.

 
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