[ Lost in the Landscape ]

poultry: 1, humans: 0

What fol­lows is an unpaid polit­i­cal rant.

Unless you’re read­ing this blog using a bicycle-powered gen­er­a­tor in the desert out­back some­where east of Perth you’ve heard of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary change in the lead­er­ship of the United States. It’s the cul­mi­na­tion of tire­less work for equal­ity and civil rights by gen­er­a­tions of good peo­ple. In Tuesday’s Cal­i­for­nia elec­tions, in addi­tion to vot­ing for Barack Obama in a land­slide, vot­ers also over­whelm­ingly approved Propo­si­tion 2, a wor­thy ini­tia­tive that man­dates more humane cage con­di­tions for chick­ens and other farm animals.

I should be happy, and I am gen­uinely happy–about those and many other things that hap­pened elec­tion day.

This gar­dener is pissed

But pol­i­tics is a messy beast, and this gar­dener is hav­ing a bout of bad atti­tude. It started on Mon­day with the first signs of a bad cold and then wors­ened as some of the polit­i­cal fall­out from Tuesday’s elec­tions became clearer. So often, along with the good and rev­o­lu­tion­ary, you get deliv­ered the vile and reac­tionary. In the same Cal­i­for­nia elec­tions I referred to the pop­u­lace nar­rowly approved Propo­si­tion 8, a con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment rescind­ing the rights of gay and les­bian cit­i­zens from mar­ry­ing each other, thereby uphold­ing the tra­di­tional val­ues of hav­ing gays and les­bians marry peo­ple of the oppo­site gender.

In effect, in their actions, the vot­ers of Cal­i­for­nia decided to grant addi­tional civil rights to poul­try, while at the same time rescind­ing rights for the state’s gay and les­bian population.

So, are we to con­clude that, in a state where it takes 55% of the vote to raise prop­erty taxes, all it takes is a slim major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion to take rights away from thou­sands of its fel­low cit­i­zens? Have the Cal­i­for­nia vot­ers said that my com­mit­ment in mar­riage last June to John is now null and void? Not so fast!

The law­suits have begun, and one of the argu­ments is that very issue of the size of the vote nec­es­sary to revise a basic right that’s in the con­sti­tu­tion ver­sus merely amend­ing it. Legal chal­lenges often get a bad rap in this coun­try, but if it had been left exclu­sively to the pop­u­lar vote we’d still have things like seg­re­ga­tion and indus­trial runoff ignit­ing the rivers of the Northeast.

My cur­rent cold will pass, along with my cur­rent bad atti­tude. No mat­ter the imme­di­ate out­comes of the chal­lenges to Propo­si­tion 8, so too will pass this country’s romance with intol­er­ance. No mat­ter what tran­spires, John and I will con­tinue to con­sider our­selves married.

It’ll take a while for the cul­ture to change, but the signs are every­where. Although peo­ple over 30 voted for California’s Propo­si­tion 8, the pop­u­la­tion 30 and under soundly rejected it by a mar­gin of two to one.

Another sign: Let me quote the final sen­tence of Mar­tin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, in which he sets the bar for the changes that would need to take place. Notice the list, the agenda King sets.

…And when this hap­pens, when we allow free­dom to ring, when we let it ring from every vil­lage and every ham­let, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s chil­dren, black men and white men, Jews and Gen­tiles, Protes­tants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spir­i­tual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

And let me com­pare that the agenda Barack Obama set in his speech Tues­day night at Chicago’s Grant Park. His list, his agenda, his Amer­ica resides in the third para­graph from the very beginning.

If there is any­one out there who still doubts that Amer­ica is a place where all things are pos­si­ble, who still won­ders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still ques­tions the power of our democ­racy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in num­bers this nation has never seen, by peo­ple who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be dif­fer­ent, that their voices could be that difference.

It’s the answer spo­ken by young and old, rich and poor, Demo­c­rat and Repub­li­can, black, white, His­panic, Asian, Native Amer­i­can, gay, straight, dis­abled and not dis­abled. Amer­i­cans who sent a mes­sage to the world that we have never been just a col­lec­tion of indi­vid­u­als or a col­lec­tion of red states and blue states.

We are, and always will be, the United States of America.

At no time in his cam­paign did Obama defend gay mar­riage. That would have been polit­i­cal sui­cide. But it’s telling that we are no longer invis­i­ble as we were in King’s day. This is a dif­fer­ent vision of Amer­ica that will come to be as the next gen­er­a­tion finally gets its say.

The bar has been raised.

November 06 2008 | Categories: everything • quotes • rambles | Tags: Barack Obama • gay marriage • gay weddings • Martin Luther King • politics • Proposition 2 • Proposition 8 | 2 Comments »

humility 101

Most of [Czech author Karel] Čapek’s com­men­ta­tors con­sider The Gardener’s Year a minor work, but as Ver­lyn Klinken­borg remarks in the intro­duc­tion to the Mod­ern Library Eng­lish edi­tion of 2002, “most stu­dents of Čapek believe gar­den­ing is a sub­set of life, whereas gar­den­ers, includ­ing Čapek, under­stand that life is a sub­set of gar­den­ing.“
–Robert Pogue Harrison

My first mean­ing­ful expo­sure to the work of Čapek came through Leoš Janáček’s amaz­ing 1925 opera, The Makrop­u­los Affair, which is based on Čapek’s play of the same name. I sup­pose you could call it a sci­ence fic­tion opera: a young woman becomes the lab­o­ra­tory rat of her alchemist father, who is tasked by Emporer Rudolf II to devise a for­mula that will extend his life by three cen­turies. When given the potion, the daugh­ter at first drops into a coma. How­ever, when she wakes up, she truly has been trans­formed into being able to live another 300 years. In liv­ing through those extra years she becomes increas­ingly detached from her orig­i­nal human­ity as she is forced to leave one mor­tal hus­band after another and loved ones fade around her. At the end of the opera, even though she is in pos­ses­sion of her father’s for­mula for the elixir that would allow her to keep extend­ing her life, she refuses to con­coct the drink and chooses humanity–and death.

It’s a pow­er­ful tale with echoes all the way back to the Odyssey, where Odysseus declines eter­nal life in favor of his known, mor­tal one, back in Ithaca with the fam­ily and friends he knows and loves. Also, Čapek, ever rooted in the earth and dis­trust­ful of the quick, shal­low plea­sures of “progress,” uses the play to express his dis-ease with where unthink­ing appli­ca­tion of the tech­nolo­gies that were explod­ing around him would lead the human race.

I bring all this up because I’ve been read­ing Gar­dens: An Essay on the Human Con­di­tion, by Robert Pogue Har­ri­son. One of the chap­ters is devoted to Čapek and his work, The Gardener’s Year. The quote at the begin­ning of this post comes from that chap­ter, as does this sec­ond by Čapek him­self, in an extended quote:

I tell you, to tame a cou­ple of rods of soil is a great vic­tory… And if you have no appre­ci­a­tion for this strange beauty, let fate bestow upon you a cou­ple of rods of clay–clay like lead, squelch­ing and primeval clay out of which cold­ness oozes; which yields under the spade like chewing-gum, which bakes in the sun and gets sour in the shade; ill-tempered, unmal­leable, greasy, and sticky like plas­ters of Paris, slip­pery like a snake, and dry like a brick, imper­me­able like tin, and heavy like lead. And now smash it with a pick-axe, cut it with a spade, break it with a ham­mer, turn it over and labour, curs­ing aloud and lamenting.

Then you will under­stand the ani­mos­ity and cal­lous­ness of dead and ster­ile mat­ter which ever did defend itself, and still does, against becom­ing a soil of life; and you will real­ize what a ter­ri­ble fight life must have under­gone, inch by inch, to root in the soil of the earth, whether that life be called veg­e­ta­tion or man.

All this may sound a lit­tle dense and dif­fi­cult going, but oth­ers of Harrison’s quotes from Čapek’s work show it to be incred­i­bly funny at the same time. I have plenty of books lined up that I need to read, but this one is mov­ing to the front of the queue.

July 07 2008 | Categories: everything • gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: Gardener's Year • Karel Capek • opera • Robert Pogue Harrison • technology | 3 Comments »

and so it begins

There’s an old fam­ily photo that I think about every now and then. My sis­ter and I are seated at a view­point over­look­ing the lower falls on the Yel­low­stone River. My sis­ter is star­ing into the cam­era and at my mother who took all these early fam­ily pic­tures. And next to her is me, star­ing not at the cam­era but over the rail­ing at some­thing off to the side, not the main attrac­tion of the falls, but some­thing else–maybe the gorge, maybe the river, maybe the clouds and sky and weather. Lost in the landscape.

For me gar­dens can be won­der­ful lit­tle memen­tos of the larger land­scape. Sur­round me with inter­est­ing plants and their inter­est­ing col­ors and tex­tures, and you’ll stand a chance of los­ing me in it. But I’m also inter­ested that these patches and pots of earth are totally faked ver­sions of what lies beyond the gar­den gates and city walls. There’s always a human hand in the gar­den, and I’m inter­ested in what the gar­den reveals about the per­son plan­ning, plant­ing and tend­ing the garden.

And I have lots of other inter­ests that I expect will end up here–art, pho­tog­ra­phy, design, music, pol­i­tics, sci­ence, stuff in the news–and so I expect these notes will ram­ble a bit, some­thing like an old Lady Banks rose grow­ing in many direc­tions from its root­stock. Since the ram­bles and bram­bles grow from the same root­stock, though, I expect they’ll have some­thing in common.

I guess all that’s a bit of a man­i­festo. I don’t want to lay down too many rules, though, because the world is such an inter­est­ing place, even if that world is a small patch of gar­den with herbs for the kitchen or a tiny re-creation of the cos­mos in a flow­er­pot on someone’s apart­ment windowsill.

And so, off we go!

November 24 2007 | Categories: art • everything • gardening • landscape • landscape design • rambles | Tags: my sister • old photographs • why people garden • yellowstone | No Comments »