Leaving the Garden
The natural cards revolve ever changing,
Seeded elsewhere, planted in the garden fair,
Grow trees, grow trees. Tongues of the sheer wind,
Setting your foot where the sand is untrodden,
The ocean that only begins.
—“Koeeoaddi There,” The Incredible String Band
Fortune is a wheel; fashion is a lifecycle. But a world lies between planting trees and keeping up with casualwear. Imports, imports, imports. The [garden wall | city gate | keep portcullis] is a semi-permeable boundary: it keeps the bad out and lets the good in. Inhale, exhale, a cycle of respiration; oxygen is gifted a carbon atom. Cuticle wax retains moisture. Our basket’s bound with skin so the elements don’t escape. A watery moat slows raiders, protects its tower’s flesh and gold. Meanwhile, the artist-theorist, trader-troubadour, source of novelty for our sorry structure, schlepps between boundaries and samples from the provinces, “everything a remix.” so: this there, that here, peddled at market. So ISB becomes an international squad of bohemians, nomad spice traders, importing the mbira, guembri, sārangī. Luther Burbank crosses fruit trees, Santa Rosa farmers swap heirloom varieties, seed companies send plant explorers to the edges of the map. Sing: “The injection of novel inputs to a system is equivalent to the creation of novel outputs. Stagnant ponds make poor drinking water and breed bloodsuckers. A zero-sum game means your pleasure at the cost of mine.”
This is the tao: stability sans stagnance, growth without disruption. A contradiction in terms whose only solution is Pareto-friendly tradeoff. Structure that isn’t overbearing, isn’t life-quenching and maladapted. Remodeled, sure, but regulated and in the “right direction.”
The garden is designed topology (so what?), a space with objects intentionally situated in relation to each other (so what?). The structuring constitutes a theory, the plants fertilized yes but also pruned and moved and weeded, a system of mattering made matter. Hypertext garden, wiki as garden, novel and text and commune as garden. A city as garden, immigrant seedlings schlepped past wooden palisades. A stream or brook passes through and nourishes the garden. Heraclitus steps in the stream; it is a new stream; the garden remains. Perhaps our garden has been founded in the path of a flowing. Perhaps a flowing has been diverted through the garden, mineral waters flushing novelty through structure. Too fluid: pure dissolution. Too stable: fossilization, calcified bureaucracy, and sticky heuristics. (1) Structures are made of stone for ephemeral purpose; the purpose fades and the stone remains; two generations later no one knows why. (Or else purpose remains quietly real; Chesterton’s screaming as the demo team arrives.) The high-level play has always been a stable main structure that’s limber and flexible and accommodating of transgression, which realizes this limberness is, paradoxically, in the interests of stability. (2) But where’s the insight in postulating a Goldilocks zone? Who wants porridge too... anything?
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“Boundaries are structures that protect what is within them and allow their contents to solve smaller, more manageable design problems than would be possible in a perfectly interconnected system.” (3) Which is to say: We ought to stop thinking of boundaries as things which prevent, constrain, and disable, and begin to think of them as things which allow, generate, and enable. An insight of structuralism: without difference, nothing “is.” Universal oneness is a soup; form, D’Arcy Thompson tells us, requires irregularity. (4) Liquefaction is valuable only as possibility for new form, only as a way to re-anneal structure in better-fitted form. The hero makes solid ground from swamp, erects structure on stilts overlooking the waters which one day swallow the neighborhood. Entropy may be evaded, but it cannot be defeated. From soup we are born; to soup we return.
Society, the garden, the organism, the cell, all in the same situation: walled-off but needing to track developments outside their boundaries, expelling parasites, detecting threats and opportunities. Hence we have sensory organs and intelligence agencies, tendrils and tripwire. But bodies are never merely reading machines—they always double as writing machines: issuing diplomatic missions and military threats, running ad campaigns and hiring lawyers. Bluffing and enticing and broadcasting with wardrobes, bacteria signaling each other through the passing of potassium molecules. Sometimes boundaries need re-litigating; sometimes boundaries are in danger of dissolution.
The degree of permeability and the degree of isolation determine the uniqueness of the bounded niche’s contents, prevent transference and cross-pollination between zones. Planetary systems separated by light-years of space. The island, like a perfect-moated castle, is a more familiar example: “Drifting daisies evolve into trees; drifting iguanas learn to swim; fruit flies evolve into fantastic, showy varieties; crabs grow a meter long and figure out how to open coconuts. Tree kangaroos, ground parrots, and giant tree skinks are niches only available on islands.” (5) When contact between islands increases, when real trade arises, invasive species threaten to wipe out this evolved diversity. I’m standing in Maui among the fertile soils of a dead volcano, the hardened drifts of magma long past liquid. The birds here are flamboyantly colorful, like the plants—USDA checks our bags at the airport gate; this boundary does not allow dangerous imports.
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But then—what to make of heterosis, of hybrid vigor? Of the cultural blendings that produced blues, jazz, rock, disco, techno, hip-hop?
The stream is historical, but it deposits minerals along its banks. “In many ways the Stream is best seen through the lens of Bakhtin’s idea of the utterance. Bakhtin saw the utterance, the conversational turn of speech, as inextricably tied to context. To understand a statement you must go back to things before, you must find out what it was replying to, you must know the person who wrote it and their speech context. To understand your statement I must reconstruct your entire stream.” (6) Responsibilities swap when the roles swap: “Whereas the garden is integrative, the Stream is self-assertive. It’s persuasion, it’s argument, it’s advocacy.” (7) The water of life, the water of dialogue, the water of dialect. Thin thesis and anemic antithesis: finally, a stronger synth. Tl;dr: the temporal motion converts to vertical growth in the verdure.
Sewer, seuwiere, as in seaward flowing—into the great ocean, purified by dilution; here comes the next thing. Hello institution, hello commander. My captain my captain. Channels and pipes like “organs of the large city,” (8) circulating fluids, distributing resources through its body. All this to say: the health of the garden is premised on fashion, which channels the foreign, which flows through arbor and nourishes it while washing out the waste. In his search for homeostasis, man—rather than find a dark room—is driven to exploration, compelled to leave the cave.
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Time past, time present. Time began in a garden, time began on January 1, 1970. (9) Rolling greens surround the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, syncing the world from an imperial core.
A garden is made coherent (to whom? man): for all its mess, a town is a garden is entropy domesticated—entropy in both the physics and information sense of the term. (Like narrative, like history, like time.) The second law can’t be defeated, but it can be managed. Town is made legible by the concerted efforts of citizens; its environment structures their ontology, which structures their environment. Map becomes territory, territory map. A place for man, built by man. Guilds consolidate and re-design life-scripts; equilibria are made stable and kept stable. Streets are given names, buildings are given numbers. A piazza becomes a schelling point for performance, propaganda, protests, and the peddling of spices. The walls keep out ransacking barbarians, allow an energy surplus to build, prevent erosion and preserve topsoil. Long-branched fruits dangling over crude stone walls are plucked by passersby. A factory inside a fortress, Deborah Gordon calls an ant colony, as if it were not a universal descriptor of life.
Contrast a wild with no gardeners, no pragmatic care for the men who live in it, ever shrinking. To say some X matters is, definitionally, to say some Y does not. A famous form the garden takes is labyrinth, branching maze of choices. Borges, Dante, Eco, Kubrick, Chaucer. It’s a legible, rutted set of paths—the grooves of habit, the shape of “typical”—each with a distinct choice, a discrete choice: left or right, straight or back. Perhaps one branch has grown a reputation; perhaps a series of tests await any who choose it. Perhaps the choices have been mapped from above, as in the model of the maze at the Overlook Hotel, the whole space of possibles observable and known. (Perhaps not, as in Eyes of the Overworld.) All the value clarity of a game—clear objectives, clear rules—with all the blind corners of everyday life. Sure, the wild has roads too: herbivore trails and desire paths, scent trails and thermal columns. It even has signs—conventionalized signs—to be read and written. But it is not designed for man; in many ways, it is “designed”—not created so much as curated—to take advantage of him. To split his boundaries, spill his water, release a body’s hoarded wealth. Man evolves to fit wilderness; only lately does it fit itself to him. When I said “Another Green World,” I meant “Anthropogenic Global Warming.”
I said, I’m sorry; I’m busy gardening today. I said, I’m sorry, I’ve got a rival town to conquer, which was sorta the same thing, and sorta the opposite. Territorial acquisition, territorial maintenance. Conquest and stewardship. Any gardener knows: in the beginning is death. In the beginning is always death. To tame a patch of land is to commit murder. Trees are felled and bushes uprooted. The tunnels of an ant colony are caved in; worms are halved by the sharp steel of shovel and hoe. “Listen, a woman with a bulldozer built this house now / Carving away the mountain whose name is your childhood home.” (10) Stories tell that young Napoleon, far from home at officer’s school, spent long hours tending his plot, reading Virgil in among the verdure. The stories also suggest that the young man’s “appropriative and expansionist ambitions were already evident when he took over the neglected plots on either side of his own and tripled the side of his garden.” (11) Games like Age of Mythology, Civilization, 0 A.D., Age of Empires, Factorio—the input-output logic of growth at its most barren, the bachelor stripped bare, the pattern obvious.
Society, the garden, the organism, the cell, all in the same situation: seeking ever more energy to bring inside their bulwark. I’m picturing Apocalypto, the long walk from village province to city capital, the miles of felled trees and dried rivers. There and back again, from the comforts of country to the terrors of city, returning to a world irretrievably changed. Nothing to do but start again, so they do.
Eden is a human imagining of a utopic past, the hope-spring of Retvrn. Nostos as in home, sickness as in algia. Garden as womb; pastoralism as nostalgia for the womb-condition. Out here in the Northwoods, the growing season is a few short months: frosts last til June and can emerge as early as September. So seedlings must be incubated indoors, in the stable temperatures of our home—temperatures in which heat will not so rapidly leak from the cells’ membranes; temperatures enabled by the continual burn of truck-delivered propane.
“Natural” in the sense of “default”; “harmony” as in “heaven.” The mistake is to believe that a garden (that homeostasis) is attainable without work or hard choices, without sacrifice and boundaries, the exorcism of enemies by force. Without pruning or trimming or ideology, policing or weeding; without the maintenance of boundaries or the continual processing of extractive caloric output. In Genesis that work is done by God; in womb fantasy, by Mother. Expulsion leads inexorably to adulthood—to becoming one’s own gardener, own guard, own gatherer—a dirty and difficult work, streaked by the cruelties of triage. Even Rousseau cannot contest: the only return lies forward: “time is a circle” means “suffering shapes will,” and will shapes choices, and choices suffering.
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The archetypal hero’s journey is out of the garden, the mapped, familiar world and into the uncaring wild, the dark of the map. Outside its walls he gains knowledge (of the dark spots—“here be dragons”) or resources (miracle healing—the Holy Grail) or experience, its own form of capital (changed by combat, changed by miracle, changed by contact with unsheltereds). He brings these acquisitions back to the garden on return. Imports imports imports. Briefly, he believes himself to have reclaimed his Eden, thus the Tahitian Potaveri is moved to tears by the sight of a banana tree in the king’s arboretum. (12) I can remember well the gardens of my childhood, the white Queen Anne’s lace, the drought-resistant lavender fitted to the California climate. The nasturtiums that grew wild and like weeds along the fence-lines and compost pile, somehow edible for salads. The magenta bougainvillea—named for the navy admiral who first imported it to France from Brazil—near our driveway and small lawn, borders set by large, smooth stones in white and cream and yellow. The old plum tree and the sticky tar-stains that its fruit left on the sidewalk, and the apple tree that replaced it post-disease.
Louis Antoine de Bougainville, a name that survives past the surrender of skin. For bringing a piece of the new world into old, the hero is paid in prestige. But the garden, often as not, is ruined for him. It is too slow, too uneventful. Life is change; stasis is morbid, he tells neighbors and old friends, each failing to understand. The local sense of time is different than that outside the walls. The garden’s pleasures no longer delight him.
Perhaps its tamed, ordered logic is nothing like the stakes and uncertainty of outside the walls. Sometimes the denizens of a too-tame français garden themselves grow restless, and engineer surprise inside a sand box. A joke, a jest, a signed urinal. A garden-path sentence goes: The old man the boats. A garden-path sentence goes: The cotton clothing's made of grows in Mississippi. The whistle of a Chekhov’s gun—incomparable to bloody bullets.
Perhaps our hero’s perception has been trained on disorder, his nerves now perpetually on edge. He reads conflict in harmony, war in peace. He has a structure of expectation 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.” (13)
Perhaps he has merely tasted the apple. Either way, the cowboy loses the Shire. He sails or rides off to the ever-receding horizon line of the New, the Nothing, the After.
A variant of the archetypal journey swaps out literal return for symbolic ones. (Time as a circle: move forward to go back, a trained memory guiding present choices.) The hero ventures past the gate, into rocky soils with a knapsack of humus and seedlings and there builds a new garden all his own. From whence does he derive the humus and seedling? From others’ gardens, of course. The difficulty, as always, is knowing when to settle—a tradeoff called explore-exploit in reinforcement learning—and a 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. And in changing his energies, the demands placed upon him, the hero morphs from quester to gardener, from conquest to cultivation. There is no “is,” nor “ought,” only ever decision.
The gardener cares and cultivates. He stays put on his patch of land and fosters it. If he leaves, it is only briefly, to bring in necessary materials from the outside: soil, seeds, pesticides. He watches his garden nervously, watches the weather, the rolling clouds, the dry spells, the cold snaps, with anxiety. The sensitivity of his perception, his ability to spot patterns, corresponds to the efficacy of his interventions. Even the most French and orderly of gardens is a process of cooperation, the top-down enforcement of law and ideal, when left uninformed by a bottom-up reality, leads only to ruin. Karel Čapek—born in the Bohemian mountains, sci-fi author, museum founder, inventor of worlds, coiner of “robot,” expelled from school for anarchist politics, an admirer of Cubism—writes in Gardener’s Year: “There is something peculiar about the weather; it is never quite right. Weather always shoots over the mark on one side or the other. The temperature never reaches the hundred years’ normal; it is either five degrees below or five degrees above. Rainfall is either ten millimetres below the average or twenty millimetres above; if it is not too dry, it is inevitably too wet.”
As with all men, the gardener calms these anxieties through divination and magic—the attempt to discern the world through signs, and the attempt to alter the world through signs, respectively. (In other words, reading and writing.) I push a finger into the soil, in deciding when to water it; I overturn leaves in search of mold or caterpillars, in searching for a remedy. The true gardener is a constant gardener, and with investment comes fretting and a pathetic proselytization. The dignity of the self is of no value compared to the well-being of the garden, a calculus which everywhere drives parents to ignore embarrassment for the sake of their offspring. (An eternal tao: Contentment without complacency, ditching worry but keeping care, a stoic acceptance that preserves its ambitions.)
Often, this settling of the wild is combined with—comes after—the hero’s disappointed retvrn, the home that’s no longer a home. It isn’t that the hero has tired of gardens—he has tired of other people’s gardens—sick, that is, of being parented. The home was made for the child; the child has changed, become adult, and home no longer fits; as adult, he builds a home which does.
The switch from adventuring to gardening’s a growing up: the hero sets out as witness, one who has read knights’ tales and is instigated to action. Reader becomes writer; on return, the hero testifies to the history of his vision. But even in his adventures he is an experiencer of worlds, a rich beneficiary to what already grows. A raider, a grazer, his debt is paid only in death, returning his minerals to dirt. Robert Pogue Harrison:
If he had wanted to make Adam and Eve keepers of the garden, God should have created them as caretakers; instead he created them as beneficiaries, deprived of the commitment that drives a gardener to keep his or her garden. It would seem that it was precisely this overprotection on God’s part that caused Adam and Eve to find themselves completely defenseless when it came to the serpent’s blandishments... It was only by leaving the Garden of Eden behind that they could realize their potential to become cultivators and givers, instead of mere consumers and receivers. (14)
So it is with all succession problems—the pampering of the child undermines the child’s ability to overcome trials, to domesticate wilderness. So it is with all alignment problems—time is a circle; the conditions made the father; the father changes conditions; the conditions make the son. Many go by the name “Napoleon,” but of Napoleon, there was only ever one.
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The garden is founded, like all agriculture, on the distinction between weed and cultivar. The distinction is nowhere to be found in nature; it is a pragmatic, Heraclitean distinction; a measure made by man for man. The cultivars are of use; they are affordances in the games man plays against nature, or against rival men. Affordances create symbols, and the symbols cue a next generation into affordances. The weeds threaten the cultivars, are obstacles to thriving or merely unsightly—an aesthetic cull. The selection pressure we exert on the weed-cultivar distinction ushers in a process of mimicry, curation as creation. In weeding out, a new cultivar is born. Rye was once inedible, a wild weed; that rye which looked least like wheat was culled, and that which most resembled crop to a farmer’s eye was spared through oversight, so that, over centuries of agriculture, surviving rye strands began to look more and more like wheat; the mimic at last took on enough properties of its model to serve as proper, edible cereal.
The soil is not beautiful in its own right, like rolling hills and vistas, like meandering rivers and oxbows, but it is the soil that gives rise to the greenery of the landscape painting, and the ecstatic colors of the sexual organs of angiosperms. The soil is a process that gives rise to, and a rich reserve of resources accumulated in a cubic yard of surface, “black gold.” In compost the gardener sees the beauty of potential and becoming. “Regeneration—truly you are King of nature.” (15) Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Aguirre’s El Dorado was jungle soil, right beneath his feet; watch him go mad, surrounded by monkeys for acolytes, trying to find fully formed riches, not understanding the proper form of money—not understanding that riches are only ever promises. (16)
Another time you may catch it from your neighbours; you see that a campion is flowering in your neighbour’s garden, and you say: “By Jove! Why shouldn’t it grow in mine as well? I’m blessed if I can’t do better than that.” ...The passion of the collector bursts out in him, driving him to raise everything according to the alphabet from Acaena to Zauschneria; then a craze for specialization breaks out in him, which makes of a hitherto normal being a rose-dahlia-or some other sort of exalted maniac. (17)
As with all human life, the push & pull between generation and curation, mimicry and niche-distinction rules the evolution of the garden, as it rules the evolution of human persona, as it rules the evolution of art.
Individuation, following Simondon, is the process of making choices, committing to one phase of being over another, in a process of becoming. The state of the chooser at any moment evidences the choices made, just as the state of the organism evidences the environmental selection pressures which shaped it (good regulator theorem). Subtract environment from position and you are left with a dis-position, the algorithm which chooses. This situation is complicated by the fact that one’s experiences of choice, and of differing states, perpetually refines the choosing algorithm; the disposition does not merely act within the environment but is discovered through action. (18)
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“Digital garden” is the emerging (generated, hardening) metaphor for an ecology of information. It is a place of stocking and accumulating, pruning and connecting and relating, which is fed and nourished by the flow of information which comes through browsing, streams, and feeds. Our vocabulary for information-consumption is a metaphorical extension of our vocabulary for resource-consumption: to browse is to graze; our engagement with the web is an herbivore’s practice. Metaphor and mimicry: this like that, that like this. Schlepping schlepping schlepping; connect the towns with roads, build a network. Some speculate that, in a branching path not taken of some previous Internet (a world of backlinks, a world of Xanadu) the garden, and not the stream, would be the organizing conceptual metaphor of life online.
But idea gardens are an old idea. The academy has always hoped to be such a garden, although it has often failed to strike a balance between order and chaos, inculcating conservatism. We must build and keep “gardens in our villages,” incubate them, keep them “flourishing in a great, open, windy world,” Oppenheimer—destroyer of worlds—speaks in “Prospects for Arts & Sciences.” The dialectic between generative creation and violent curation is one which Ullica Segerstråle, in her treatment of the socio-biology debate, sees as necessary to any healthy garden of thought, and as requiring two types of gardener: planters, who emphasize the generation of new hypotheses, who speculate and draft—and weeders, who serve by critiquing planted hypotheses for not being up to scientific snuff. Such dynamics are complicated when the plants become ends and not means, when the plants become people and the gardener police.
Do we need an information garden? Why? Because our information wild is too hectic, too chaotic, littered with info-hazards and the decomposing corpses of past worldviews. The canon as a garden, a partial path through, an artificial hedging within a fully endless forest. Most of the labyrinth’s forks lead nowhere—the dead-ends of models who never found mimics, suffered unlucky weather or lacked a careful gardener.
So inclusion is exclusion, as the truism goes, and to pick a path in a forking garden is always to dismiss the other options. Time and attention—so limited, are we, in a limitless world. So we go, making history, writing a stream of irreversible choices whose composition is informed by memories, altering structure that alters choices that alters structures, hoping to learn something in the middle way. “And the wisdom to know the difference.”
The natural cards revolve ever changing,
Seeded elsewhere, planted in the garden fair,
Grow trees, grow trees. Tongues of the sheer wind,
Setting your foot where the sand is untrodden,
The ocean that only begins.
1. "Sticky Heuristics," May 29 2022, tis.so2. S. Reason, El Morado 20203. Sarah Perry, Anthology 2020, Not Nothing Press.4. On Growth and Form 1917.5. Perry.6. M. Caulfield, “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral”7. Ibid.8. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, appointed by Napoleon III to overhaul the Parisian parks and public works.9. Unix documentation10. Incredible String Band, “Koeeoaddi There”11. Scurr12. R. Scurr, Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens13. Reason, El Morado14. Garden: An Essay on the Human Condition, 1985.15. Napoleon, notebooks16. Herzog, Aguirre Wrath of God17. Ibid18. Source lost, a decay of information.