How does STA – an acceptance of the seemingly real facts I have listed about us and the world, and the ‘natural duties’ which I claim follow – how does this colour everyday life? As the sole adherent of the STA movement (though, of course, the ideas are not new, and are observed under different guises and descriptions all over the world), I can only refer to my own experience. [Footnote: in a slightly sardonic mood one day I noted, ‘This is a book all about me and my crusade against egotism.’]
I do not wash, shave or eat my cornflakes in an especially STA way (as I think, mutatis mutandis, a diligent student of mindfulness would). Perhaps I should. But I don’t demand that the ‘Natural Duties’ should be one’s exclusive preoccupation – that one should be manically painting murals, helping old ladies (or, of course, beings of any age, gender, race or species in similar circumstances) across busy roads, sighing with breathless wonder at raindrops and bed-bugs. It would be exhausting, and irritating for everyone else too. But neither do I regard STA as mere consolation – an activity for weekend retreats or coffee-breaks ‘empowering’ you to tolerate the grimness of the rest of your life. The search for consolation is an endorsement of slavery. We can all do better than that.
STA is the context for everyday life, and an invaluable perspective in my garden design work. Understanding the haecceity of each place, each micro-climate, each client; one’s awareness of the myriad individual elements involved; the leap of imagination to realise and re-present the unity they all enjoy – all these are essential parts of the work.
That creation is a continuous process is nowhere more apparent than in this choreography of living things. Although garden design is popularly associated with ‘projects’, the garden is never fixed and never finished. In this it is the least artificial of the arts. You can never step into the same garden twice. This continuum of ‘process’ needs to underlie all the work. Garden design does have an ‘aim’ but it is a quality rather than a quantity, and so its achievement – like any art, like the position and momentum of a photon – is unpindownable, a subjective matter constantly changing, but no less real for that. The aim is the overall ‘effect’ as seen from a human perspective (which does not imply indifference to the individual needs of all the contributors). This is the dance in which the trees and shrubs and bulbs and birds and stones and the rest all join: the steps are never exactly repeated, the dancers themselves are constantly leaving or joining the floor, but however nebulous and indefinable the concept seems, however impatient of precise scientific description, it is plain to any spectator.
The physicist Richard Feynman also uses this image of the dance. Noting that the atoms that make up the brain are continually replaced, he writes, ‘the thing which I call my individuality is only a pattern, a dance. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, then go out; always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.’ [Footnote: I’m not sure what he is implying by that ‘only’. Does he mean that because it is not material it does not exist? No, because he has told us it exists. Does he mean that it’s just a name and not a reality? If so, how do the new atoms ‘remember’ the dance? Is it because the ‘memory’ is the individuality, and the dance its manifestation? Would that imply that the individuality has an existence before it is physicalized as the dance? Is this ‘memory’ then our supra-physical being, our soul? Or is it just a metaphor which explains nothing, merely re-stating the problem? But it is a lovely metaphor. Let’s try it without the troublesome ‘only’: ‘the thing which I call my individuality is a pattern, a dance.’ Will that do?]
Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time (Wallace Collection)
Individuality, gardens, art – the same pattern of indefinability but unarguable reality appears. David Jones insisted that once an artist ‘has put two marks on the drawing paper – he has made, not two marks, but three & it is by the invisible third ‘mark’ that we know whether the other two have significance.’
D.H. Lawrence wrote,
Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,
But there is also a third thing, that makes it water
And nobody knows what that is.
These things are more than the sum of their parts. [Footnote: Ravel is at the same business. Orchestration, he says, ‘means you are building an atmosphere of sound around the music, around the written notes.’ ‘Complèxe mais pas compliqué’ was his motto.] Whether this arises by divine sanction or is simply the property of complex interactions of matter (or if the two are synonymous), it is this, the dance, that gives meaning, taking us beyond the merely quantitative. If water is the third thing emergent from H2O; if the third mark is emergent from the previous two; if our identity is emergent from the action of the atoms in our brain, and yet then determines the actions of those atoms (or, at least, the atoms ‘know’ to follow the same dance steps), is there then perhaps a God emergent from the complexity of the universe, as immaterial as our other examples but as real, perhaps originally created by (or simultaneously with) the universe but then continuing it as we continue the dance, and determining it in some way as we determine our actions? Would such an emergent God rule out a kick-starter creator God? Or is it rather gauche to think in terms of time and causality? It is certainly naïve to think that Phlo and I will work it out this afternoon.
We know no more than the two on the road to Emmaus, than the two marks know of the existence of the third, than the penstemons know of the garden plan or than the atoms in my brain know I’m writing this. ‘For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’ Is that a hint that God emerges out of complexification? I have no idea. Probably not. But it’s fun to wonder, to whip the butterfly-net of my mind through the brightness to see what I catch – truth, froth, nothing. And not just fun, there’s fulfilment in it too.
Garden-making, then, involves creation as curation. [Footnote: the current use of ‘curator’ to mean ‘someone who puts an exhibition together’ is misleading – ‘anthologist’ or even ‘artist’ would be better. The root sense of ‘curator’ involves ‘caring’; it is a continuing process, not a temporary project.] Curation is implicitly humble. Indeed, it would be helpful if it were recognized that all creative work is in some sense curation, the preservation and re-presentation of the subject. We do not make our marks to say ‘I exist! I did this!’ but to say ‘This exists, and I have experienced it. How wonderful!’ Everything we do is a response. Like the Aboriginals walking the earth and singing to keep it alive, gardeners curate the creation. In both the original design and the subsequent maintenance, we are treading with obstinate humility a narrow path between acquiescence and dogmatism – neither letting nature be, nor dictating to it (or, if you prefer, both letting it be and dictating to it) – towards the Paradise we never reach because it is no fixed destination. Our garden (like anything else in nature) is ‘process’ not ‘project’; movement and change are its very essence. Even in the stillness of a Japanese Zen garden sap pulses, bugs crawl, molecules teem and swarm.
The dream we have of stillness is, in reality, a plenitude of activity. It is the stillness of the blades of a propeller spinning too fast for us to see, or the myriad random actions of the particles combining into a larger coherence, for which ‘harmony’ or ‘balance’ might be a better word than ‘stillness’ with its connotations of absence. The night sky seems dark only because we are so short-sighted: if we could see to the end of the universe it would all be starlight – one great bright blaze, the individual stars tight-packed and indistinguishable as the burning molecules that make up a candle flame. [Footnote: yes, I know, a few black holes would get in the way.]
Kandinsky, Heavy Circles (Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena)
"Gathering all things in,
twining each bruised stem
to the swaying trellis of the dance"
(David Jones)
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