Glass Houses
And there was another noise, that of my life become the life of this garden as it rode the earth of deeps and wildernesses.
What can flowers teach us about art? The question sounds flippant, even a bit silly. We live in serious times. Everybody knows this. Art, we tend to think, should be serious too. It should be profound, or ought at least to avoid those clichés of the beautiful surface with which flowers seem to be synonymous. ‘What kind of times are these’, asked Bertolt Brecht ‘when a conversation about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence about so many horrors?’ Trees, flowers, flowers against glass, dust in sunlight, sunlight on snow. These, Brecht says, are what we notice in moments of distraction, of fleeting separation from the meat of our lives. They are pleasures glimpsed on the wing, the distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight. Not to be trusted.
Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be. Then I was no longer that sealed jar to which I owed my being so well preserved, but a wall gave way and I filled with roots and tame stems for example, stakes long since dead and ready for burning, the recess of night and the imminence of dawn, and then the labour of the planet rolling eager into winter, winter would rid it of these contemptible scabs. Or of that winter I was the precarious calm, the thaw of the snows which make no difference and all the horrors of it all all over again.
Brecht’s confident certainty feels remote from our own days. To imagine a politics that addresses horror by turning away from trees! – in our times, when every conversation about trees seems weighed down with human catastrophe. So naïve, this vision of modernity, with its factories and aeroplanes pointing straight towards the future. So convinced the world’s problems would be solved without nature.
We need other ways to think. The separation of human production from natural reproduction will no longer serve. It is here that a relationship which long seemed defunct – that between the artist and the natural world – might open a way. The artist does this each time she transcribes the shapes of trees through the window, the patterns formed by water in a storm, or the slow, moist growth of the forest floor. She does it each time she forms those analogies which are the joy of viewing painting or sculpture – between a man’s face and a tree’s trunk, say, or a stone wall and an earthwork. Each time art comes to the forms of nature and gives them back intact, it suggests a transfer, an equivalence between terms – human and natural – the opposition of which has wrought so much catastrophe. Each time it suggests that things might be otherwise.
But that did not happen to me often, mostly I stayed in my jar and knew neither seasons nor gardens.[1]
Text by Saul Nelson
