h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

WILD GARDEN

This summer, surprisingly
For a Dublin garden, I saw
An enormous dragonfly
Black and golden, four
Inches long at least, settle
For a few glorious moments
On a convenient nettle.
My garden gets comments
Like, "How wonderfully wild"
Rather than, "Oh how nice."
I used to come here as a child
On Fridays. It was paradise.
My mother picked the flowers,
I ate raspberries and plums.
She spent happy hours
Pruning, I picked pips from my gums.
This summer I saw butterflies too,
(They love the rampant nettles,)
An orange-tip, and a smokey blue,
Tortoiseshells and peacocks on the petals
Of the wall valerian. You see weeds,
I see wild flowers. I agree
On one thing, planting seeds
In my garden leads to misery.
I'd love some lupins, hollyhocks
And big tree mallows. Slugs
Just eat them whole. My stocks
And lettuce seedlings fed the bugs
I would not douse with spray.
Pretty well-kept flowers in rows
As in my Mother's time
Or wilderness? The price you pay
( Is wildness a horticultural crime?)
For order, breed and colour grows
With every lurking weed you keep at bay.

( September 11th. 2001 series. )

Like, wild, man.
Go wild in the city.
Rus in urbe.

Dear Recumbentman.

This poem is about politics. By your remark you align yourself with Al-Qaeda! Intentionally? I doubt it, given your gentle philosophical stance. Maybe you missed the words in the brackets ( September 11th series.)

My own feelings on Sept 11th are still unresolved and contradictory. I loathe the gung-ho Bush-Blair alliance, just as I loathe the actual act of slamming two planes full of people into the World Trade Towers. But I cannot help sympathising with those who look with envy and resentment at the ultra-rich, ultra-materialist, consumerist western "civilisation" which corrupts everything it touches, and turns the entire world into a saleable commodity, or a resource to be exploited to extinction. Just as I wouldn't sacrifice one iota of technology if that sacrifice threatened the supply of anasthetics to my dentist.

Maybe I'm just a pathetic hand-wringer from the guilt-ridden privileged classes. But must one always choose sides? Eventually, presumably, one must.

Hi Chai .

May I be controversial here? I'll assume I can be until told otherwise.

Some words you never hear about the men who slammed those planes into the World Trade Centre:

Brave?
Intelligent?
Cunning?
Committed?
Effective?
Sons?

Allowed?

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

PS: A question of culture. How many cruise missiles would be fired by America if they had to have pilots?

And I thought it was just about gardening?! I was going to make comments about how I was looking forward to having a garden and was going to make a bog for frogs and a compost heap for hedgehogs and get bunnies to nibble the lawn instead of having a lawn mower.

Now I am most confused

Kaz, you're not the only one. I noticed the Sept 11th reference and wondered for a moment what relevance that could have. I guessed a person was being addressed with "The price you pay
( Is wildness a horticultural crime?)
For order, breed and colour grows
With every lurking weed you keep at bay." but couldn't quite work out was it self or another enemy . . . then he jollies me up with "By your remark you align yourself with Al-Qaeda!" Now if anyone else (other than my esteemed and pressed friend of long standing known in these pages as Chaiwallah) said that to me I'd yikes it quicker than you could say "Push the button".

Whatcha on about O Respected Wallah of Chai? If you want to talk politics in riddles, don't expect us all to get them . . .

As for your painful ambivalence, methinks the laddy doth protest too much. Identifying an entity such as 'the ultra-rich, ultra-materialist, consumerist western "civilisation" which corrupts everything it touches, and turns the entire world into a saleable commodity, or a resource to be exploited to extinction' is just too vast a simplification to carry much moral weight. Lighten up! Life's a piece of shit, when you look at it . . . whatever kind of ultra-consumerist or ultra-fundamentalist or ultra-apathist or not-particualrly-ultra-anything society you find yourself in. The problems are not solved that way!

Can you imagine any other civilization (than this western one you call such rude names) giving a tuppenny for Tibet, or human rights in distant places, or for the question of the justification for the recent Iraq invasion?

And now please tell me why Rus in urbe is an Al Qaeda slogan.

Hi Recumbantman .

I'm afraid I must take issue with one part of your reply:

"Can you imagine any other civilization (than this western one you call such rude names) giving a tuppenny for Tibet...".

As a long time supporter of the movement to restore Tibet I can assure you that our Western 'civilisation' doesn't actually give a damn about it. Despite clear and unequivocable evidence of the illegality of the Chinese invasion, the massacres, the ongoing repression and the human rights abuses the West has done precisely diddly-squat. If you asked 100 people on a British street about their opinion on the situation in Tibet, the majority wouldn't have a clue.

As for us standing up for Human Rights abuses we actually condone them by continuing to support the many countries that perpetrate them (especially if it furthers our interests). Some European countries even allow torture (with a judicial warrant)as a legitimate interrogation tool.

None of our political parties (in the UK) have a real commitment to ending this support, nor do they campaign on it at elections. The European Charter on Human Rights is a lawyers' dream, but does almost nothing for the population at large. The UN Charter is just another thing the signatories ignore. Some Western civilised nations even refuse to sign up to such accords as the Charter on the Rights of the Child (the USA for one).

We are such a bastion of civilisation - not!

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

Dear Recumbentman,

(1) Of course the problem is that I know what I was thinking about when I wrote the poem, and therefore assume ( wrongly ) that my meaning ( with the clue of Sept 11th.) is clear to anyone who reads it carefully.

(2) As to lightening up regarding the politics, erm, no. Math has made the basic point. But my remarks regarding western consumer culture were ( again ) specifically thinking in terms of Sept 11th., and what Islamic fundamentalists ( for whom I have little sympathy...except for the Palestinians who have been comprehensivly shafted since 1945 ) think of the USA and what it stands for. Namely, an all-encompassing consumerist materialism which views the world as a commodity to be exploited. Look at the power of the lobbies which actually control political influence in the USA, and thereby, the west to a considerable degree. Look at the relationship between the USA and Israel, then look at that from the point of view of a Palestinian. ( Of course, the fact that Osama Bin Laden is a rich Saudi is a sick twist in the equation of evil.)

(3) Of course Rus in Urbe is not an Al-Qaeda slogan. ( Reductio ad absurdum OK.) But, read the last lines of the poem carefully. It is about the price we pay for "civilisation," about order and chaos, about whether wildflowers are weeds. It's about context. And therefore about the clash of contexts, eg, the Islamic Sharia versus the West's "free market economy."

(4) The poem ends with statement,"The price you pay....for order grows/With every lurking weed you keep at bay." As the Middle East clearly demonstrates. Palestinians have been excluded from every kind of process of justice for so long, that Israel is now paying a huge price ( in terms of terrorist attacks ) for its relative order and prosperity. Indeed, if Hamas are the "weeds", then the Israeli use of force against them is looking increasingly ineffective as a "weed-killer.".

(5) Finally, in the context of my understanding of my poem, your remark;
"Like, wild, man
Go wild in the city..."
means do exactly what Al-Qaeda did. They "went wild" in the city. OK, to a rather extreme degree. But anarchic ( weedy ) behaviour is ultimately opposed to orderly, civilised ( pruned flower ) behaviour.

So, for me, your remark trivialised my intention in the poem. Hence my heavy-handed reply.

Hi Kaz, If you have read through this stuff I've just addressed to Recumbentman, you should be clearer about why my poem is about politics, not just gardening. My garden is a semi-civilised jungle, where nettles grow six feet tall ( but butterflies love them ) the brambles arch over the apple trees fifteen feet tall ( but I get the most delicious blackberries for ice-cream, juice, jam etc. I picked 50lbs last year!) My "lawn" is often ankle deep, but we have frogs, hedgehogs and foxes. Or had. Recently I fear the foxes have eaten both the frogs and the hedgehogs. So I get stung and scratched, but it's worth it. Ambivalent, or what?

Hi Math. Thanks for your input. The story of the West's relationship with Tibet is deeply depressing. Simply put, everyone wants to deal with China because of the perceived economic benefits. I've been actively involved with this for fifteen years, and the situation is not improving. The Tibetans were all too keenly aware of the irony that the West would go to war against Iraq ( last time ) to save Kuwait and its oil, but the fact that Tibet has huge oil reserves ( not to mention the world's largest uranium deposits, gold, silver, copper, and 126 other industrially essential minerals ) has not prompted the west to save Tibet from China!! Indeed quite the opposite. Several big western corporations are vying for the chance to be in on the plundering of Tibet's resources. The petrol/oil guys are first in...of course.

Thank you, I understand a little better now.

But I don't agree that what Al-Qaeda did was go wild. On the contrary they went extremely focussed, planned far ahead, kept their secret extremely clean . . . a lot of gardening went into the attack. And it was an untrecedented slap in the face of American values because it was a media coup that out-Hollywooded Hollywood. The ultimate disaster movie, and done the only way it could, to be sure to be caught live on TV. That's what stung the US pride. All they could say was "They can't do this to us -- We're a Superpower for God's sake". And what was it they "can't do"? Hijack the media, in a way that went much further than the c3,000 casualties.

Cold-blooded? Certainly; but not wild. Hothoused.

On order vs chaos: it's not a choice between the two. We need to balance constantly and accurately between them. Making either one conquer the other means death: the hot death of chaos or the cold death of order. (See Stuart Kaufmann, "At Home in the Universe".)

Math: I don't pretend that *most* people in the west care a tuppenny, only that certain ones (including yourself and Chai) do. OK it's not a lot, but it's an improvement on none.

Dear Recumbentman,

It seems we still are not quite talking on the same wavelength. If blowing up the WT Towers with a high-jacked plane full of people is not "wild" in the terms of my poem, I don't know what is. It's calculated, OK, but it's still wildly aggressive, destructive behaviour, which is what I mean by "wild" in me pome.

To pursue the allegory, ( always a bad idea...allegories can run faster than thought ) if in an ordered garden the neatly pruned rose-bushes represent order, then the ramping brambles, or twining bindweed represent disorder. Of course the bindweed is very cleverly programmed to entwine, and ultimately strangle any plant within its coils, while brambles, left to themselves, over-arch and smother anything in their reach. This is their own genetic "order", which makes use of our imposed order to benefit itself. But from the perspective of the gardener, it's purely, viciously "wild." Ditto Al-Qaeda, whether or not their plans were coldly calculated. You are equating "wildness" with hot emotion. I'm not, not in this poem anyway.

As to balance, just think of how my garden is, mainly wild. I wish I had time and energy to impose a bit more order, Meanwhile the blackberries look stunning, huge and ripe! But the bindweed has completely taken over the beds Murrough cleared last autumn, twining up the apple-trees, the old roses, the nettles, and even itself, where other support is lacking.

Yeah but wild in my particular Pickwickian sense . . .


All right: Al-qaeda represents anarchy????

Chaos is best described (by a friend at my elbow) as the conceptual opposite of order. You have been describing the clash of two orders.

Blimey!

Like Kaz, I thought it was about sunshine and flowers and butterflies and things.

Yes - I understand the metaphor, or some of it. Though I don't see the West as representing freedom, (the wild garden), though I can see the reaction to Al Qaeda as internally and externally repressive. But, me, I like both kinds of gardens, and I don't like repression, so the metaphor does not hit me hard and square.

I found the first four lines hard to read. I was expecting free verse because of the placing of the comma in lines 1, 2 and 4, and I needed to double back and read poem aloud to hear it. Starting sentances just before the ends of lines is troublesome, (viz Marvell and consequently me in my most recent love poem). This is not a criticism of your poem, just an observation about my habits as a reader.

Back to the metaphor. It seems to be about good times in a wild garden now, and good times in an orderly garden then. There seems to be no indication of the intrusion of 9/11 on our fecklessness. There also seems to be no allusion to the way our own, (or America's own), actions had causal responsibility for the fundamentalism which led to those attacks. If these things are missing, then obviously the poem is not about these things.

I am not entirely sure what it IS about? The Patriot Act? The US's clamping down on internal and external freedoms in the name of Freedom?

It is too sweetly good to carry its sinister message as effectively as your other poem about flowers and weapons.

The fault, dear Brutus, is in my lack of political awareness, though.

With love

B

Yeah, you tell im Ben

What - that I have no political awareness?

Cheers!

B

Hi Ben,

First off the punctuation. Re-reading it, there should definitely be a comma at the end of line 3, which then puts the phrase "Black and golden" in line 4 in its correct relationship with the preceeding line.

Regarding free verse, I think of this kind of poetry as rhyming free verse! By which I mean that it should be read totally conversationally, casually, with the rhymes barely noticeable, and the rhythm that of ordinary speech.

As to the metaphor; OK obviously, judging by the varied response, the metaphor has not succeeded, inasmuch as it's not clearly articulated enough for people to say,"Ah, yes..." That doesn't mean it's not about what I felt it to be about when I wrote it. But compared with the "Flowers over Baghdad" poem, it was not written in a moment of intense revelation/emotion.

Probably it doesn't even merit all this discussion, but I take your thoughts as an honour anyway. Thanks chaps.

So, I'll throw up something different.

Hmmm, let's see.

*baits breath...*

PS - it works massively easier as free verse with internal rhymes. It might be worth repaginating it in that way, and seeing what it looks and feels like if you do.

B

Hmmm. That's a thought! Ta.

(massively more easily - )

Ben -- I meant, you tell im "It is too sweetly good to carry its sinister message . . ."

You know my opinion of free verse from my rimickle on the subject; I thought it very disciplined of Chai to do metre and rhyme here. Grimley Moer has him in the hypnotic thrall of regular verse.

Alas I think he lost me where he added the line "( Is wildness a horticultural crime?)", and I misread the next line

The price you pay
. . .For order, breed and colour grows
With every lurking weed you keep at bay.

I might have got the message had he put the comma thus

The price you pay
. . .For order breed and colour, grows
With every lurking weed you keep at bay.

or even

The price you pay
. . .For order, breed and colour, grows

I thought he meant "breed and colour grows", silly me. And after all I just read it late at night, not very attentively, stuck in a reply to show that I'd been there, and lo he berates me for not solving it thoroughly. Poets! And well he might.

Oh hello Chai! Sorry to be talking about you behind your back!