A Strategy for the Reclamation of Eden

Abstract

Recently, to take brief refuge from the crowded and noisy city-world I inhabit, I visited the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It was a balmy Sunday, and there were many people strolling about and lounging on the grass. In close proximity, even if arranged at some distance from one another, there were Hasidic Jews and migrant Arabs, American and Haitian Black people, and Hispanic-Caribbean teenagers. There were Italian and Irish-Americans, and Chinese and Korean families arriving from the Japanese garden. Young couples caressed and gazed and old couples sat and remembered. A baby's cry momentarily threatened the cloister-like atmosphere, but the sound floated away into the air, enveloped by the total peace of the scene.What, I asked myself, was the secret of that peace? How, I wondered, could people ever duplicate in their wider collectivities and interactions, the social chemistry of that harmony ?Anthropologists cannot state precisely when people first began to plant gardens. Recent archaeological studies put the domestication of plants in the Old World at about 10,000 years ago. But when did human beings first begin to plant gardens for pleasure and not merely to satisfy hunger? When did they first cultivate water lilies and plant trees as much for their blossoms as for their fruit? When, in other words, did they first purposively transform their surroundings in fulfillment of a moral and aesthetic ideal? At what decisive moment did our Neolithic ancestors choose to create a thoroughly humanized, thoroughly natural lanscape?The gardens of antiquity were aristocratic retreats. The word 'paradise' derives from the ancient Persian word for royal garden, pardes, an idyllic preserve where kings could roam and ride and hunt in the manner of their less civilized forbears. The impulse to plant gardens and to build pantheons is a unitary oneboth are visionary microcosms: both select and express in abstract form the manifold possibilities of human nature as revealed to elites in the radiant light of limitless power and wealth.If, as Ludwig Feuerbach has suggested, God is merely a projection of potentials unrealized in persons, then the cult of the garden bears witness to the unfulfilled promises of cooperative social labor, even as it makes of the 'good life' an unattainable dream. The Great Garden, from whence our mythic ancestors fled, cowering and ashamed, still symbolizes a simpler and lovelier world which we have lost and are too afraid, immature, and barbaric to reclaim. Our century, after all, is the century of Auschwitz. Our gardens inhale the carcinogenic air of our cities and are within earshot of their clamor and their strife.