the edge of nowhere - 27th June 2015
From the edge of Nowhere looking for John Clare
“This is good. I like this,” Holly said, admiring a dense emanation of common or garden plants variously in flower and seed. Their shoots and foliage, fresh or senescent, entwined, interlocked and layered to form a raw and unkempt botanical culture of cyclical ascendency and decline.
We stood sharing a brief moment of quiet absorption in the thriving living tapestry before I interrupted the reverie.
“Ah, thank you. Yes. This is our Utopia; a Utopian raised bed in which weeds are tolerated, where anything goes and grows,” I replied, with some tongue-in-cheek relish in the pun. I did not ask Holly what she thought was good about ‘Utopia’, nor why she liked it however Holly appeared most interested in the profusion of poppy heads. Their slight movements in the gentle breeze were so synchronous as to create an illusion of them floating above the crowded island of entangled plants.
Holly and I moved on to another part of the allotment and so abandoned that potential meeting of our minds in the darker, less ethereal, undergrowth of the island.
Are tolerance and coexistence among the fundamental tenets of ‘Utopia’, as described in the book written by Thomas More and published in 1516? Does anything ‘go’ in ‘Utopia’? As ‘Utopia’ approaches its 500th year, there seems to my more contemporary mind much that is intolerant about society on ‘Utopia’. There is some paradoxical tension in confusing tolerance with laissez-faire. More’s treatise explores an island on which inequality, e.g. in property, is intolerable, but where slavery and patriarchy/chauvinism are tolerated and form a fundamental part of the social fabric there. To what extent are deviation, difference, dissent, protest and free will tolerated on ‘Utopia’? Could someone withdraw from his or her compulsory (?) 2 years of agricultural labour on ‘Utopia’ because she or he disagrees with any particular husbandry practised there?
This is a loose application of tolerance on my part and it possibly reveals that I have not fully read the book or understand particularly well the philosophical dilemmas it describes. However, I have read this in ‘Utopia’ and think it pertinent to that encounter in the allotment archipelago – ‘this’ reads,
‘nature has so made us, that we all love to be flattered and to please ourselves with our own notions…’ (Thomas More, 1516)
I could have declared the raised bed as our, or your, ‘Eden’ but who or what am I? What ‘notions’ or conceits would ‘Eden’ imply? The allotment is not my private property although it does involve a lot of personal and social investment of various sorts. Our allotment garden is a place made principally of raised beds and I wonder if each raised bed, each an island, might be named after each of the no-places making up the entirety of the ideal mind-scape. How many words and names are there for ‘paradise’, ‘heaven’, ‘utopia’ and so on? They could all be there, a field of names, in flux, according to the cycles, rotations and verisimilitudes of gardening life.
What would belong in the archipelago of no-places? What should or could be tolerated in the allotment in terms of cultivation? This is a question concerning public ownership and individual responsibility acting within that. What I, or we as gardeners, do is, ideally, looking forward to the next gardeners. We are preparing, maintaining and cultivating the ground for them – and us. So what then is the value of ‘my’ raised bed-fellowship of weeds; those tenacious stranglers, smotherers, stingers, scratchers and snaggers – a barely contained penal colony of villainous herbs? Is the creeping buttercup to be brutally expunged from ‘Nusquam’? Will the somniferous poppy be meticulously routed from the Elysium field? Is there a right to nurture this sort of colony of outlaw plants that will, of course, escape and spread, to create so much toil for the future gardeners of this little patch of land?
I made homage to John Clare from a photographic image of my ‘Utopia’. The island is intended as a sanctuary for him, his memory or his spirit, in the midst of my otherwise brutal dictatorial mono-culturalism. He can be a guide to the poetic rhapsodies of the wild bunch and its mysterious fellowship. However, Clare’s elegiacal poems, his sense of loss of intimately known places – intimate no-places – ‘nowheres’ – may not make for the most forward looking and sustaining places to grow food unless, in that poetic intimacy, there is to be found a deeper understanding of what makes for lasting fertility.
'Utopia' - 27th June 2015
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