rough draft

CHAPTER 15. EPILOGUE: HUMAN NATURE, TECH LIFE AND

GARDENWORLD.

"[The] cultural obsession with the art object is slowly disappearing and
being replaced by what might be called 'systems consciousness.' Actually,
this shifts from the direct shaping of matter to a concern for organizing
quantities of energy and information...

Jack Burnham At the conclusion of Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968)

If we cannot get to GardenWorld, the reasons why, and the deeper nature of
our time, will be clarified by the attempt. We are one of god’s most interesting
experiments, and it is not going too well. He needs help, or, how interesting human
are can only be found out by brining the maximum good from them, the way only a
good violinist can bring out the rare qualities of a Stradivarius.

There are discouraging voices. I’ve mentioned Diamond’s brilliant Collapse,

and Chalmers Johnson’s trilogy ending in Nemesis, in which he argues we can
either be a republic or an empire, but not both.., "This book was not easy to write. I
do not like what it has to say about my country. But I am convinced by the course
of events leading up to and the developments following the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, that this analysis is fundamentally correct. It is because I do
not like stating that the United States is probably lost to militarism that this book is
so heavily documented."

...a growing number [of Americans] finally began to grasp what most non-
Americans already knew and had experienced over the previous half century –
namely, that the United States was something other than what it professed to be,
that it was, in fact, a military juggernaut intent on world domination.i[i]
 Another is the final thought from Neil Ferguson’s War of the Worlds,.. “We
shall avoid another century of conflict only if we understand . . the dark forces that
conjure up ethnic conflict and imperial rivalry out of economic crisis, and in doing
so negate our common humanity. They are forces that stir within us still.” … “In
writing this book I have begun to doubt whether the war of the world described
here can genuinely be regarded as over even now. . . As long, it seems, as men plot
the destruction of their fellow-men—as long as we dread and yet also somehow
yearn to see our great metropolises laid waste—this war will recur, defying the
frontiers of chronology.”

And we can end with Mathew Arnold’s 1852 Dover Beach

THE SEA is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

To which we can answer with Shakespeare in The Tempest..

…………..

What comes to our help is the idea of evocative symbols, symbols that touch
deep emotional roots that are not just intense and irrational, but deeply rational and
soul making judgments about what is right and good. I hope GardenWorld is such
an evocative symbol. Experience so far tells me it is.

And I hope that Blake’s lines do not , alas, apply to me.

The last poem in Poetical Sketches, “To the Muses,” looked sadly at
contemporary poets and addressed them reprovingly:

How have you left the ancient love

That bards of old enjoy’d in you!

The languid strings do scarcely move!

The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!

And recall that line,

To make the frozen circumstances dance,

you must sing to them their own melody.

i[i] From the introduction to the new edition of Blowback, page 4.