[lit-ideas] Re: Sunday Wotsit
- From: cblists@xxxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2012 22:42:26 +0200
On 10-Jun-12, at 9:06 PM, David Ritchie wrote:
Industrial society relies on larger neural networks than the
preceding agricultural one. And the passions that go with, the ones
to emerge half way through the nineteenth century, were gardening
and team sports. Both invite us to evaluate aesthetically the
relationship between the individual and the whole. One lesson of my
garden this week, shared by the first display by the Dutch team in
Euro 2012, is that collective show and beauty can be undone by a
surprising shower. And individuals? We know there is nothing
certain in the world and that intimations of mortality sometimes
work like coughed-out hints in teenage classrooms--remember those?
We nonetheless dress ourselves as if the world cared, as if we
matter. In fact those who buzz around only notice when they are not
too preoccupied, and were we to fade or come undone, they would
wander without us. We and the glories of the world all fade.
Sometimes the marauding Danes win; sometimes shot hole virus gets
the cherry. That is history. The only thing certain in life is
that Germans will win on penalties, except when Drogba and the
Chelsea flower show deny.
Very nice commingling of gardening and team sports.
Cf. Rudyard Kipling - surely one of the foremost champions of mid-
nineteenth century mores and attitudes (never mind that he lived well
into the twentieth) - on gardening and (or rather, as a metaphor
*for*) team *work*:
The Glory of the Garden
- Rudyard Kipling
OUR England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.
For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,
You'?ll find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all,
The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dungpits and the tanks,
The rollers, carts and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks.
And there you'?ll see the gardeners, the men and ?Prentice boys
Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise;
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.
And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows;
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,
For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.
Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:??Oh, how beautiful!? and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinnerknives.
There?s not a pair of legs so thin, there?s not a head so thick,
There?s not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick,
But it can find some needful job that?s crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.
Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it?s only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.
Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener?s work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!
And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!
Chris Bruce,
thin-legged, thick-headed, weak-handed and sick-hearted;
thankfully putting away the 'broken dinnerknives' for another week,
in Kiel, Germany
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