Step Out into the Abyss

The first chapter is suitably entitled "Approach" for this phenomenologically-informed discourse.

Every approach needs to presume upon its reception. And, so, in beginning we never fear that we shall be wholly misunderstood, we trust that our hesitancy, our stumbling talk, and our choice of words are not a search in the dark. To begin is confidently part of the work of building and sharing an understanding. It is ideally the institution of making sense together within a common life and a come world.

John O'Neill. Making Sense Together: An Introduction to Wild Sociology

By some form of association this calls to mind a marker placed in the ground at the parting of a cedar hedge into a view of the meadow with one word "abbyss" to indicate the leap not only of perception but of imagination (seen at the garden created by Douglas Chambers, Stonyground) which is an allusion to "Upon Appleton House" by Andrew Marvell

And now to the Abbyss I pass
Of that unfathomable Grass,

I let Chambers explain its origins himself (and you gentle reader to judge its aptness for juxtaposition with wild sociology):

That summer I was writing an article on Andrew Marvell's poem "Upon Appleton House": the first record of an Englishman's recognition that the landscape is also a garden. Marvell has provided several texts for my landscape but perhaps none is so apposite as the one that now sits at the edge of the west lawn, just as you walk into the meadow. "Abbyss", it says, in Marvell's spelling: a signal that you are about to pass across an abyss from the fixed architectural formalities of the garden into the true abbeys [sic] of nature.

There is a picture of the "Andrew Marvell quotation at the border of garden and landscape" in Stonyground: The making of a Canadian garden. Chambers's "true abbeys of nature" recalls as does Marvell's poem that the seat of Fairfax's estate, Appleton House, was once a nunnery. Common life and common world.

And so for day 2025
29.06.2012

Where Laboratory meets Library

Jennifer Bennett in Our gardens, ourselves : reflections on an ancient art quotes Elizabeth Lawrence to the effect that

I cannot help it if I have to use my own well-designed garden as a laboratory, thereby ruining it as a garden.

The quotation is plucked somewhere from Gardening for Love: The Market Bulletins. It reverberates for me with a notion that I have held for a long time that a garden is a library (a kind of DNA bank). Whether the library comes equipped with scanners or limits users to note taking in pencil, the old work of quotation and annotation has a familiar gardening feel.


And so for day 395
12.01.2008

Increments of incrimination

Martin Buber Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters translated by Olga Marx

Zusya's account of the "incomplete" angel-accuser that emerges from acts of sin

The Accuser

This is Rabbi Zusya's comment on the pasage in the Sayings of the Fathers: 'He who commits one transgression has gotten himself one accuser.' "Every sin begets an accusing angel. But I have never seen a complete angel spring from the sin of a devout man of Israel. Sometimes he lacks a head; sometimes his body is crippled. For when a man of Israel believes in God, believes in him even while he is sinning, his heart aches, and what he does, he does not do with all his will, and so the angel never emerges complete."

Reminds one of the Buddhist teaching about how the seeds of hate shrivel up while tending with loving kindness to one's affairs in the world, especially as related by Thich Nhat Hanh.

And so for day 389
06.01.2008