Saturday as Field

The rains came early this year, washing away the large wolf spiders that cover the Bay Area every autumn and illuminating the mossy patches they guarded.

Pruned the lilac bush to revel the garden within the garden. Cleared away the vines tangling their way around everything, redirecting traffic upward. Pushed back at the miserable weed growing wherever there is unclaimed land with its sticky clawing at; the struggle against this subversion is a never ending, year round battle. I garden the same way I read; randomly collecting as much of what I can.

Starting with the function of space in text; The Garden then is a fluid example. Laid out for the reader via the viewer/a voice(s)/a flawed but seeing specter, an I/eye independent of objectivity, comfortable in the logic of their fiction.

This led me back to thinking about the garden in Under the Volcano again; admittedly a favorite subject. Malcolm Lowery's Garden contains the ultimate warning:

Do you like this garden? It is yours, Make sure your children do not destroy it.

The Consul's Garden has gone wild:

The tragedy, proclaimed, as they made their way up the crescent of the drive, no less by the gaping potholes in it than by the tall exotic plants, livid and crepuscular though his dark glasses perishing on every hand of unnecessary thirst..."Regard: see how strange, how sad, familiar things may be. Touch this tree, once your friend... Considering the agony of the roses... Do you know their sweet aroma any more? Regard: the plantains with their queer familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death. You don't know how to love these things any longer. All your love is the cantinas now: the feeble survival of a love of life now turned to poison, which only is not wholly poison, and poison has become your daily food... UTV Chapter III

Chapter five, taking place as it does in the garden, amid the thundering effect of alcohol poisoning transforms an unkempt back yard into a symbolic jungle through which the consul staggers searching for a bottle of Tequilla he has hidden there for just such desperate occasions. After procuring the necessary drink needed to regain a toxic equilibrium, the Consul discovers he is not alone, as his next door neighbor, Quincey, witnessed the whole sorry dash into the bushes. Being English, the Consul attempts to maintain a civilized appearance with his compatriot by making light of the whole affair. Commenting on having seen a snake a moment before he says:

"And it made me think... do you know, Quincey, I've often wondered whether there isn't more in the old legend of the Garden of Eden, and so on, than meets the eye. What if Adam wasn't really banished from the place at all? That is, in the sense we used to understand it--...--what if his punishment really consisted," the Consul continued with warmth, "in having to go on living there, alone, of course--suffering, unseen, cut off from god... UTV Chapter V

Pretty sure the essay introduction to the new Modern Library edition of UTV talks about the "environmentalism" of the novel. This might be going a bit too far, but there is something in Lowery's attention to nature. It may be closer to the truth to say that the Consul, and for the most part the person I understand Lowery to have been--via Pursued By Furies-- suggests an eco-consciousness, not necessarily Green in the contemporary meaning, but aware of nature. There is also the prevailing sense of a split throughout, the Consul is divorced from nature but still there in the corporeal sense. The nature of the fall then is this: To be aware of something is to be separated from it.