Gardening as a statement on God’s aesthetics—or evidence of the nonexistence of God. If God’s aesthetics were sufficient, then nature walks would be enough. Nature walks are wonderful, but so are garden walks. And nature walks have to have their complement of gardens.
Nonrepresentational art as a manifestation of the invisible of being.
Nothing in the Universe Is Green.
One has to be as precise as one can be with one’s vocabulary here understanding that at the most precise one will still be trying to pick pennies off the dirt with oven mitts.
Every gardener understands implicitly that the universe expresses itself very inadequately in nature. Nature is beautiful in the way that maple syrup is tasty, only after it has been boiled down. With syrup it’s at about a 25:1 ratio. Nature’s boiling down consists of plowing up and reshaping the canvas as needed and rearranging the plants and breeding and engineering new ones. Like all art it involves an inexact and wavering ratio of conscious choice and stated reasons to instinctive irrational responses to the materials. I don’t know what nonrepresentational gardening would be.
Nonrepresentational art eliminates the ratio by reducing the reasoned part to zero. But the aim is still the same: to manifest the invisible of the universe. Even if the aim is unstated, implicit and unknown.
These were the old words: truth, essence, nature, structure, representation. Oven mitts. They were not abandoned because they were wrong but because they were partial, because what they exclude belongs inside them, because to understand nature, nothing in nature can be excluded.
Understand is an oven mitt. One does not understand nonrepresentational art. One experiences it. Nonrepresentational art does not understand nature, it manifests it. But, as with gardening, the manifestation is a transformation, like giving colors to invisible light. Like giving color to anything. Nothing in the universe is green. Even Galileo understood his. The eye is already an artist, allowing the brain to experience some small part of being by picking apart the wavelengths of light and painting everything.
Art does what every body was already doing.
Every manifestation is therefore also a representation—depending on how you look at it. How you see it depends on how you look at it. Nonrepresentational artists may have no clue what they are representing. They like to say the “self.” “I’m expressing my self.” But what does your self express? What is it a piece of? Is it my self? Or is it nature or the universe of God? Is it those oven mitts in their shared parts or in their diversity and variety? Or some of all?
There are the pars we can know and the parts we can only experience and the parts we can’t know or experience but can hint at. And there are the parts we can’t even hint at.
What is a garden? It is nature re-made. Every gardener knows that if she were God she’d have added more color and more bloom in a more coherent arrangement with so much less wasted space. Every heightening and refining of nature in the garden is a critique of God if God is a gardener.
Gratitude for the materials if God is just a supplier. (The criticism of God that God is not an artist as often as his materials may themselves be beautiful and his universe elegant in pieces). It is a slapdash universe: the critique of God that his universe is nonrepresentational.
Can a garden heighten and refine without critiquing God? Can a garden reduce nature to its essence so we can comprehend or experience it in its heightening or refinement without critiquing God—the problem being dilution or scale? No. Every garden is a critique of God from a human perspective. If I were you I’d’ve done it this way. Why didn’t you?
Every garden is also a question. If this is your garden, why are you hiding? Why is your signature smudged?
Every garden even every failed garden is a statement that something is wrong with the way things are.
