Category: Gardens

Getting back to the garden

Posted onAuthorumphrey

White clematis, red roses

White clematis, red roses

I believe the purpose of our life is to find our way back to the garden, where we began. Once we didn’t need to care for the garden–it was a gift. But we couldn’t stay there, except at the cost of never being fully human.

I’ve learned the way back to the garden. We merely have to create it around us. Then we will be able to keep it because we understand it.

What did God mean when he said it was good, after finishing Creation? I meet a lot of young people these days who do not have any very useful understanding of what “goodness” means, who are not even sure it is something they should want. They confuse “goodness” with obeying a list of rules. This is understandable, since teaching an understanding of goodness often includes teaching rules.

But goodness is something much larger and more important than a list of rules. Mainly, it is the vision beyond the rules. A vision of people living in all the little and big ways that support happiness. Fully realized, the vision is a vast and complex ecological order, quite beyond the comprehension of children.

And so we teach children little rules that preserve the good order and make visible its principles. Our rules are not meant to deprive children of freedom. Quite the opposite–they are the stepping stones that keep us out of the cold, swirling forces we traverse moment by moment and that lead us to freedom.

When Valerie’s and my children were small, exploring the world with hands and mouths, Valerie kept a philodendron on the coffee table. Often that poor plant got dumped on the floor or had its leaves torn off before we could intervene. Over and over we gently stopped little hands and said “No!” It would have been easier, no doubt, to simply to move the plant out of reach until the children were older, but that would be a controller’s strategy–to turn our home into a huge cocoon in which everything was either child-proof or out of reach.

Sure, we put cleaning solvents, prescription medicines, and other items that could cause genuine danger out of reach, but the philodendron was sacrificed to an ideal: it is better to awaken children than to pad the rooms where they are sleepwalking.

What we awaken them to is the order that surrounds them, which is the order of our living, which is our best approximation so far of our vision of goodness.

Sometimes we encountered a gleeful daughter wildly shredding the leaves of the forlorn philodendron. Such moments rightly understood are teaching opportunities. When I lightly slapped my daughter’s hand and said “No!” I only wanted her to learn.

I would have been disappointed if she had learned that plants are never to be touched, though from her child’s perspective that must at first have seemed a possibility. But in fact, I wanted her to learn things she could not then comprehend. “Thou shalt not touch the philodendron” was a little rule that didn’t express our final will but hinted at a deeper law that might be expressed “Thou shalt respect living things,” or “Thou shalt live in a house of order.” And beyond these laws was a higher reality: “Thou shalt love plants.”

We wanted our children to learn to live in a garden, which is to say we wanted them to understand the earth and the processes of life, and we wanted them to care for the world in wise ways. We wanted them to recognize and desire goodness, which is complex and requires us to live amid ordered loves.

That’s quite a bit to learn. So we start with simple things: don’t touch the philodendron. We knew our daughter would question the rule, and we also knew that as her questioning spirit became more powerful, our answers, both implicit and explicit, would lead her toward what we really hoped to teach.

It wasn’t long before we let her to help with such tasks as watering the plant. As she grew, we negotiated with her, gradually increasing her responsibilities and freedom to keep pace with her understanding.

In time the philodendron rule became irrelevant as she learned that plants not only could be touched, but they could be pruned, re-potted, fertilized and enjoyed. Beyond the philodendron rule lay profound principles, more difficult to understand but more liberating to live. Beyond the philodendron rule lay all the principles of wisdom, which are identical with the principles of goodness.

Wise traditions teach goodness by giving rules without making the rules absolute. Life is complicated in precisely the way ecosystems are complicated, and inexperienced people are likely to make decisions that damage or destroy their chances at happiness before they can see the long-term consequences of what they do. Good rules help keep young people safe while they are still learning how life works.

As Wendell Berry observed, the rules of morality are guidelines to long-term practicality. In many cases, they are summaries of centuries of experience about what sorts of actions tend toward misery, and of what sorts of actions contribute to happiness.

Goodness is almost a synonym for wisdom, since happiness in this world will be fleeting unless our thoughts and actions are in harmony with the way things really are.

“Truth” is our name for that harmony.

A happy life is a garden–a thing of beauty made out of the materials of this life, arranged in harmony with both the laws of science and the principles of beauty. It is an emblem of care, an embodiment of joy. It adheres to principles of selection which allow careful editing of what the world offers. It includes a long history of things learned and remembered, and a long future of things desired and hoped.

And always, it is here. It is now.

Can we fight evil without imitating it?

Posted onAuthorumphrey

A review of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay–Part 1

Katniss discovers a white rose, which unlike the other flowers has not wilted. It's a message from President Snow, who cultivates the flower to mask the smell of blood. Flowers are ephemeral, symbolizing the hope of beauty. Now they have become ominous, unnaturally enduring.

Katniss discovers a white rose, which, unlike the other flowers, has not wilted. It’s a message from President Snow, who cultivates the flower to mask the smell of blood. Flowers are ephemeral, symbolizing the hope of beauty. Now they have become ominous, unnaturally enduring.

Several critics have noted that although Mockingjay–Part 1 was largely exposition, lacking the action of the first two Hunger Games movies, they liked it anyway. It may be a satisfying art form for an age that often understands itself as poised in a pre-apocalyptic moment, dangling between the trouble we have known and a greater trouble that has to be coming. A film about the calm before a storm feels right.

But there’s more, I think. The real struggle we are engaged in will not be settled, this time, by missiles and bombs. Our disagreements are ontological and epistemological, so language is the arena in which this generation’s epic battle is being engaged. The Hunger Games gives that struggle accessible form by casting it as a war between Katniss’s impulse to love and Snow’s compulsion to control. The battle goes beyond physics–bullets and bombs–into the realm of spirit, and all outcomes at lower levels will fail to be decisive.

So some in the audience may want a story that moves beyond fighter jets and lasers. This third film centers on that contest between the President and the Mockingjay, and this penultimate chapter of their epic contest is waged in words and images. We stranded in a propaganda war for the hearts and minds of the Capitol’s subjects. To be sure, we see that we are fated to move quite beyond words into a bloodier realm of earthquake and thunder–there are constant skirmishes that leave fields strewn with corpses–but compared to earlier episodes the war is now waged in rhetoric. For the moment, antagonists struggle to give form, words and images, to our understanding of what is at stake, the meaning of good and evil.

The moral tone of the story has grown darker. Snow is clearly evil. Snow’s hypocrisy is vivid. The Capitol’s rhetoric about the common good and human flourishing is mere stratagem to perpetuate an oligarchy of masters who control a vast system of subjugation and poverty, where the suffering of individuals means nothing. Snow’s nihilism is total. Just before switching off the telescreen and pivoting to air strikes, he tells Katniss that “it is the things we love most that destroy us.” Love makes us vulnerable.

Yet hope abides, and Katniss bears hope’s burden. Her beauty inspires hope even after great disillusionment. Abernathy claims we need to see her without makeup, we need to go past appearance and manipulation. Her unfeigned moments of emotional candor keep the rebellion going. Her trainer, Haymitch Abernathy, makes explicit that contrived images lack the force of Katniss’s raw responses to horrors perpetrated by Snow’s military. He gets her out of the studio and to the front, where her image can be projected by capturing unstaged moments where her hatred of the Capitol is caught on camera in unscripted emotional outbursts. Authentic passion, not contrived images, are the keys to better propaganda. But, of course, it remains contrived propaganda.

How can we fight evil without imitating it? This story has been wildly popular with today’s youth, who sense that they are entangled in orchestrated contests with each other for advancement in a dark and hollow world void of ultimate meanings. The consequences of the games they must play are real enough, but winning is only a temporary reprieve in a larger game which no one wins.

The Hunger Games story takes place in the godless world of modern imagination–our world–a place in which human power is constrained mainly by the opposition of other human power. The Capitol’s tyranny is enforced by technology and propaganda, and the revolution can imagine no opposition but its own technology and its own propaganda. The film approaches transcendence only in moments when Katniss inspires hope that she represents another way. She resists the flat-souled utilitarianism of the advisers who would turn away from the plight of individuals to focus on the big battles. She demands that Peeta be pardoned and that a cat be tolerated, and she ignores attempts to discuss propaganda strategy in those moments when she is filled with sorrow for what has happened to the particular people she loves. She suggests a larger game, a different world. Eddy asks, “Are you here to fight with us?” “I am,” says Katniss. “I will.” And so we have hope.

Are love and authenticity enough? Or are they too vulnerable? When we learn that Peeta has been conditioned to hate Katniss, it seems that personal love has roots too shallow to survive the manipulations of evil. How can goodness win against a sadistic ruler who seeks ever more cruel modes of action, capable of feeling only the harshest and most primitive passions, a being nearly dead to all that makes life wonderful, committed to destroying whatever does not wither before his numb gaze, breeding deathless roses to mask the stench.

Does Katniss’s love draw on a power sufficient to restore a good order? Is the people’s faith in Katniss enough? Is there more?

A lot is at stake.

Philodendron Rules (teaching the vision of goodness)

Posted onAuthorumphrey

Revised (original post)

Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he. Proverbs 29:18 (Duchess of Edenburgh clematis)

Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he. Proverbs 29:18 (Duchess of Edenburgh clematis)

Years ago I spent time trying to understand what “goodness” meant. I knew Aristotle’s notion that “goods” where what people pursued–peace, wealth, more comfortable sandals–but I wanted something more vital and clear than that. What I eventually came to, after dozens of detours and cul-de-sacs, was that goodness was essentially a vision of life as we want it. Most importantly, it was the vision of life one can glimpse as through a glass darkly in sacred literature–the vision that deity has revealed and is revealing. We gather the light here a little and there a little, if we seek it with honest hearts and real intent.

When God finished creating the earth, he said that it was good. What did he mean by that? Teachers may confront that question, along with the question of how to talk intelligibly about it, because we sometimes meet young people who do not have any very useful understanding of what it means, who are not even sure it is something they should want.

They often confuse “goodness” with obeying a list of rules. This is understandable, since teaching an understanding of goodness often includes teaching rules.

But goodness is something larger and more important than a list of rules. Mainly, it is a vision of people living in all the little and big ways that support happiness. Fully realized, the vision is a vast and complex ecological order, quite beyond the comprehension of children. (Evil, of course, also has an ecology–it is a complex web of oppositions to the vision of goodness.)

I suppose the purpose of our life is to find our way back to a garden, where we are told we began. In the beginning, we did not need to care for the garden–it was gift. That meant that it wasn’t really ours, in a fundamental way. We were completely dependent on much that we could not see and did not understand. We couldn’t stay there, except at the cost of remaining forever children.

The way back to the garden, we have learned, is to re-create it around us. Then it will be ours, and we will be able to keep it because we understand it. We grow from creature to creator.

And so with children we teach little rules that both preserve the order and make visible its principles. Our rules are not meant to deprive our children of freedom. Quite the opposite–they are meant to be the stepping stones that keep us out of the cold, swirling forces we traverse moment by moment and that lead us to freedom.

When our children were small, exploring the world with hands and mouth, my wife and I kept a philodendron on the coffee table. For a time the poor plant got dumped on the floor or had its leaves torn off before we could intervene. Over and over we gently stopped little hands and said “No!” It would have been easier, no doubt, to simply to move the plant out of reach until the children were older, but that would be a controller’s strategy–to turn our home into a huge cocoon in which everything was either child-proof or out of.

Sure, we put cleaning solvents, prescription medicines, and other items that could cause genuine danger out of reach, but the philodendron was sacrificed to an ideal: it is better to awaken children than to pad the rooms where they are sleepwalking. And what we awaken them to is the order that surrounds them, which is the order of our lives, which is our best approximation so far of our vision of goodness.

So it was that we would sometimes encounter a gleeful daughter wildly shredding the leaves of our forlorn-looking philodendron. Such actions are teaching opportunities. So when a lightly slapped my daughter’s hand and said “No!” what did I want her to learn?

Obviously, I would have been disappointed if she had learned that plants are never to be touched, though from her child’s perspective that must at first have seemed to be my intent. In fact, I wanted her to learn things she could not then understand. “Thou shalt not touch the philodendron” was a little rule that didn’t express our final will. Rather, it was a means to a deeper law that might be expressed “Thou shalt respect living things,” or “Thou shalt live in a house of order.” And beyond these laws was a higher reality: “Thou shalt love plants.”

What we really wanted was for our children to learn to live in a garden, which is to say we wanted them to understand the earth and the processes of life, and we wanted them to care for the world in wise ways. We wanted them to recognize and desire goodness.

That’s quite a bit to learn. So let’s start with simple things: don’t touch the philodendron. We knew our daughter would question the rule, and we knew that as her questioning spirit became more mature, our answers, both implicit and explicit, would lead her toward understanding what we really wanted. Soon, we allowed her to help with such tasks as watering the plant. As she grew, we negotiated with her, gradually increasing her responsibilities and freedom to keep pace with her understanding.

In time the philodendron rule became irrelevant as she learned that plants not only could be touched, but they could be pruned, re-potted, fertilized and enjoyed. Beyond the philodendron rule lay profound principles, more difficult to understand but more liberating to live. Beyond the philodendron rule lay all the principles of wisdom, which are identical with the principles of goodness.

Wise traditions teach goodness by giving rules, because life is complicated in much the way ecosystems are complicated, and inexperienced people are likely to make decisions that damage or destroy their chances at happiness without understanding the long-term consequences of what they do. Good rules help keep people safe while they are still learning how life works.

As Wendell Berry has noted, the rules of morality are guidelines to long-term practicality. In many cases, they are summaries of centuries of experience about what sorts of actions tend toward misery, and of what sorts of actions contribute to happiness.

Goodness is closely related to wisdom, since happiness in this world will be fleeting unless our thoughts and actions are in harmony with the way things really are.

“Truth” is our name for such harmony.

A happy life is similar to a garden–it is a thing of beauty made out of the materials of this life, arranged in harmony with both the laws of science and the principles of beauty. It is an emblem of care, and an embodiment of joy. It includes a long history of things learned and remembered, and a long future of things desired and hoped.

It is here. It is now.

It only seems like a story about hollyhocks

Posted onAuthorumphrey

perry-20130617_DPP-33tQuinn Televan laments the uniformity that inevitably follows standards enforced with standardized tests:

Not only will public schools be made uniform, but private schools, home schools, and religiously-affiliated schools will be pressured to adapt to Common Core. Students at non-public schools won’t be forced to take Common Core assessments but will have to adapt a decent part of their curricula to prepare their students for changes in these tests, which are paramount to students’ entrance into college. Nevertheless, the person credited as the architect of Common Core is David Coleman, current CEO of College Board, the company that administers the SAT test. Coleman officially announced that the SAT would be redesigned to align with Common Core. The designers of the ACT and GED tests followed suit, declaring they would also change to meld with Common Core.

It’s hard to listen day after day to policy debates which have largely replaced talk about teaching and learning. That’s what happens when politicians take over schools–they politicize them. Pity.

To teach, we need to find time to ignore them. We really do need lots of people thinking and doing different things: Love note to a beautiful stranger:

I find myself driving along a ratty looking street in a financially forlorn neighborhood and suddenly, nearly choke with gratitude for the single human soul who silently got down on hands and knees, again and again to plant seeds and pull weeds, to pick up litter and tilt a watering can, effectively saying ‘no’ to all that ‘tit for tat’ soul commerce, making time instead to plant and tend flowers that add such beauty to an otherwise bleak landscape, asking nothing in return.

I could not have imagined this

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey

Cranesbill and peonies

Cranesbill and Peonies--Umphrey's gardens

A garden is an epiphany, at least for the gardener. The orchestration of visible beauty, according to invisible processes in time, gives us the metaphors to think about the order of being. The astonishing thing is not merely how life is, but that it is capable of, indeed prone to, such beauty.

I take that to be the most important truth of many truths one can know only by experience. No philosopher confined to his study would have imagined anything so wondrous as even my little garden. The great philosophers all know this–their work is full of nature and of history, taking its bearings from the real world that they have opened themselves to knowing.

Since ancient days, one of the uses of gardens has been a refuge from worlds gone awry. I’ve used gardening this summer to reorient myself to teaching, after an unusually discouraging year. This is an unpromising time to be a teacher dedicated to passing on some understanding of the order of being discovered and explored through the great classic literature of the West.

The enemies of such as Homer, Socrates, Moses, Jesus, Shakespeare et al have always been here. In recent decades, they have been triumphant at the level of pop culture, which, regrettably, includes public education, and many young people have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the “isms” of ersatz religion before they reach high school or college, with results described memorably by philosopher Allan Bloom in his controversial best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind and summarized by James M Rhodes in Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues:

American students believe that truth is relative. They are astonished by anyone who does not accept this proposition as self-evident. Consequently, they lack intellectual seriousness and learn little. Their relativistic families are also spiritually dreary, colorless, devoid of inspiring visions of mankind’s meaning and good, intellectually moribund, bourgeois, and incapable of transmitting ethical principles effectively because their relativism has robbed them of moral authority. The students do not read great books anymore, thanks to relativism and the successful feminist assault on the Western canon. Instead, they are addicted to rock music. This music has “one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire–not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored….

Like severe drug addiction, he says, this “gutter phenomenon … ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education.” The sexual frenzy of the music is part of a broader phenomenon. Sex has become “the national project.” The students have joined this enterprise. They have abolished sexual limits and modesty and now engage in multiple “relationships, ” not promiscuously, but serially. The sex is easy and it has become “no big deal.” The result is that “sexual passion no longer includes the illusion of eternity.”

Young people, and not only they, “have studied and practiced a crippled eros that can no longer take wing, and does not contain within it the longing for eternity and the divination of one’s relatedness to being.” This eroticism is sated, sterile, lame, and “is not the divine madness that Socrates praised.” Casual relationships have also fostered the habit of approaching marriage with egocentric attitudes that lack constancy. This has contributed to the runaway divorce rate that “is surely America’s most urgent social problem.” The children of divorced parents are irreparably harmed. It does not matter that armies of psychologists are hired to persuade them that their parents love them and will spend “quality time” with them. The children feel grievously wronged, come to mistrust love, and develop a slight deformity of the spirit that closes them to the serious study of philosophy and literature. In addition to all this, the students are self-centered, that is, more interested in their careers and enjoyments than in other human beings or in great spiritual or political issues. In the vast majority of cases, they arrive at their universities seeking vocational training, without the sense that they are embarking upon grand intellectual adventures that might yield answers to the question, “What is man?” Thus, a defective American eros, not only in its sexual forms but also in all its branches, has prevented our students from waxing in wisdom and grace. By and large, American students become “flat souled.”

“Flat souled” would seem a precise name of the affliction. Rhodes in main agrees with Bloom, though he thinks the situation may not always be as grim as Bloom states it. What he does agree with, though, is that youth today are taught to understand their sexuality in ways that are quite destructive to the higher learning–knowledge of the transcendent order of being. Though Rhodes is talking about undergraduates, the same dynamic is increasingly present in high school:

It [many] cases, the students’ sex has really become so easy that it is “no big deal.” In these instances, the eros has surely become sterile, devoid of Socratic divine madness, and incapable of taking wing into eternity, as Bloom contends. Also, there is usually exploitation in these kinds of relationships. Almost invariably, somebody gets hurt. Undoubtedly, there are exceptions. There must be a number of cases in which there is perfect mutual giving of self to other and a firm intention of permanence. These instances are marriage in all but name and can be expected to eventuate in the Socratic winged flights. The normal result, though, is heartbreak. Socratic teachers cannot save students from these mistakes by prying into their private lives or policing bedrooms. Neither can they prevent the errors by preaching religious morality or the lessons of Plato’s dialogues from their bully classroom pulpits; words are mere abstractions to the young until the realities of their self-inflicted injuries become manifest as pain. All the Socratic professors can do is to wait for the heartbroken students to crash-land in tears in their offices and classrooms. When this occurs, the youths do not need pinch-faced authorities in tall, pointy hats to inform them that something has gone badly wrong with their love affairs. Rather, they need advice on how to heal their wounds and fulfill their erotic natures in true love. Here, Bloom seems mistaken if he supposes that the eros of the damaged souls can never take wing. Sometimes, it is disaster that opens unhappy souls to philosophy. The teacher must be prepared to lead the students to a more philosophic eros when it is needed and wanted. In this role, the Socratic professor can help some of the sorrowing youngsters.

I have no faith in the profession of teachers–they are part of the pop culture that has become the problem, but I do wish more parents understood that what young people are being taught by pop culture is not some accidental cultural evolution. It has been planned, and the planning has not been a secret conspiracy so much as an out loud and in your face revolutionary movment that can be clearly traced in history.

The way of faith has always been too demanding for some, and intellectuals have from the beginning offered alternatives to it, all having to do with the idea that humans direct history and can make of the world what they want. These are false prophets in the sense that what they promise does not happen, but false prophets have been plentiful, offering escape from what Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquistor in The Brothers Karamazov called “the terrible freedom” brought into the world by Christianity.

Eric Voegelin is one major philosopher who traces such false prophets through history, detailing the murder of God and the establishment of ersatz religion. He focuses on the major philosophers–Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel and Heidegger–and he includes in his list of false teachings “progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism.” The way these movements have influenced pop culture has been detailed in dozens of books that are less dense and easier to grasp than most of Voegelin. They aren’t hard to find. It’s only necessary to desire.

The main thing about truth–the true order of being–is that it is hidden just enough that it’s necessary to desire it to find it. To one who desires it and is opened by love to it, it reveals itself. But it’s hidden by design from others, so that we can be free to choose what we really do desire.

Years ago, I reached the conclusion that the goal of teaching is simply to make a case for the order of being–to put before young people the record in literature of those moments, such as when Achilles learns of Patrocles’ death, when Moses knows that he will confront Pharaoh armed only with faith and that Pharoah is powerless, when Hamlet reaches the divine present and knows finally that he need only respond in that presence–“the readiness is all”–in short, all those moments when great souls break through mundane reality into the presence of transcendent being and glimpse its order.

It is not, as a student said  last year, that we are telling them how to live. It is that we are pointing them toward witnesses of how things are, so that they are more free to choose wisely.

On those few occasions when I have suggested to individual young people that there is a force in the cosmos with us that wants us to act in some ways and not in others, and sensing this is the beginning of communication with deity, the idea has not been rejected outright. So the game continues and hope remains.

What I know as a gardener is that the force before which Odysseus and Hamlet found themselves present is the same  force “that through the green fuse drives the flower.” It is the force that creates and sustains moment by moment the order of being. To be a gardener is to know that it is a force that can be known, that it reveals itself bit by bit as we ask and listen.

I am asking, and I am learning to listen.