online: 1 june 2015
modified: 1, 2 june 2015
1 june 2015 landscape views of tamed
nature
...a cold gusty wind from distant sea (the Atlantic)... grey sky...and
tall trees already turning yellowish... some nettles already as tall as
a man... several dogs with a few people... (a little black one refuses
to leave the vicinity of this seat until its keeper comes back to fetch
it and we exchange a few words asking who is in charge and then
laughing)...
...time to walk a little further... before it begins to get dark... (and
perhaps too dangerous for me or for anyone in darkness)...
...walking beside the Seven Sisters Ponds i am surrounded by new dock
leaves and buttercups and irises and reeds and several other tall plants
that have grown suddenly where the keepers have mown away previous
undergrowths that seem to me far wilder and more valuable to city
dwellers in a garden suburb or elsewhere...
...then i pass by a seat where someone has blocked off (by hedging) a
wild view of the water...
...(i'm trying not to get angry at these tamings of small parts of
what's left of the city forest... for i know that the distinction
between wild and tame can be perceived as illogical... and getting angry
is not the right way to react to the people who are paid by all of us to
decide when to mow... or cut down the wild growths... (or to enframe
them... or us)...
...for this is not a small question but a profound one that involves
everyone not just a heath walker and a few heath gardeners who decide what
wildness to leave alone and what to cut or mow or to otherwise civilise)...
and by the way (btw) what happened to civilisation...
...change the names says Confucius...
...don't enframe says Martin Heidegger... (don't let technology
turn ourselves into what he calls standing-reserve*)...
*'The Question Concerning Technology' in Martin Heidegger Basic
Writings, introduced and translated by David Farrell Krell, Routledge
and Kegan Paul, London 1977, pages 283 to 317
...
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