I don’t get lawns. I mean, I’m glad I have one and I revel in its revivification each spring. I’m just not particularly particular about its constitution. Green is great, but green alone lacks drama and verve. What is up with the incredible close cropped homogeneity that pervades most of suburbia?
Well (you read it here) it’s the outer manifestation of a sequestered concern that there might not be order in our universe – which of course there is not. At the beginning, for a moment, it was indeed highly organized. Since, however, we’ve been hurtling toward ever greater disorder. Entropy. The universe is a mess, getting messier by the moment, and there’ll be no turning back the arrow of time. Too bad, so sad.
The more assiduous the lawn care, the more every blade in a lawn is identical and oriented just so, the more bottled up inner turmoil can logically be assumed to inhabit the owner determined to beat his little part of the planet into submission. Just watch the reaction after a kid cuts a path and you’ll see what I mean. Jeers and tears all out of proportion and to no good end.
Makes me think of Thomas Hobbes. His 'Leviathan,' published in 1651, is perhaps the most important work of modern political theory. In it, Hobbes asserts the necessity of an iron-fisted central authority strong enough to preclude civil disorder as well as to enable a credible defense.
It made certain sense back then, especially given the provenance of his thinking. Told that the approach of the Spanish Armada jolted his mother into labor, he later said that “I was born the twin of fear.” His point of perspective though didn’t allow him to foresee twentieth century totalitarianism and the associated agony and horror left in its wake.
Sure, civil society must most certainly be. But not to the point of heartlessness and cruelty. As the Dalai Lama says, “The purpose of our lives is to be happy,” and dandelions can help. They are bits of beauty that arrive on their own, unannounced. If allowed, they can provide emotional counterpoint to Hobbes’ famous dictum that “life is nasty, brutish, and short."
Walt Whitman, among others, would agree. From 'Leaves of Grass':
Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,
Give me juicy autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,
Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows,
Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape,
Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals
teaching content,
Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of
the Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars,
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I
can walk undisturbed.
Give me for marriage a sweet-breath’d woman of whom I should
never tire,
Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of the
world a rural domestic life,
Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own
ears only,
Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O nature your
primal sanities!
*Finally, I’m ecstatic to report that the January 2, 2010 Economist (what else?) tells us that dandelions “may yet make the big time”. They might supplement or even replace Hevea brasiliensis which is the scientific name for the traditional rubber tree. Can you imagine what a field of them would look like?
