The Garden, Neglected

[Video: scene from 12 Monkeys, in which the protagonists learn
the true intentions of a shadowy revolutionary movement]

From whiskey river:

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

“In return for this jasmine odor,
I’d like all the odor of your roses.”

“I have no roses; I have no flowers left now
in my garden… all are dead.”

“Then, I’ll take the waters of the fountains,
and the yellow leaves and the dried-up petals.”

The wind left… I wept. I said to myself:
“What have you done with the garden entrusted to you?”

(Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly [source])

…and:

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.

(Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Speaking Gillican

It was a perfect language—
rarefied, precise, and all my own.
At three I spoke it fluently
to dust motes in prismatic light,
and to the bear who sang Brahms
each night as headlights prowled
across my bedroom walls.

Gillican gave voice to the night
my father scooped me out of bed
to see the northern lights,
to the witch who lived in granny’s cellar,
who hid in ripples of sea-green glass.
It could evoke the ethereal spirit
of the stray cat we took in, moth-grey
fur in clumps, three legs, half a tail.

If Gillican had words for loss or death
I don’t remember what they were.
I lost a red boot—stuck in the mud
when I fled from a giant bumblebee—
but it happened in a dream.
Animals died—old ewes, frumpy
in their tattered coats after shearing.
There was a word for orphans — lambs
who nuzzled our knees after we fed them—
and an expression for the black-eyed guppies
whose mother ate them up.

I made up a lovely name
for the tortoises from Galápagos,
the ones I sat on at the Reptile Gardens.
I saw them again last summer—
all of them were still alive, thriving
on melons and prickly pears
eaten in slow motion.

(Jane McKinley [source])

…and:

Once in a while Chance would turn off the water and sit on the grass and think. The wind, mindless of direction, intermittently swayed the bushes and trees. The city’s dust settled evenly, darkening the flowers, which waited patiently to be rinsed by the rain and dried by the sunshine. And yet, with all its life, even at the peak of its bloom, the garden was its own graveyard. Under every tree and bush lay rotten trunks and disintegrated and decomposing roots. It was hard to know which was more important: the garden’s surface or the graveyard from which it grew and into which it was constantly lapsing. For example, there were some hedges at the wall which grew in complete disregard of the other plants; they grew faster, dwarfing the smaller flowers, and spreading onto the territory of weaker bushes…

[Chance said,] “In a garden, things grow… but first, they must wither; trees have to lose their leaves in order to put forth new leaves, and to grow thicker and stronger and taller. Some trees die, but fresh saplings replace them. Gardens need a lot of care. But if you love your garden, you don’t mind working in it, and waiting. Then in the proper season you will surely see it flourish.”

(Jerzy Kosinski, Being There [source])

As you can see in various discussions at the folk-music site called Mudcat Cafe, the lyrics to the old song “Wildwood Flower” have stirred numerous confusions in their 150-year history. The 2003 book Rural Roots of Bluegrass may (but probably won’t) resolve them for good. The version there was transcribed from a copy of the original in the Library of Congress… an original which had gone missing by the time of the transcription.

The recording below features Reese Witherspoon, on the Walk the Line soundtrack. It’s the version sung by the Carter Family, which doesn’t quite match up with the lyrics (correct or not) in Rural Roots of Bluegrass. But it tells the same tale, of a gardener who takes his responsibility way too lightly.

[Below, click Play button to begin Wildwood Flower. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:31 long.]

[Lyrics (opens in new window)]

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P.S. (2011-10-21 11:10am) Edit to add: On my first pass, this post slanted in a more obviously polemical tone — finger-wagging, really — triggered by the events the other day at Zanesville, Ohio. (Hence the clip from 12 Monkeys, which was shown early in the week on one of the HBO channels. I have no idea if the Zanesville guy had seen that, of course.) But, well, nah. Not on a Friday here.