Arnold Berleant
DOWN THE GARDEN PATH
In "The Garden of Forking Paths," the metaphysical fabulist Jorge Luis Borges tells of a novel written in the form of an infinite labyrinth in which each of the choices in the plot leads to an endless succession of further choices.[1] This is a labyrinth of time rather than space, yet like one of space, its novelistic form allows every choice to remain poised in time, eternally open and possible. He describes it as "...an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities."[2] If this story it had been published today instead of in 1941, we might think of it as a play on interactive fiction utilizing the postmodern sense of an infinite number of realities, each definite in itself and each permanently possible. Or perhaps the story might suggest interactive computer games and postmodern fiction as exemplifications of Borges's imaginative fabrications.
Following Borges's garden trope, I want to speak, not of a spatial maze or a temporal one, but of a labyrinth of experience, a maze that is spatial and temporal both, but also dynamic, all three -- space, time, and motion -- simultaneous and inseparable. For in thinking about the garden, or any landscape, for that matter, we make choices about how we come to experience them, and our initial choice leads to an unending series of further choices along the path taken at the outset. And it is that first fork in the garden path that concerns me here.
The Meaning of landscape
Many people are concerned with the landscape. Those for whom it is home may identify with a particular landscape and see their lives in relation to it. Others may consider a landscape as real estate, as a natural resource, or as a building site. The landscape may be related to a nation's history and its culture, or it may figure in political issues. Environmental groups consider the landscape a human resource and are preoccupied with what happens to it.
Because of such different interests, landscape means different things to different people. But one value, often unspoken, underlies many of these: its aesthetic value. Aesthetic interests often play a part in the value that environmentalists find in the landscape, and places of unusual natural beauty are often made into national parks and preserves. There is, too, what has been called a cultural landscape, the cluster of perceptual characteristics that gives a distinctive identity to the landscape of a particular country or region. A country's characteristic landscapes may, in turn, contribute to its sense of identity, as do the forests and lakes of Finland, the South African veldt, the great plains of the American West, and the Andes of Peru. Furthermore, typical land use patterns also contribute to forming distinctive cultural landscapes, and these change with social and technological changes, such as increasing urbanization, suburban sprawl, and the development of factory farming.
On this occasion, I want to think about the experiences of landscape and, in particular, of gardens, and about what meanings best reflect these experiences. I want to suggest that, of an endless number of possibilities, two orientations in experience are basic and fundamentally different from each other. I shall call these the observational landscape and the engaged landscape. A subtle shift has been under way which may be traced back to the early nineteen hundreds but which has become more pronounced and explicit in the past half century. It is a change in experience that has begun to seep into the very meaning of landscape.
To illustrate this change in meanings, let me start by referring to two definitions of landscape given in the Oxford English Dictionary some fifty years apart. The first, appearing in 1933, offered what may be called the traditional meaning of the word: "a view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view."[3] In 1987 it was supplemented by this one: "A tract of land with its distinguishing characteristics and features, especially considered as a product of modifying or shaping processes and agents (usually natural)."[4] These seemingly similar definitions actually reflect differences in experience. The first signifies the landscape considered visually, or what we may call the observational landscape. The second implies the landscape in relation to human activities, the landscape with which we participate actively or the engaged landscape. Landscape architects shape the environment in which humans experience the world and thus the character and quality of that experience. By articulating these differences, we are better able to understand how design can shape the landscape to reflect the values and meanings we would like to encourage. This means that landscape design can function as a technology of displacement and alienation or of harmony. What is true of landscape in general is equally and pointedly true of the garden. The garden may be considered a microcosm of the world as it is understood by the culture in which it stands. It can also function as a model of experience that we may strive to emulate.
The Observational Landscape
The observational landscape is the most familiar. It has both etymology and tradition on its side. 'Landscape' began as a technical term used by painters[5] and its origins remain embedded in the observational landscape. We see this in the common practice of taking the garden as a visual object, set apart and bounded in some way by fences, hedges, or borders, like the frame of a painting. These enclose the scene, just as many painters and photographers compose their images, so that it can be "taken in at a glance from one point of view." What does this tell us about the garden or about landscape, more generally? Not only that it is to be objectified and experienced visually, but that it is stationary (or at least that we are). Thus the observational garden is more like a conceptual object than a natural one, since a glance is all that is needed to grasp it.
Many features in the design of cities, buildings, and gardens in the Western architectural tradition embody the observational landscape. Symmetrical structures and regular patterns of fenestration and decorative features are common in architectural design. Straight paths, allées, city grids, squares, traffic circles, and other geometrical shapes appeal to the eye and mind. Although linear vistas can have a powerful dramatic effect and even incite an impulse to proceed down them, that motive is often short-lived when the distance is of any great length. Such vistas tend to arrest our movement and invite a contemplative gaze; the visual terminus quickly replaces the physical one and the visitor turns off in more curious directions. Since we can see far into the distance, walking becomes redundant, since it would merely repeat what the eyes have already registered. Passive observation tends to be a common response to monumental buildings sited on a hill or escarpment and on observation platforms that offer a panoramic view (if the air is clear enough to see far), just as scenic overlooks provide a panoramic vista for highway travelers. Formal garden designs tend to have a similar effect. Gravel paths separating carefully edged beds, often geometrical in shape; viewing terraces bounded by a railing and overlooking the garden, a grand allée extending a formal axis dividing the landscape B all these objectify the garden landscape and turn it into a contemplative object. These patterns are so familiar and hallowed by tradition that they have become the aesthetic standard for architecture and design in the West. They exemplify the dominance of the distant eye and are eminently suitable for the culture of objectification they so eloquently express.
The observational landscape, moreover, is largely static and often so is the observer. Movement and change in the landscape are not significant as the scene extends in its completeness before the viewer. Of course most gardens now only allow but encourage walking through them. Yet even when the garden path is laid out to lead the visitor along a predetermined route, as occurs in the English emblematic and painterly gardens of the first half of the eighteenth century, the visitor is encouraged to regard each scene as an object of contemplation, to be seen in the light of its mythological, religious, or personal references. The viewer stands apart from what he or she is regarding, a spectator or interpretive reader of the scene, like the picturesque traveler who views the charms of the countryside through a Claude glass.[6] Movement is essentially incidental, a means to the contemplative regard of a succession of objectified scenes. As with the rest of the world, social as well as natural, a separation, both physical and psychological, lies between the observer and what is observed.
All this reflects the Cartesian dualism of body and mind, of subject and object, whose influence is still powerful. Its roots lie deep in the classical tradition of contemplative knowledge, its branches of political individualism straining for light and air in the urban sprawl and creeping sprawl of suburbia. Its social consequences are displacement, isolation, alienation, competition, and conflict. Landscape design thus has more than an aesthetic significance; it constructs a human environment. Such dualistic thinking is not an exclusively European tradition but can be found (and also opposed) in other cultures. It resembles, for example, the distinction between self of atman and a real, material world made by Indian philosophers, in particular the two Nyaya philosophers, Udayana and Gangesha.[7]
The presence of the Cartesian attitude is so powerful and deep in the West that it has become enshrined in our vocabulary and we have no language with which to express easily and clearly other ways of conceiving things. The ordinary world we live in is a Newtonian world of absolute time and absolute space, of discrete objects governed by impersonal forces whose influence is formulated in wholly abstract mathematical laws. It is the materialist world of science and industry; the manipulative world of engineers, politicians, economists and businessmen; the exploitative world in which forests are cleared and minerals extracted from the earth; and also the world of improved living conditions, the control of diseases, and increased life expectancy. It is the world of space exploration, but it is also the world of nuclear arms, expanding deserts, burgeoning homeless populations, the spoliation of the environment, the profligate destruction of natural resources, and the irretrievable alteration of the earth's surface and atmosphere. Some take refuge in Eastern philosophy and mysticism, others in drugs, in New Age thinking and art, or in revealed religion. These are all different, to be sure, but they represent a subjective alternative to the depersonalizing objectification in the materialist ethos of science and industrial technology. Both directions, materialism and subjectivism, are the direct consequences of the dualistic division of the human world.
Aesthetic Engagement with the Landscape
Yet this is not the only world. I ascribe the observational landscape to the industrialized West because it is the dominant Western mode. But it is not the world of the poet nor is it the world of those peoples who live harmoniously with the earth and with each other. And it is not, I believe, the world we experience most directly, most immediately, and most intimately. Alternative traditions exist and their influence is increasing. Over the past forty or so years, Westerners have turned increasingly to other ways of thinking that offer a more conciliatory understanding of the human place in the natural world. Among them are Taoism and its vision of living in harmony with nature[8], the Native American tradition of a continuity between one's body and the land,[9] and the Aboriginal belief that everything in nature is equally sacred.[10] Although these traditions are distinct and different from one another, they share a sense of the fundamental and inviolable continuity of the human being with the natural world and its processes. This is not a reconciliation of human and nature but a recognition that no division between them exists. We can discover here a certain consanguinity with the ancient and still widespread animistic belief in a pervasive vital quality that pervades both animate and inanimate nature.
I should like to consider all such ways of understanding humans as active participants in a naturalistic context as forms of engagement. This general term is useful because it contrasts sharply with the observational ideal that in various forms has dominated Western thought since the Renaissance. The difference between objectifying nature and engaging with nature is more than a contrast of traditions or an alternative philosophical understanding: It is a contrast in basic ways of experiencing the world.
Each of the many modes of human activity generates its characteristic form of engagement, pursuits such as social, political, economic, religious, intellectual, or practical. When the emphasis is on the perceptual content of that intimate participation, on the sensory qualities of that experience, the engagement may be called aesthetic. There is no single, uniform, and rigid standard to which each instance of aesthetic engagement must conform. Different gradations of closeness and force occur in the various modes of human involvement. At the same time, the continuity that characterizes each context is what allows us to identify it as engagement.
The aesthetic appreciation of nature and of art stands among these forms. This is the aesthetic world, the world most real and most present to us. Aesthetic engagement recognizes the primacy of our immediate perceptual experience, experience that is sensory yet colored by all the personal and cultural dimensions that enter into all human experience. These include such things as education, personal biography, and biological and social conditions.
I hope you will forgive these general comments, but they are necessary in laying out my garden paths. Once we take the engagement fork as our initial decision, many alternatives branch out in a rich array of possibilities. One, for example, might seem to be the choice between the path of art and the path of nature, yet we have been too well taught by environmental artists, landscape painters, and others who organize perceptual space not to make art and nature too distinctly different. At the same time, each art and each kind of environment exhibits its distinctive characteristics, and particular instances of each of these are themselves unique embodiments. Surely, aesthetic engagement in painting is not the same as it is in music or dance. Similarly, different landscape and garden traditions offer different qualities of engaged experience, and these are not equivalent. It would be unfortunate to try and force the French formal garden into the mold of the English landscape garden. Each offers possibilities for aesthetic engagement that are distinctive yet rich. It may be enough to think of all these as arts in the broadest sense, the sense of skilled making, making that shapes perceptual experience with some degree of originality and some touch of creativity to make it salient and valuable. All the arts are part of this world of aesthetic engagement, from the so-called fine arts, to the crafts and practical arts, to the creative engagement with uncultivated nature. When we enter the realm of the arts, we live in this world.
In an architectural aesthetics of engagement, a building is not set apart as a massive, monumental edifice, imposing and overwhelming. Rather, it joins the landscape in some way, its forms mirroring the shapes of the landscape. Gardens, like buildings, are a coalescence of culture in material form. While many people habitually adopt an observational approach to gardens, as they do to architecture and other kinds of landscapes, gardens are more difficult than most landscapes to keep at arm's length. Aesthetic engagement takes many forms here and in ways that are not vague or mystical but definite and identifiable. Each garden tradition suggests its own manner of engagement. The English emblematic garden differs from the cottage garden and the landscape garden, the Chinese from the Japanese, the Japanese stroll garden from the dry garden, the Italian from the French formal garden. Yet at the same time, each of these forms expresses the poetic nature of aesthetic engagement.[11]
Gardens may be understood further still as idealized landscapes, ideals that vary with in different cultural traditions. for example, idealize the sacred by fusing temple, nature, and the human presence through pavilions, water, stone paths, and sculpture, with trees, plantings, and sculptural rocks. French and Italian gardens idealize the cultivated landscape. Japanese gardens idealize the natural landscape by aestheticizing it. And English design in the eighteenth century work of Lancelot >Capability= Brown and Humphrey Repton idealized the natural landscape. As idealized landscapes all these exemplify and assign moral value to that ideal.
That is not to say that a garden, in whatever tradition, is invariably a place of tranquility, a refuge from the pressures of industrial urban life. Gardens may serve other purposes that are not primarily aesthetic, such as utility and contemplation. But even when perceptual experience and its meanings dominate, gardens may not be entirely benign. Sometimes they elicit overtones of danger, as in the maze garden. Designing features such as elevated walkways, narrow paths, and stepping stones across water may elicit feelings of apprehension or danger. These color our engagement with practical as well as aesthetic interest and demand close perceptual involvement from the visitor in response to both concerns.
An aesthetic of engagement not only connects people to the landscape; it exercises a magnetic attraction on those people. A landscape that is fully engaging does not consist of set pieces that we can view respectfully as tourists. Rather, it transforms the casual observer into an inhabitant. Arbors and gateways in a garden have different influences on the body as we pass through. Shape and scale become strong factors. Oversize portals may impress the beholder but they also are intimidating, while low lintels press down on the body and may make us feel that we need to stoop in order to pass through. Moving through an arched doorway does not feel the same as walking through a rectangular one; a Japanese tori and a key-hole doorway into a Chinese garden are different still. A Chinese moon viewing pavilion pressing out over the water invites contemplation, yet it is contemplation from inside the environment, not apart from it. The same is true of vantage points along the path of a Japanese garden, a form of engagement that offers a contrast from the intimate discovery of a bamboo water trough or a stone lantern hidden in the foliage. Even the dry garden of Ryoan-ji gently coaxes the visitor to move, since one of its fifteen stones always remains hidden wherever one stands on the viewing veranda.[12]
What is true of the design of structures applies equally to the design of spaces. Paths and roadways, whose curves and dips respond to the contours of the topography appeal to the body more than those that press heedlessly forward in straight lines and on level planes. An allée or straight path tends to discourage movement, since one can easily see what lies ahead, while curved walkways invite one to enter and move forward. Plantings that soften geometrical forms help humanize an outdoor space. The attraction of small details and small spaces may cause one to bend, squat, or sit. We sense with our entire bodies; not just with our eyes but with our ears, skin, muscles, and legs. Sacrificing immediate visual clarity and order may be a welcome price to pay for the appeal of indeterminacy and discovery.
The same difference between observation and engagement can be found in landscapes on a larger scale. The arrow-straight avenues and the grid pattern of urban design are a model of visual clarity and intellectual order and have dominated landscape design in the West, just as survey grids have standardized topography and transformed the landscape into exchangeable pieces on a checkerboard. This is familiar enough and the advantages are obvious: immediate recognition, clear direction, convenient manipulation, and impersonal exploitation. But there is a loss, too. The order and scale of such an ordered environment obscure uniqueness and difference. They expand the scope of an environment to the distant limits of sight and conception so that the human body is lost in the vastness. No mystery remains and, with everything exposed, curiosity disappears, as well. In the extreme case, an observational landscape can lead to immobility: Since everything is revealed at a glance, there is little reason to press forward.
The landscape of engagement functions very differently. As the curves in a river entice the paddler to push ahead, a winding walkway beckons the pedestrian on to see what lies beyond the next bend. A curving highway has a similar effect on the driver, drawing one ahead while at the same time slowing the speed of the vehicle. Designing the landscape, whether garden or city, so that we move together with it requires creative imagination. No ready formula provides a prescribed solution. This is actually an advantage, for it offers an alternative to the standardized places of an impersonal, homogeneous environment, as in the anonymous and interchangeable commercial strips and malls that surround American cities, or the ready-made landscaping of arbor vitae and juniper that surround every MacDonald's. The tent village of a nomadic group and the Indian trail through the forest or along the bank of a river take their form out of need and use joined to the configuration of the landscape. These manifestations of the human body moving in and with the landscape are a reminder of how engaged design can work, and they provide one model for the garden.
Two Paths through the Landscape
The observational landscape and the landscape of engagement are, then, two different meanings of landscape. They generate two conceptions of design and two very different kinds of experience. Of course, few landscapes are exclusively observational. Most lie somewhere between these two models, and develop under the influence of politics, economics, social, cultural, and historical forces. Yet however their design comes about, these two meanings of landscape represent different conceptions of the human world and lead to different kinds of environmental experiences. They are the first fork of our garden path. Which direction we choose will lead us either into the garden as an engaged participant or along its periphery as an observer. Although in practice few gardens or landscapes are exclusively observational, all tend to encourage one or the other of these alternative modes of experience and to different degrees. On the one extreme, a maze garden is heavily participatory, for it is the visitor's movement that activates its peculiar charm of search, discovery, and resolution. On the other extreme, a formal garden provides a strongly visual appeal, delighting in the gratifications of symmetry, balance, order, and control. To view the garden at Versailles from the king's chamber is to achieve the pinnacle of observational power, epitomizing the Sun God, who from this point surveyed his orderly, geometrical Eden. Like Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, this human god exemplifies utter stasis. But when we descend the staircase and stroll along the paths, the formalism of suspended equilibrium is transformed into a dynamic geometry, a kaleidoscope of moving forms.
But we cannot speak of design alone, as if this were the entire determinant of the observational or engaged landscape. Our attitude and understanding are reciprocal with the garden. The willingness to descend from a god=s eye view point and become a participant, to enter actively into a relationship with the landscape and to collaborate with its features all contribute to the process of aesthetic engagement. This resembles the Ming description of those who can see the mountain from a viewing hall: AThey take hold of what is crucial in order to view its mysterious wonder. They obtain one [aspect of a] thing and encompass a hundred more. Everything that they receive with their eyes they would meet in their hearts."[13]
Once we start down the garden path, we cannot help but engage with the garden. We can even think of the garden as the embodiment of motion. For the primary motion of the visitor is echoed in the reciprocal motion of the landscape. Shapes, masses, colors, and composition move in continuous rearrangement. Even as one pauses to survey the scene, the movement of the roving eye projects us outward over the lake or lawns and into the configurations of plantings, rocks, and more distant terrain. How these landscape features are shaped and placed guides our passage into the landscape, just as the painter leads the eye into the space of the canvas.
Gardens represent the central truth of landscape. However we fashion a garden, however we build our landscapes, whether by deliberate design or haphazard action, we inhabit them, regardless of how we may think about it. Even the observational garden, in so far as it has some connection with human habitation, is, in some attenuated sense, engaged. We are unavoidably in the landscape, moving through the landscape, an active part of it.
It is important to recognize this ultimate engagement and to design with it in mind. There are places where it is appropriate to move closer to the observational model: the view across a lake, the distant prospect using a borrowed landscape, or the contemplative serenity of a monastery garden. And there are gardens that demand our close attention to intimate detail and our active participation, such as the Japanese stroll garden. Perhaps the difference in these models lies as much with the visitor as with the garden, with the attitudes and expectations one brings to environmental experience. Recognizing these differences helps us realize how a garden aesthetic embodies an understanding of the human place in the world. Culture has a great deal to do with this understanding, as do education and experience. But design can coax the visitor into close involvement. It can invite participation and entice one into active engagement. It can teach the body how to live
This, then, is the challenge of garden design, an aesthetic challenge but at the same time a social one. We can design an object or we can design a place. We can distance the world as an impersonal location whose interest is entirely utilitarian, the world of strip developments and shopping malls. But contrastingly, we can form an understanding that envisions the world as a human place, as our home. To recognize that the living body is an active participant in the landscape, to integrate the body's dynamic force with the forces of the land and its features, is to humanize the world. Here is where the garden assumes moral stature by offering not only an oasis from the impersonality and objectivity of the industrialized environment but a model for its design and for our experience of the world. Borges's maze garden was a metaphor for the intricate possibilities eternally present in a fictitious novel. Our garden of forking paths is a virtual garden, an overlay on the world we make for ourselves. Which fork shall we choose as we start down the garden path?
ENDNOTES
This essay was first presented at the Symposium on @Landscape Design and Experience of Motion,@ Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, 19 May 2000. I am grateful for the valuable suggestions of Michel Conan, the Director of Landscape Studies. A later version appears in my book, and Environment: Variations on a Theme (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). This is yet a further extension of the essay and was presented at the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division Session on Ethics, Aesthetics and Gardens, in Boston on 29 December 2004.
[1] Labyrinth, also called MAZE, system of intricate passageways and blind alleys. "Labyrinth" was the name given by the ancient Greeks and Romans to buildings, entirely or partly subterranean, containing a number of chambers and passages that rendered egress difficult. Later, especially from the European Renaissance onward, the labyrinth or maze occurred in formal gardens, consisting of intricate paths separated by high hedges.
In gardening, a labyrinth or maze means an intricate network of pathways enclosed by hedges of which it is difficult to find the center or exit. It is a descendant of the old geometrical style of gardening. The more common kind consists of walks, formerly called alleys, kept to an equal width by parallel hedges, which should be too close and thick for the eye readily to penetrate them. The task is to get to the center, marked in some conspicuous way, then to return; but even those who know the key are apt to be perplexed. Sometimes the design consists of alleys only, with no center. A design published in 1742 showed "six different entrances, whereof there is but one that leads to the center, and that is attended with some difficulties and a great many stops."
Britannica CD 97, "Labyrinth."
[2] Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths," in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998), p. 127.
[3] Def. 2 in The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), p.54. Def. 3 offers a generalized version of definitions 1 and 2 as: "Inland natural scenery, or its representation in painting."
[4] Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. III, a Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 587.
[5] OED, loc. cit.
[6] Stephanie Ross, What Gardens Mean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
[7] See Ben-Ami Scharfstein, A Comparative History of World Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 331, 362, 363.
[8] Chinese Taoism has the concept of tzu jan or "naturalness," which is living in complete harmony with the forces of nature. It idealizes the simple, spontaneous life that accepts the unalterable cycle of nature and strives to bring one's existence into full accord with the natural process.
[9] "The earth and myself are of one mind. The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies are the same." Chief Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht (Thunder Traveling to Loftier Mountain Heights, or Chief Joseph) of the Nez Perce Native American Tribe. Quoted in Touch the Earth, A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence, ed. T.C. McLuhan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), p. 54.
[10] Caroline Jones, The Search for Meaning: Book Two. (Crows Nest: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1990), p.56. Cited in Aboriginal Australia, ed. Colin Bourke, Eleanor Bourke, and Bill Edwards (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1994), p. 82.
[11] What Tuan writes of the Chinese garden is even more pronounced in the Japanese: "The garden is not designed to give the visitor a certain number of privileged views; seeing is an aesthetic and intellectual activity that puts a distance between the object and the observer. The garden is designed to involve, to encompass the visitor who, as he walks along a winding trail, is exposed to constantly shifting scenes." Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia, A Study of environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 138. For a comprehensive treatment of aesthetic engagement, see A. Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992) and Art and Engagement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
[12] The placement of the stones is designed to encourage contemplation and the viewer's contribution is needed to discover their meaning. It is possible to transport oneself into the garden and transform the scene into any size, for example, changing the stones into islands.
[13] Liang, quoted in AThe Record of the Hall for Viewing the Mountains,@ by Fang Xiaoru (1357-1402), in Si ku quan shu, vol. 1235, p. 519. Cited in Stanislaus Fung, AMovement and Stillness in Ming Writings on Gardens,@ a paper delivered at the Dumbarton Oaks Symposium on ALandscape Design and Experience of Motion,@ 20 May 2000, p. 7.
