Human life, consciousness exists at the intersection of two great orders of reality, one which it creates – the artificial, material, geometric order – and one which creates it – the natural, living, organic order. That’s where we live – where we eke out our material subsistence (i.e. stay alive), and where we seek out love, meaning, purpose, happiness, wholeness, unity, with others of our ilk. It is a mixed up, confusing, profusing, ambiguous, ambivalent, jumble, jungle of a place. It takes the whole of our science and our art, not to say our religion and our politics, to cope with it, to make the slightest headway. Sounds amazing – something it would be good to know about, to be aware of – don’t you think? Well, hang on to your hats and I’ll explain.
This piece is riffing off Bergson in Creative Evolution[1], Chapter 3, in case you’re wondering where I got it from (the great man will be turning in his grave right now). It is also based on careful observations of my children’s bedrooms when they were growing up, particularly when they were wandering in the nether-regions of teenagerhood. Then there’s a lifetime of gardening, which is where I’ll begin.
Let me take you on a little walk. Imagine you live in a house (well that’s not hard to do). Immediately out the back door of your house is a lovely garden, surrounded by a nice fence. There’s a gate in the fence, and through it you can walk straight out into virgin bushland – a magnificent National Park, perhaps, or just some ragged patch of scrub.
You start inside the house. This is more or less pure geometric order. It is a product of the human imagination, made out of real matter. We abstract, or extract, geometry out of matter – we do this imaginatively, then practically – we imagine a nice house for ourselves to live in, then we go ahead and build it (or have it built, or buy it already built). This works because geometricalness is a real property, a real affordance, of matter, and because the human mind – or rather that part of it we call the intellect (as Bergson would distinguish) – has evolved over aeons to exploit it. Geometry exerts a constant influence over how we see and think the world – like Truman in his eponymous show[2] we live in an artificial, geometric world, but one we built ourselves, encased ourselves in, willingly.
Then you walk out the back door, into the lovely garden. This time, however, you take no notice of it, walking absentmindedly straight ahead, then out the garden gate into the beautiful bushland. Man, what a difference, what a relief! This is recreation, re-creation. You keep walking till the house, the back fence, the built environment is no longer in sight. Sigh! Bliss!
You’re now in the midst of more or less pure, natural, living, organic order. It is not a product of your intellect, your hands; rather you are a product of it. Remember? – well you probably don’t – but we all have a strong, lively sense of it, don’t we? Maybe we can’t put our fingers on what exactly it is that draws us out into nature, but we can’t stop ourselves from going there, and we sure feel something when we do. Re-creation, re-connection with our roots. This is an order which created itself; and, yes, we are, ourselves, of this order, body and soul. Our intellect, itself, being part of our soul, was also created by it. Which is precisely why it (our intellect) is completely incapable of understanding, comprehending it (this living order) – a part can’t comprehend the whole of which it is only a part, Bergson would say.
After a while you get bored, crave some social media, feel hungry. So you head back towards home, but relax for a while in the garden before heading inside (maybe you bring some food outside to eat in the garden). The garden, like the bush, is a lovely place of recreation. But in the garden, especially if it is your garden, you’ll sometimes get distracted by noticing things you need to do in the garden – gotta pull out those weeds, prune the roses, mow the lawn. Today, however, you just munch and relax.
Can you see that the garden is a sort of transition zone between the two orders? A garden is geometrically imagined and circumscribed, but it is made out of living materials. It has a life of its own, even if you’re regularly intervening, for better or for worse. Gardens vary in their style and geometricalness, from formal gardens with straight borders, fine-cut lawn, topiary lilly-pillies, to cottage or native gardens which intentionally eschew geometricality and minimize intervention. We are so at home in gardens and (many of us) love gardening. The wild bush thrills us, but it is sometimes hostile or disorienting; in the garden we can re-create ourselves in a comfortable, secure environment. It combines – when we get it right – the best of both orders, geometric and organic. Re-creation made to measure.
Well might the lovely creation myth of the religions of The Book – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – begin in a garden. Joni Mitchell sings an alternative version in Woodstock[3]:
“We are stardust (billion year old carbon), We are golden (caught in the devil’s bargain), And we’ve got to get ourselves, back to the Garden.”
My teenage children’s bedrooms were also instructive. At first I was just perplexed. I tried (idle) threats, bluffs, bribery, sarcasm, maybe even tears. All I could see was mess, disorder, layer upon layer. We could turn it into an archaeological dig, I joked, probably find evidence of pre-European settlement somewhere under there. Chaos – wilful, defiant chaos – I fumed.
That was the clue I eventually got, however – the wilfulness, the defiant intentionality of it. Everything was actually in order – it just wasn’t the order I wanted. I wanted geometric order, an order they didn’t get or weren’t interested in at all. There’s was a living, organic order – a place (naturally) for everything and everything (naturally) in its place. What I saw as lack of intention, and thus disorder, was actually just a different intention. Each intentional placing of an objet – a dirty pair of socks, half a glass of OJ, a half-eaten sandwich, pens and pencils and a half-used exercise book under a pile of cleanly washed clothes not placed in a drawer where they were meant (by me) to be – was just that – intentional – not random, chaotic. Like, yes, the wilful, intentional, defiant (that’s all it knows) order of the wild bush or the deep ocean.
Let me now cut to the chase. You wonder where this is going. This is where. This existential situation we are in – finding ourselves, living our lives, at the intersection of two orders – is essentially problematic, for us. My allusion to Truman and his show a few paragraphs ago was a hint of this. We encase ourselves, out of necessity and long habit, in a lovely, material, geometric order of our own making, but in doing so we hide ourselves from ourselves. It is fundamental existential alienation. I can’t overstate it. Truman sensed it; can’t we sense it? We go looking for ourselves in the geometric order but it is the one thing we’ll never find there! Because we are, as I have said, of a different order of things – the living, organic, intentional order.
This is Bergson’s famous veil (le voile), in Laughter[4]. It is the reason we go out into the garden, into the bush – re-discovery as much as re-creation. For that matter, it’s the reason we like to bring the organic order of things inside our houses – pot-plants and flower vases, windows looking out to the garden or to the wider land or sea-scape beyond. It’s also the reason we insist on building our houses with aesthetic qualities – light, colours, textures, organic materials like wood, and so on. And, yes (and this is really where I want to get to), it’s the reason we like to put works of art all over the place, inside or outside our houses.
Works of art, yes. Buried in that little book Laughter, Bergson presents the simplest and most obvious explanation for the human phenomenon of art[5]. The artificial, material, geometric order of things that we construct around ourselves acts like a veil that hides that other lovely order of things from us, the order of which we ourselves are. So (among other things) we do art. We do art, and participate in art, in all it’s amazing profusion of forms – visual art, music, literature, theatre, film, dance and so on – out of pure existential necessity, compulsion, yearning, desperation. It is our day-to-day quest, both grand and prosaic, to see through the veil of geometricality, to the true, living order of reality beyond – to hopefully, maybe, even, one day, find ourselves.
Art is fundamentally about discovery – or re-discovery – therefore; where, for example, by contrast, science and technology are about invention, fabrication (well, they are, after all, our foremost tools for building the geometric order in the first place). I’m tempted to throw religion in there too, alongside art, but I’ve said quite enough already for the moment, I’m sure you’ll agree!
To summarize, then, we (homo sapiens), intriguing creatures that we are, live at the intersection of two great orders of reality, the geometric and the organic. We create the former (well, we extract it out of matter), but we are created by, or of, the latter. A garden is a lovely example of a transitional, hybrid order, between the two great ones. As is an average teenager’s bedroom (plenty of adults too). This existential situation is problematic for us, however, because the former order tends ever to hide the latter from us, to the extent that we lose track of that most urgent of things to know, namely ourselves. So we do, among other things, art (and religion too, but I’ll save that for another time). Cheers.
April 2021
[1] Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1907 (English translation: Holt NY, 1911).
[2] The Truman Show, 1998. Director: Peter Weir.
[3] Joni Mitchell, Woodstock, 1970.
[4] Henri Bergson, Laughter, 1900 (English translation: Digireads.com, 2010), page 66.
[5] ibid. pages 66-71.