DEBUGGING THE GARDEN

In Everything that Rises: a book of convergences, Lawrence Weschler posits the idea that there are meaningful connections to be found in images from incredibly diverse sources that somehow resemble each other - “uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered recollections—sometimes in the weirdest places.”  Some days this sounds interesting to me, other days it just sounds bleedin’ obvious.

 So, for instance, Freddy Alborta’s famous photograph “Che Guevara’s Death,” from 1967:

 looks like Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson” from 1632: 

There’s no denying that the two images do resemble each other, but isn’t it perfectly likely that Alborta had seen “The Anatomy Lesson” and he was reminded of its composition, consciously or subconsciously, as he took the picture?  But even if it didn’t, what exactly does this resemblance mean?  And in what sense is it a “convergence”?  What exactly is coming together?   

Other pictures were certainly taken of that scene with Che, some of them rather less Rembrandt-ish:

That may be a discussion for another time and place, but I did just notice (having known with the images separately for some time) a resemblance, hardly random, and hardly all that surprising, between these two images of Jerry Cornelius (as played by Jon Finch in The Final Programme) and JG Ballard (in Harley Cokliss's 1971 short Crash) walking alongside wrecked cars. 

Both images then reminded me of scenes from Jean Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil.

And then I was reminded of a shot from Derek Jarman’s Jubilee:

Which in turn reminded me of Wim Wenders’ The American Friend

I think you could argue that things here are diverging rather than converging, but that’s OK: free association seems as valid, and as meaningful, as any imagined convergence.  But hold on there.

I’m not sure that Weschler is, or that JG Ballard was, much of a walker, but I do know that Weschler is the author of another book titled, Robert Irwin Getty Garden about the gardens at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.  The book contains transcripts of conversations Weschler and Irwin (the garden’s designer) had on a series of walks through the garden, discussing the philosophical and practical decisions that went into the design.

It is a fabulous garden by any standard – wild and fanciful in some ways, very formal in others.

I don’t think it’s a garden where people do much serious walking, but there is a pretty great (if obviously unwalkable) cactus garden:

I don’t know if JG Ballard would have enjoyed the Getty Garden.  Some evidence suggests he wouldn’t. There’s an interview by Graeme Revell that appears in “Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard,” from 1984, in which he discusses the symmetry of the French garden - JGB: - Which I always find nightmarish for some reason, those formal French gardens. One would think all that intense formality would be the absolute opposite of madness. The gardens were obviously designed to enshrine the most formal, rational and sane society to ever exist during the Age of Reason. Why they should immediately fill me with notions of psychosis, I don't know.

“Have you ever been to Madingley Hall near Cambridge? It's a big Elizabethan mansion, and a couple of years ago some friends took me out there. Behind this large house, which is used for conferences and academic meetings and the like, were notices everywhere requesting silence. We walked into this large, very formal French garden with beautifully crisp hedges, like great green sculptures, everywhere; very severe, rectangular, rectilinear passways - like diagrams - on the ground. Profoundly enclosed, very silent. I nearly went mad....”

As fate would have it, some of us have seen, or at least seen photographs of, JG Ballard’s front garden, images like this one:

Not much formality there and not much wildness either.  I suppose if you live in suburbia you do have to worry just a little about what the neighbours think, however much of a wildman you are in your writing.  You couldn’t have much of a walk in it, obviously.  \

 I wonder if Ballard would have been happier walking here, at the VW Slug Bug Ranch in Conway, Texas.  I think I would.