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3 Avant-Gardens
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c h a p t e r 3 Avant-Gardens Yes, the sowing of a seed seems a very simple matter, but I always feel as if it were a sacred thing among the mysteries of God. Standing by that space of blank and motionless ground, I think of all it holds for me of beauty and delight, and I am filled with joy at the thought that I may be the magician to whom power is given to summon so sweet a pageant from the silent and passive soul. I bring a mat from the house and kneel by the smooth bed of mellow brown earth, lay a narrow strip of board across it a few inches from one end, draw a furrow firmly and evenly in the ground along the edge of the board, repeating this until the whole bed is grooved at equal distances across its entire length. CELIA THAXTER, AN ISLAND GARDEN 45 In both of the creation stories in Genesis, the Garden of Eden is created separately from humankind. Actually, in the earlier creation story, no garden is mentioned: God creates the heavens and the earth in six days and places man and woman in charge of the creation. In the second creation story, God first breathes life into man, who he has formed from the dust; then He plants a garden in Eden and places man there, to till it and keep it, and finally creates Eve from Adam’s rib so that he’ll have company. When the serpent beguiles Eve, and she o¤ers Adam the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, their fall from grace is demonstrated in their expulsion from the garden. While in both stories God makes clear that man and woman should be fruitful together and multiply (Gen. 1:28) and that they are to become “one flesh” (Gen. 2:23), love—in the conventional, modern sense of the word—is not mentioned. In Christian myth, romantic love seems a relatively minor issue, and the crucial meaning of the fall of Adam and Eve is in Christ’s redemption of humankind: the consciousness of good and evil that resulted from the original sin becomes a means for transcending humankind’s fallen state through the mediation of Christ whose life on earth transforms the original shame into a Fortunate Fall. In modern American, middle-class thinking—at least insofar as commercial movies reflect this thinking—the meaning of the garden and of Adam and Eve has been radically transformed. Indeed, the garden has become a “garden,” the psychic state of true love. Man and woman weren’t created to till a garden but rather were made for each other; and the Fortunate Fall has become boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl—or a variation on this pattern —and they live happily ever after in a middle-class Eden, characterized 46 A V A N T - G A R D E N S [3.235.139.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:13 GMT) not by the biodiversity evident in the biblical Eden but by adequate material goods. If the modern Adam and Eve are fruitful and multiply, this is a by-product , not the goal of the love they share. American alternative cinema, which has generally set itself up as a critique of commercial media and conventional thinking, has reacted against the mainstream by rarely privileging heterosexual romantic love. Indeed, when romantic love has been conjured up, at least implicitly, the focus has tended to be the demise of romance. Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) can easily be read as a psychodramatization of Deren’s resistance to conventional marriage and domesticity; and in Hollis Frampton’s Critical Mass (1971) the breakup of a couple is reflected in the increasing separation of image and sound: Frampton’s implicit rejection of Hollywood’s privileging of synchronization, his embracing other forms of sound-image relationship , is a reflection of, and is imaged by, the increasing psychic distance between his two protagonists. There is, however, a tradition in avant-garde film of using the idea of the Garden as a means for critiquing Hollywood romantic conventions, for rethinking the ways in which the commercial cinema has revised the biblical sense of the Garden. The discussion that follows focuses on several films, each of which provides a di¤erent sense of the Garden and a di¤erent...