Not that I’ve got anything against the grass. In fact, I love the grass, though there are things I love more, such as trees. Trees, bees, and pygmy goats, though the latter also cause me some discomfort, not of themselves – for it is they being so of themselves that I love them so; no, they rankle me simply because they are bred. Because somewhere down behind the long line of manmade goat clans is the Ur-Goat, the wild goat, the goat windward side of evolution’s raw wind, free as the wind, which we have tamed and put on our plates, more or less.
Such is the grass: refined, groomed, spoiled and whipped into shape by man’s hungry hand. Trouble is, his is a hunger augmented by too much mind, intellect the inadvertent tool of selfsame evolutionary wind, hapless and aimless, whose only rule is “forward,” also construed as “survive,” a.k.a. “eat.” First, scattered weeds that bear somewhat edible seed (especially if chewed long, or ground, or roasted) are turned to a noble cause like quinoa. Then wheat. Then someone decides the whole damn field looks pretty from a distance, like a kingdom, and reduces the herb to a carpet called a lawn, complete with fertilizer and ornaments in the shapes of slaves. It’s even brought inside and stuffed in a vase, with dead daisies.
This is where I come in, I and my hate. My hate of mowing, of the lawnmower, the weedwacker, the rake, the whole damn concept. I’ve never had anything against a field of green wheat sprouts, whole stalks, green or dried and standing head full of seeds, of fruit. In fact, I find it preferable. I think it should remain tall and a field.
If a practical reason not to have one’s house surrounded by a border of short-haired grasses is to keep the mice and chipmunks and other lovers of warm spaces behind the clapboards at bay, there’s something in that. A house itself is an artificial statement against the wild, so one must have a boundary, and it’s in keeping with nature’s law to let the rodents fight harder for their own stolen turf.
The poor bound the house with dirt which they sweep. If that’s not so appealing in mudtime, there are alternatives, like a cat. But even grass, I might say, in such a case is fine, if only it were kept under control. I mean not the height, but breadth. Something one could trim with a push-mower, or lamb. But not these vast savannahs of an acre or more that these other country folks adore.
I inherited my patch, my plantation of grass, so perhaps it’s not entirely my fault. Just the part just around the house would be enough, small and broken as it is by beds of lilac and periwinkle, lavender, rose, and viburnum. Hybrids all.
It’s not really that I have so much against all the works of man, but some are so absurd it would make me laugh, if it weren’t for the darker fact behind the grin. That beyond the ruff of Kentucky Rye around the house proper, there’s a half-acre lawn my grandfather had planted to make a field for his many grandsons and tommish grandgirls to play football on. Solely for that kindness I’ve been consigned to a weekly sentence of an extra hour’s mowing. And to accomplish that, I’m killing my mother, the living planet.
It used to be worse, in a way, for the four years when I still stubbornly held to the walk-behind self-propelled mower. Worse for me, since the whole job took three hours. Three hours a week less of life to live. Worse for the air and birds and global climate that I finally gave up some of my principles and invested in a riding mower. Urged on by my wife. I suppose it was the sensible thing to do, since now it only takes me seventy minutes to do the whole job. But I would rather have let the one-time football field go to seed, let the vermin revel in their restored acre.
So tonight I ride the ridiculous machine, a slave to culture and romantic love, spewing toxins and carbons into the evening air, all the while well aware the planet is already destined for trouble beyond its capacity to repair (if one considers homeostasis to be a willful force). My guilt weighs on me as heavily as the turf I roll over, blades lopping, engine howling.
The thing about guilt is that very weight. If I have somewhere that spare ounce of ambition that would allow me to live my principles without compromise, guilt is the blanket that snuffs it, as if it were a small fire set in a patch of straw. The blanket, though flammable itself (flammable, because like all functions of memory, it derives from passion, however dulled by fear) – the blanket baffles sufficient oxygen from the mouth of the fire. The flame dies down. Dead.
In other words, guilt does little to move one towards one’s desire; although it has the best intentions, it’s one of the quicker killers out there.
Still, like any evil, it’s not necessary that it prevail, and rising against its putrid stench, and against the idiocy of the lawn, is a light like morning sun, a face on the horizon in the form of a student of mine. Let’s just call him “Jake A.” This is a kid who I’d known barely a month last year when suddenly he was cadging my classroom once a week after school to hold his own student peace group. This is not what you think: another one of those ephemeral well-intentioned band of bleeding-heart freaks out to replay the Sixties with their manifestoes and tie-die t-shirts. Well, maybe some of them are, but this one student in particular, this Jake, has a fire in him that, well, he’s the kind of kid you say you wish you had a million of. But in this case, you really mean it. His depth of conviction and his ability to organize people is admirable for any living human, much less a seventeen year-old one. It puts me to shame. Which is, of course, another way of saying it puts me to guilt. But that’s my doing, I’m pretty sure, not Jake’s. Oh, occasionally he does give me that “I’m so disappointed look” when I say I can’t go to the rally in the city because I have too many papers to grade. The underlying question is, “What can your essays matter, when the world is burning?” But the question is out there, without so much weight, just out there, hanging. It’s I who can choose to take it on or not. Taking it on as a gauntlet is a different kind of weight than taking it on as a yoke; it has a heft, rather than a stranglehold.
But most of the time I tend to push that radiant, earnest apparition out of sight all together, grinding my teeth in ire as I bump along on my riding mower. Still, that promise is out there, that beamy face, offering me a way out of my misery. I don’t think either of us thinks my planting the lawn to the carbon-sucking sycamore is necessarily going to save the world. But it might save my soul.
And as for the grass, if it had a mind, it would mind either. But for mammals, shade is preferable to hate.
Categories: Political Animal
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