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November 25, 2003
The Garden of Rejection
The Fall is failing, heading into its naked final phase, on the way to Winter. It’s as if the fullness of Summer were too much; a thing to turn away from. We are wound in cycles, with no way to sustain the ripened moment. Always nurturing in expectation, or working vainly at preservation. Towards or away from, but rarely there… Who would not seek to hold on to the long days of growth and warmth?One Lady, in a song I’m thinking of, would rather look to Winter.
The Gardener Child is the ballad, similar in form to the riddles and “topping” songs I’ve discussed, but with a strange, declining note. The Gardener propositions the Lady with an offer to clothe her in a gown of all the Summer’s flowers, but she rejects him, with a parallel promise to array him in all the discomforts of Winter’s weather.
And that’s all there is to it.
More often this form involves a series of exchanges, working to a positive resolution. Here it’s a simple one-to-one, solicitation and rejection, leading nowhere. Perhaps the song as it comes down to us is a fragment, but it may be more likely that it is lodged in a level of Mystery we customarily turn away from, preferring to invent our happy endings.
A cycle has no ending, happy or otherwise, without recourse to something outside itself. But if Summer and Winter are opposing statements, then Spring is a “yes” and Autumn a “no,” between them satisfying the barest definition of a dialogue; just enough to motivate the ongoing transformations of the Year.
We might prefer to tongue the dialogue of “yes” and “yes”, but that exchange belongs to eternity. From our oscillating vantage we cannot tell it from an argument: for us, even agreement is evidence of fracture; a requirement of separation, in imitation of true unity. To our ears it is as the gossip of heaven, which we can know only as a fitful ecstasy, beyond season or cycle.
Such ecstasy is surely the aim of the Gardener’s importuning: “Come kiss sweetheart and join and join, Come kiss sweetheart and join.” Do we not all wish to Join? Maybe there is an imbalance in his offer of a literal rose in exchange for the Lady’s more figurative “flower.” Her answer is in the same terms, for a gown of plants, however surreal, is something we can imagine, but to wear the wind and hail, or to ride upon the Winter as a horse, is reserved for the realm of metaphor.
Though his desire is “natural,” the male’s role as Gardener puts him outside of Nature, placing him in a position of control. He can train Nature to his will, making it an instrument of seduction. The Lady is not so compliant. Her invocation of the intemperate is the opposite of cultivation. Where the Gardener would manage the cycle, she turns it back upon him, denying “natural” desire (which would enforce the cycle through procreation) by her appeal to the unaccommodating side of Nature, which lies beyond the garden’s fences. Between the Summer’s flowers and the Winter showers, she speaks the “no” of Autumn. This is the voice of asceticism: a form of self-control that resists control imposed from without.
But even if the power of the Outside can be found Within, there also will be found loneliness, and though her “no” may echo through the Winter, maybe come Springtime this Lady will have something new to say.