Weird lawns

(That's the Blue Velvet one)

The good things about having just copy edited The Ecological Thought are:

--I can watch The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari on Netflix streaming.

--I can listen to Garlands by The Cocteau Twins in lieu of a soundtrack.

--I can proof read my essay “The Dark Ecology of Elegy” for Karen Weisman's forthcoming blockbuster, The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy.

Ah, life is good...did I say “life”?

So I'm going to add some things here that didn't make it into the final draft of the essay. They have to do with weird lawns. And as we know, lawns are inherently not weird. Weirdly not weird.

I've written on lawns before so you may know what I think, but in essence, the lawn is the embodiment of private property in public (Keep Off the Grass). Thus they became a symbol of republicanism (small /r/). Hence the giant lawn at Monticello, designed to show, like huge parking lots and big tables in restaurants, how much private property Jefferson had, while keeping some of the actual private property (slaves) hidden around the sides of the house. When he visited Zurich, Lenin was pretty amazed by all the carefully mown lawns.

Hence:
--Switzerland was founded on a lawn. (Well, the Rütli Meadow.)
--One of the primordial lawn images is that of the lawn studded with flowers, like a blank page studded with words. Tropes are flowers. That's why it's called an anthology (a collection of rhetorical flowers, viz. “flowery language.”)
--Frankenstein was written in Switzerland and the good doctor is a Genevan.
--Wordsworth was obsessed with lawns.
--Percy Shelley was obsessed with Wordsworth obsessed with lawns.
--Shelley's poem Alastor is about a republican (small /r/) poet, called Poet.
--Alastor is Shelley's version of what Mary did in Frankenstein.
--The poem says it's a critique of Wordsworth for not being Wordsworthian enough.
--Or is it?
--It's an elegy for a dying Poet, and a dying politics; and like any good elegy it turns into a horror movie where we know what's going to happen before it happens, and then it happens.
--What happens is that the Poet becomes obsessed with Nature until he dies, literally immersed in it.
--As part of this immersion he visits a lawn. A weird lawn.
--So the question is, is the weird lawn what happens when you do something to Wordsworthian language--or is it inherent in Wordsworthian language from the get go?
--To be continued. For now, here is the weird lawn.

The meeting boughs and implicated leaves
Wove twilight o’er the Poet’s path, as, led
By love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death,
He sought in Nature’s dearest haunt some bank,
Her cradle and his sepulchre. More dark
And dark the shades accumulate. The oak,
Expanding its immense and knotty arms,
Embraces the light beech. The pyramids
Of the tall cedar overarching frame
Most solemn domes within, and far below,
Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky,
The ash and the acacia floating hang
Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed
In rainbow and in fire, the parasites,
Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around
The gray trunks, and, as gamesome infants’ eyes,
With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles,
Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love,
These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs,
Uniting their close union; the woven leaves
Make network of the dark blue light of day
And the night’s noontide clearness, mutable
As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns
Beneath these canopies extend their swells,
Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms
Minute yet beautiful. One darkest glen
Sends from its woods of musk-rose twined with jasmine
A soul-dissolving odor to invite
To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell
Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep
Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades,
Like vaporous shapes half-seen; beyond, a well,
Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave,
Images all the woven boughs above,
And each depending leaf, and every speck
Of azure sky darting between their chasms;
Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves
Its portraiture, but some inconstant star,
Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair,
Or painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon,
Or gorgeous insect floating motionless,
Unconscious of the day, ere yet his wings
Have spread their glories to the gaze of noon. (426–68)

...weird, isn't it?

Now back to what is now Nosferatu plus Treasure.