Contradictions

I have just finished Geraldine Brooks' latest novel, Caleb's Crossing.  Based on the true story of Harvard College's first Native American graduate, circa 1660's (so early:  just forty years after they first set foot on Plymouth Rock and they already had a university esteemed by Oxford and Cambridge back home!), it is a beautiful meditation on what is lost and what is gained when we forsake the familiar and chase after strange knowledge.

   

Caleb makes a kind of Faustian bargain when he leaves the rather idyllic Martha's Vineyard for Cambridge, and the price is high.  Yet Brooks is a writer sympathetic to all her creations:  she lets us see clearly the nobility of Caleb's desire for the white man's learning.  

It is also about the terrible clash of cultures (and here is where I begin to bring this around to my garden).  The inevitable tragic decline of the Wampanoag is heartbreaking, for tentative early attempts at coexistence were showing promise before all hell broke loose in King Philip's War.  It was ever thus:  the sensitive and the thoughtful reach out to the Other in curiosity and mutuality, while the fearful, the hateful, the violent seek out the Other to destroy.  I think of that other English--Indian encounter, halfway across the globe on the subcontinent, so fruitful and so ill-fated.  Or the Golden Age of Spain, a time of relative peace and incredibly generative cooperation between Arab, Jew, and Christian, until the Inquisition and Ferdinand and Isabella put an abrupt end to all of that.  The seeds of those scorched Iberian orchards remain, however, and they continue to put forth shoots at unexpected times and in unexpected places.

                                           

I, too, am at odds with the native population of this land.  Any gardener is.  Not the Native Americans for whom this state is named, but the flora and fauna that want to swallow up my artifice and return it to the forest and prairie that was here before.  It's more complicated than that, really:  it's the invasives that really want to swallow up the place.  So I am engaged both in the morally dubious enterprise of "turning back the wilderness" and the more righteous battle against the invasives.

Compromise and contradiction, this is the way of the gardener.  I am of necessity a conquerer, intent on imposing my own will on what is, and yet pained by the damage I do.  As an American, as a gardener, I am a sensitive soul in a conquerer's state, forever contradictory, forever guilty.