Discuss: The Nature of Walls

Hi, Jon -

I enjoy your way of looking at things - the mingling of human geography, the impact of cultural metaphor, and ecology.  And I like that you came to this thought because of your love of building walls - it’s poetic.  I could imagine you standing there, puzzling out a stone, thinking about how your wall will be overgrown and buried one day.

To add to the discussion: I agree that walls, existing to separate, have often been used to separate culture from nature, and that this leads to a blindness and otherness that allows us to rationalize harm.  I also agree that all walls fail, eventually.  (But, like Bill, I see that walls serve a valuable function while they’re up - that value is why people build them.)

Where I differ is the interpretation of this separation.  You equate the separation that walls bring with the false dichotomy of “culture vs. nature”. But, just because walls HAVE done this doesn’t mean they MUST, or that they ALWAYS do.

The underlying principle: separation is not opposition.  Walls often act as partitions to prevent mixing, the same way cell walls and organelles prevent mixing.  The separation of parts allows the functioning of the whole.  Plants and animals create their own separations - termite mounds, with different chambers for each function, and defenses; wolf territories with scent-marked boundaries, to avoid conflict; seed pods with strong hulls to stay safe until germination.  The concept of ORGAN is tied to the concept of WALL - and, without the chambers of our hearts, our blood would spill out into our chests. That’s probably a good metaphor for it: life itself is made of walls.

The trick with separation is that our minds DO often confuse it with opposition.  And it can also go too far: becoming too rigid to adapt, too tight-fit to move.  I don’t hope for walls to end - I hope they’re used well.

Dear Anthony

What a marvelous letter.

The false distinction between nature and culture is in my sights.

I think about it like a pointilist painting.  The painting is thousands of dots.  Something in our minds puts them together to form an image. I think the calculus that does that inside our heads is prone to cultural priorities and lessons learned.

For instance In Peru, home to the apex of human stonework, I think the Inca masons were not trying to use walls to make culture separate from nature but were trying to tie their culture to nature with stone as an artistic medium of this endeavour .

Inca walls were clearly homologous with our western walls in their intent to aggrandize the ruler, and to express mastery over hard stone.
I think in a way that is very different than most European walls, They were trying to weave their culture to their animate land.

I think a similar phenomenon is at work in the Maltese walls mentioned in an earlier comment in this discussion.

A big part of what walls are, is what we make them. They are frequently used to do terrible things.They can do good things too.

Perhaps it comes down to what we ask from them?  Or perhaps what we are able to perceive them doing. And there have been many questions posed to stone by culture, on several continents and in various time periods.

Thanks again especially for the cellular and organ reference.

Jon

When Neolithic people lived in huts or caves they did their very best to build unique temples to their gods and the temples were built close to the sea on a hill facing the rising rising sun at its equinox.

Nature and man’s walls creating a unique environment still vivid today 7,000 years later.

The ancients, however, came to realize what they had lost by building the literal and figurative walls of “civilization” around themselves.

All mesoAmerican civilizations, other than the ones Europeans later destroyed, abandoned their cities and returned to the wild. These include the Maya, the Olmec, the Toltec, the Hohakam and the Anasazi.

We, the moderns, are the only civilization which has failed to learn the lesson of your poetic treatise.  And even as the walls fall in atop us, we no longer even see them.

i think that we build walls to block out nature but thats not the way to handle it there has to bbe some way we can keep people safe and still enjoy nature! THINK PEOPLE THINK!!!!!!!!!!

Dear Robert

Thanks for your comment.I am worried that when these walls fall we will feel it severely.

I once had the good fortune to speak with a great elderly environmentalist.  I asked him after his years of work if he saw a way to protect nature. I was much younger and thought there was one cog or gear that could be pulled to bring down the mess we have made and save nature.

He told me that nature is not really in any danger. It has handled catastrophe before.  What is in danger is us.

The green side wins.  The question is will our species be here to see it.

Jon

Dear Punky,

I think there are a bunch of ways to do this. I bet there are even more that I can’t even think of. Some are part measures, and all are welcome.

I wonder about safety though.  I know it might seem callous to someone in pressing danger but it seems to me that the one thing all humans, and other biological entities, have in common is that we all die. 

The safest, the richest the best educated, the most at risk the youngest the oldest, democrat, republican, all races, all religions, in every country throughout all time. All die.

People in Europe and Japan on average live longer than people here.  People here live longer on average than people in some less developed places.  But that is on average.

The time will come for each of us to die.

I do not think that we should in anyway spur this.

We should work to improve safety, justice, ecological sustainability.We should make a world where each person and other creatures can live to their potential.  We should enjoy life and do the great things we are capable of. 

But I think it would be a mistake to assume safety.  Perhaps a new way of looking at what has always been the ultimate danger might be helpful.

Maybe the physical requirements needed to support the presumption that it would be better to live forever,or that we can be forever young, or that each person should live like a king, or that humanity is the apex of evolution ask too much of our world. Perhaps our assumptions about success put all of us people at risk.

Thanks for writing

Jon

I am lucky enough to have actually helped make some stone walls, so I found the article especially appealing!  The ones I have helped with are within the Mohonk Preserve in upstate New York, and are exclusively made to help reduce erosion of the steep talus slopes.

Most of our work is covered by dirt, so people might not even know there’s a short wall below their feet as they walk the cliffside trails, but I can tell you that I always get quite a sense of solidity and connection with the land when I am passing through a section I worked on.  It’s almost as if I can sense the land saying “Hey, thanks!  It’s hard work staying in place when everything’s downhill from here....”