Discuss: The Nature of Walls

To Zachary

One common working assumption is that there is a line between nature and culture. This line has troubled me.It seems to me that there is a problem intrinsic to any duality.  You can’t have one without the other.You can’t reason yourself out of the box if you can’t entertain the notion of destroying the box.  You can’t destroy the box if you exist only in reference to the box.
This is very hard.

To Ramesh

Thank you. It was my intention to use walls as a vehicle to examine mind.

To Paul
Beside my drafting table I have 10 little postcards that I look at at times for inspiration.Three are from Malta.  I have the Hypogeum,an overview of the Ggantija temples on Gozo, and one detailing the alignment of the temples of Hagar Qim. They are unique in the world and they predate and are perhaps markers of a very different attitude toward nature than I addressed in my article. I am very interested in this other attitude and am trying to learn about it. I have not been and would love to see them.

To Rebecca

I find it amazing that 2 people with MCS commented on this.I don’t know anything about this condition. Is it that the biology of you is recoiling from the chemical residuals of our culture?

I think you are right that walls need not be solid.  One of my favorite not solid wall is called a whistling wall
built by Native Americans on Martha’s Vineyard. They have lots of holes and they whistle in the wind.  I am not sure that this is true but i like to think that the Natives, who were essentially enslaved by the colonists to build the walls, took the opportunity to provide the wind the opportunity to sing while they were forced to build the very markers (the walls) that disenfranchised them from their land.

Dear Sir,

Your claim is that walls always fail. Certainly walls fail, but often after much time, and after much success.

The citizens of East Berlin, of Ramallah, of North Korea; the two million Americans behind bars; and the exploited in every country regularly experience just how resilient and successful walls really are. Perhaps the grandchildren of the imprisoned will walk free; too late, I think, for the imprisoned.

Your metaphor is touching, but rings hollow in a country with the highest imprisonment rates in the history of the world.

Dear Bill,

You are right.

I like to imagine and work towards a world where those walls will come down.  I had hoped my opinion on the ultimate futility of such containment
would be clear. Perhaps i failed.

Sorry,

Jon

Jon,
I understood you to be using walls and the metaphor of walls to argue that the more we distance ourselves from Nature, from “the outside”, the less dynamic, well-rounded people we become.  I appreciated this argument and thought it was a well-timed article in a world where Progress is measured by the expansion of our concrete jungles.  The discussion of walls can go far beyond nature and culture even to walls being icons of separation and hate, as Bill has noted.  But I think in any case, walls are less about understanding, freedom, and community, and more about separation, entrapment, and fear.

Hi Laura

That was amazingly well said.

I think walls and the division they represent and provide are a vestige of an earlier cultural rapport with nature. Sadly, in my opinion, it has morphed into a negation of the natural world. Religion and materialism have conspired to undo nature, energized by this ancient nature/culture animosity first sighted in print in the epic of Gilgamesh.

I am afraid the progression might go like this:

culture defines itself in opposition to nature/ culture expands erasing nature/ culture collapses/ nature wins (there are no people)

I would prefer the following progression:

culture defines itself in opposition to nature/ culture expands erasing nature/ culture realizes it is putting itself at risk denying its obvious dependence on nature/ culture realizes it is nature/ culture adapts to this new fusion/ Nature wins (people are still there to play a part.)

There several fantastic books dealing with this topic from a variety of perspectives which i will list for anyone interested.

Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity

Walter Burkert, Homo Necans

George Hersey, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture

Robert Harrison, Forests the Shadow of Civilization.

Sorry to be so long.

Jon