Subliminal Gardening
Where is it written that gardening is a form of subliminal activity? That the organisation of space on an experiential, sensory basis proceeds from desires that verbalisation cannot satisfy? Where is an acknowledgement of gardening as the effort to convey, or better yet, to satisfy some undercurrent of feeling?
If we approach gardening this way, as the effort to arrange a scene, whether a still life or a bit of pond life, then this is my latest gardening exercise.
What it leaves unexplained may or may not be of consequence. But for people who want their gardens to mean something, I can offer two possiblities. One, that this particular effort exemplifies the sub-liminal; it is a garden exploration of the not-quite conscious. Two, that the topic is still being excavated, and will find an explicit meaning in time, as the various elements interact.
3 Comments:
i think what you mean to be getting at is Unconscious Intelligence. (read daniel dennett et al.)
and it's not that rearranging, categorizing, filing, altering--and so on--'things' is just about, well, rearranging (and so on), but that we use 'things' to work ideas/concepts/problems out on an unconscious level. one day you come home from your job at your post office; your apartment, with its el lisitzky and futurist posters, just doesn't look right anymore. so you spend the day moving things around, operating on what appears to be an unconscious level. and then the next day, whilst sipping a cup of soy milk, you realize the method behind your organization of your 'things'. there is a method (maybe even meaning?), in fact, but your discovery of the abstract structure and syntax of your redecorating impulses necessitates the use of props-things-stuff.
also check out (briefly) esther pasztory and george kubler.
By
Anonymous, at 09 June, 2006 18:09
someone takes the time to post a comment, and you don't even display it. totally fucking lame.
By
Anonymous, at 18 June, 2006 21:26
Oops. I didn't even realize there were any comments. Had moderation turned on, no email notification, and have only now upgraded to the new Blogger.
So, guilty as charged. And sorry. I apologise.
And thanks for the original comment. I was trying to get at something else - something not directly about organizing and processing, but at something like a pre-linguistic mind, something with a capacity for making patterns that satisfy some other part of the mind. Call it a spiritual urge, or a creative urge. So the integration of what you wrote would point toward any pattern-making activity as a problem solving tool.
On that basis, would nest-making count as a problem-solving activity?
By
e-tat, at 17 August, 2007 23:55
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