29

The children walked about between the grown-ups legsThere was some talking in the garden. On the plumTree pears were growing.

Israel Eliraz1

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1. The Garden of the Constant Gardener (2005)

Tel Aviv Cinemateque (21.8.06)

In the film The Constant Gardener,2 a white British diplomat

living in Kenya cultivates a beautiful private garden. At one

moment in the film the camera moves abruptly out of this garden

into the nearby Kenyan space of poverty, epidemics, exploitation,

oppression, rioting, filth, overcrowding, and mostly cruel

violence. In syntactical terms this cinematic transition is like

a sentence that begins in English and ends in Swahili. It is an

impossible suture between worlds, and it exists both in the film

and in the world as an impossibility. English and Swahili are the

official languages of Kenya, a former British colony.

This relationship between the garden and its neighboring reality,

a reality perceived as its opposite, is an ancient one. The story

of the Garden of Eden in Genesis already contains the internal

contradiction. It is a story (and a garden) which negates itself,

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation,

1433-4, Tempera on wood,

150x180cm, Museo Diocesano,

Cortona

1 Israel Eliraz, lifnei ha-delet, me-ever la-kayitz (Before the Door, Beyond the Summer), Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meuhad 2006, p. 94 [Hebrew].

2 The Constant Gardener; Director: Fernando Meirelles, United Kingdom/USA, 2005. Based on the novel by John Le Carr.

The Gaze of Cain Meditations in Four Gardens

-------

Dror Burstein

30

locking itself up. In an early painting of the Annunciation by Fra

Angelico this duality is well captured: on the one hand Adam and

Eve are banished from the garden, and on the other, as part of the

same narrative continuum, the angel arrives to announce to Mary

her pregnancy. A violent outward movement (banishment) versus

a gentle inward movement (the angels words as a sublimation of

sexual intercourse). But even the pregnancy in the painting will

ultimately lead to an expulsion from the Garden of Eden, to

the crucifixion. The garden is the place which we have already

left, or which we are bound to leave. It always faces some sort

of desert. And there are times and places where it seems that the

desert is everywhere. Even in the garden. I write these lines in

the summer of 2006, in Israel. A war is going on.

For Mary, and for Adam and Eve, the garden is the place from

which one exits into the real world, where the givens are not

gardens, but rather the crucifix or the earth, which symbolizes

all that is material in man: Therefore the Lord God sent him

forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he

was taken (Genesis 3:23). When a person plants a garden today

he is like someone who sends himself a gift by post: he sends

himself from the desert (the city too is a desert) to till the

ground from whence he was taken. He creates for himself the

thing which was denied to him, the gift. From now on the soil of

the garden is also an intimation of exile, a present symbol, the

seal on his verdict. Perhaps this is the reason that the flow of

water is so important in the garden (and the transparent flow of

gravel for the Japanese is also a flow, mixed inseparably in the

soil). Water as the grace of the garden, as against the weight

of the earth, the goddess of gravity. The gardens foliage is the

offspring of this meeting, between water and earth.

Adam and Eve exit the garden, immediately, into a world of murder.

The story of Cain and Abel occurs right after the expulsion from

the garden. It is the first story after the expulsion. Thus, the

ever-turning sword protects the garden from the world of murder

lying outside it: So he drove out the man; and he placed at the

31

east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which

turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. (Genesis

3:24). And what is the following verse? And Adam knew Eve

his wife; and she conceived, and bore Cain (Genesis 4:1) and

immediately after: And when they were in the field, Cain rose

up against his brother Abel, and killed him (4:8).

When Cain is banished, after the murder, he says to God: Behold,

thou hast driven me this day from the face of the earth (4:14).

Yet he continues to live on the face of the earth. And what is

the place on the face of the earth that he goes to? Then Cain

went away from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land

of Nod, east of Eden. East of Eden, may it be remembered, is the

place of the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every

way. The murderer returns to the gates of Eden. He fulfills,

wordlessly, the motive for the expulsion. His gazing toward the

garden is retroactive justification for his parents expulsion, a

seal ratifying their verdict. For his parents knowledge of good and bad immediately turned into the sons perpetration of the bad. Not to eat from the tree of life is to eat from the tree of

murder. The garden is the place whose inhabitants are sentenced

to leave it, because of what it contains: the serpent, the trees,

and mainly, the human beings and human nature. There is an alien,

an even hostile, quarrelsome element between humanness and the

space of the garden; this is the storys conclusion in Genesis.

Every true garden is an attempt to deny this lesson, that is to say, to make a different claim about humanness. Suddenly I

realize that Adam and Eve were banished from the garden not only

because of what they did, but also because of what their son was

destined to do. Imagine what would have happened had Cain and

Abel been born inside the garden.

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2. Villa dEste (1550), Tivoli, 23.7.06

In front of this fountain it is easier to understand the

Fountains of the Villa dEste, from Franz Liszts Years of

32

Pilgrimage for the piano, composed following a visit here3.

The great Neptune fountain is only one locus in the garden,

which is full of water features, yet it is the explanation for

everything that occurs here. It is a wondrous work producing the

manifold out of an ostensible uniform material: water. There is

here water rising, and water descending, quiet water and frothy

water, swift water and sluggish water, smooth water and rough

water, trombone water and violin water. How different are this

fountain and this garden from the garden of gravel and stones,

the Japanese dry garden, and how similar they are in essence.

The piano composition by Liszt, this water-works musical

counterpart, clarifies the meaning of these Jeux deau precisely because it translates the material (water) into music, that is

into something that transpires through time: the statue spouts

forth a lecture about time, about the multiple voices of time

in the garden, and in the world as well. Out of this wonderful

cool that it sends to you on a very hot July day, the fountain

appears to say: you do not live within time, but within its

multitude manifestations. You are a collection of the flows of

time. Neptune is to be understood here not only as Lord of the

Sea but also as the God of Time, Chronos (in Greek mythology

Chronos/Saturnus is the father of Neptune/Poseidon). This god

hides within his water-and-time machine, pulling at the strings

of the water and of the entire garden (its water, plants, people,

land and air creatures), responsive and alive. This is how time

works: invisible, transparent, and mostly multiple. The heart

of a bird, the heart of a tourist, streams of water, a file of

ants, the barefoot steps of two or three gods walking about the

garden in the heat of day, Liszts music wells up in my memory

right now, my fingers play it upon the cool water this fountain

has already foreseen all of this. It explains, it always will

explain how it works: if the garden is a clock, this fountain is

its clockwork revealed.

When one lends one ear to this fountain one hears the different

sounds produced by the streams of water, just as when one listens

to the rocks in the dry Japanese garden one can hear them too:

3 Les jeux d'eau la Villa d'Este.

33

look at me, Francois Berthier hears a Japanese garden saying to

him, dont ask me anything. Just try to find yourself in me.4

The sound of the Japanese rocks is much softer, and certainly much

slower, than the gushing of the Italian fountains. Its wavelengths

do not reach the outer ear. But the issue, fundamentally, is the

same. For the Japanese themselves, at least from the time of

Muso Soseki (1275-1351), the most important figure in Japanese

garden design in the era dubbed the Middle Ages in the West,

rocks are used precisely to indicate absent water. Rocks that

are a waterfall, rocks that are a pool, rocks that are a

stream.5

It is necessary to observe the water within every rock, to

see how time has been imprinted upon it differently from any

other rock. What has time left upon its surface? How does it

turn its face, furrowed by time immemorial, to the other rocks

in the garden, and how does it turn its face to us? How many

transparent layers of time does each rock in the Ryoan-ji garden

contain? They have been in that garden for 500 years already.

But those years are a mere splinter of the time endured by these

rocks before they were brought to the temple in Kyoto.

An ancient Japanese treatise on the art of garden design6 instructs

the gardener selecting the rocks for his garden to leave the rock

in the original position in which it was found in nature. It

is absolutely forbidden, for example, to have a standing rock

recline. It is difficult to be certain what the reason was for

this restriction one of many grave prohibitions set down by

the Sakuteiki but an attempt at understanding can be made in

light of the aforesaid: if rocks are time-capsules, clearly they

must be exhibited as they developed in their natural setting.

The wrinkled face of an old person speaks time differently than

the back of his neck or the soles of his feet.

The time of the garden lasts longer than the time of the tenant,

always. Is this not what every garden says? The rocks of the

4 F. Berthier, Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden, trans. G. Parks, University of Chicago Press 2000, p. 42.

The Garden in Ryoan-ji (Temple

of Ryoan), Kyoto, Japan

End of the 15th or early 16th

century.

5 Masao Hayakawa, the Garden Art of Japan, trans. R. L. Gage, Waterhill 1973, p. 62.

6 Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden, trans. Jiro Takei & M. P. Keane, Tuttle 2001, p. 18.

34

Japanese garden definitely say this, because their ponderous

range of tenses hovers above and beyond the human scale of

time. Like particularly old tortoises they squat beside their

diminutive relatives, no less old than they, the gravel stones.

But the Villa dEste says the same thing. The ear attuned to the

different flows of water in the Neptune fountain, and of the

other fountains in the garden, might hear the way in which the

streams of time that compose life (the moment of conception: one

time; the in utero phase: a second time; the moments of birth: a third time: the first instants of breathing: a fourth time; and

so on) are indeed a part of the vaster times that the garden

articulates. The garden is transience. The gardener, who rakes

the gravel in the Japanese garden, quits the garden and erases his

own footprints7. After raking he leaves the garden, and the marks

he leaves behind are not a personal signature, like a painters

signature in the corner of a canvas. The gardeners departure

from the garden, without leaving behind a trace of himself, is

the gardens first lesson.

You do not observe a garden like a painting, as something

which your gaze might imagine it could contain. You yourself

are contained, always, in the garden. To leave the garden and

observe it from afar, like a map, means not to be in the garden.

Therefore the Japanese refused a rigid symmetry in the garden.

Such symmetry is not for solitude, wrote Lord Byron of the

gardens at Versailles.8 The gardens dialogue is not between

two halves forming a whole, because that is not a dialogue, but

rather a doubling of a single voice, an echo. In order for speech

to be created in a garden, symmetry must be violated. It is

always one who begins a conversation and behold, the dialogue

is already a-symmetrical.

But even the most geometrical garden cannot express an absolute

attitude of regimenting power, because even its most orderly

geometry is something in which its addressee is to be enveloped,

rather than controlling it from above like a drawing table.

When inside a triangle, you dont know you are in a triangle.

7 M. P. Keane, The Art of Setting Stones & Other Writings from the Japanese Garden, Stone Bridge 2001, p. 54 .

8 Tom Turner, Garden History: Philosophy & Design 2000BC2000AD, Spon Press 2005, p. 183.

35

The garden teaches something that every gardener takes for

granted: there is a timetable to which you are subject. The

trains movements are not subject to your pocket watch. You

cant grow whatever you want whenever you want. You cannot be

in the garden and ignore its rhythms. Therefore the garden is a

lesson in responsibility, just as the birth of a child is such a

lesson. The constant gardener, this title is a near-tautology:

constancy is the meaning of this mtier. It is like saying the

treating doctor. If he doesnt treat, can he still call himself

a doctor?

Edouard Manet has a wonderful, late painting entitled, My Garden

at Versailles (1881): a bench and a table beside a footpath, red

flowers. Everything is bathed in a quiet but glad vibrant light.

A small nook within the giant, regal, imperial complex. Manet

understood that the garden as a complete object, contained

within its boundaries, does not exist for us. The garden is always a fragment, and as such, there is always something in it that is invisible, some lost whole. Every garden contains many

gardens. For Manet, this little nook is a world. The bench in

the painting is designated for us, and for us alone, there is no

room in it but for two. Therefore, the garden is an infinity of

spaces, an infinity of gardens. It is an infinity within itself,

but sometimes also beyond itself: the Japanese always knew that

the garden is a place that collects and awakens within itself

far-off sights, be it the sight of a mountain or of the moon, if

only these places are invited into our vision. They called this

technique of inviting shakei (borrowing landscape)9. In the

West the last quarter of the sixteenth century is often noted as

the moment in which the axes of the gardens became guidelines

pointing to distant places, which during the Baroque period

become a central feature of the art of gardening. The garden, if

one only looks at it, always contains more than itself, both in

its inward gaze and its outward gaze. Every garden, whether to a

lesser or greater extent, undermines the possibility of grasping

it as an object. Sometimes, within the garden, you recognize this

of yourself as well.

9 Hayakawa, p. 10.

Edouard Manet, My Garden at

Versailles, 1881, oil on canvas,

65.1x81.2cm, Private collection

36

Mark Peter Keane, and American architect working in Japan,

saw how the Japanese garden is always an emphatic symphony

of change, whether it contains gravel and stone, or whether it

contains fountains and rich foliage. This changeable quality is an

expression of the transparent array of times, which suddenly

becomes visible. Keane observed that the garden is a place where

you can understand how your human times and how the time of the

insect in the garden are part of one whole in relation to the time

of the cherry blossoms. For humans it is a blink of an eye, for

the insect an entire life. And for a flower? It seems not to

compare its time to any other; it simply blossoms. At the Ville

dEste I sipped the cold time. The flavor of life.

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3. Villa Lante, Bagnaia, 27.7.06

As opposed to Villa dEste, which is a steep descending garden,

this garden follows a moderate upward incline. It leads from

finish to start: from the neat organization of topiary forms

on the ground floor, until the end of the incline, where the

garden begins: a triple grotto where the gardens water, that is

the entire garden, has its source. Walking through the space of

this garden is walking backwards in time: from the present to

past, from effect to cause, from the ordered to the primordial.

This is a garden of return. A return back to primordial nature

from the culture of the trimmed gardens and the fountain, in

which stone boats float (a small wonder of civilization a

stone floating on water, facing a great wonder of nature water

gushing out of stone, at the top of the garden). Turner views this

garden as the fall from a mythological golden age to quotidian

reality, but this interpretation, it seems, is reversed, when

one reads the garden in the other direction, which in fact is the

natural direction for walking through it: not a fall from the

golden age, but an upward ascent toward it. Or perhaps an ascent

to the beginning, which always ends by walking backwards, by

falling?

37

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden (Genesis

2:10). The walk in Villa Lante goes from the river that goes

out to water and leads to Eden. The most famous and outstanding

element in the garden is the water chain, a channel made of

circular links (the design is attributed to Vignola) a stone

canal that has learned from the water something about the

relativity of the concepts of stone and water. The water

chain creates something that is neither completely stone nor

completely water, but is rather water sculpted (as stone) and

stone flowing (as water). I dip my hand into the cool water,

touching the cold stone. It is 35C outside. I splash my face,

and drink.

Only on the way out do I notice: at the end of the water-chain

a bizarre form unfolds, like two hands. No, these are the claws

of a scorpion, and the water chain is the segments of its tail

(The scorpion was the symbol of Cardinal Gambara, the owner of

the Villa when it was developed and when its current shape was

designed.). Only in retrospect do I realize that the pleasures of

water and stone of this garden are also a camouflage. Within the

river going out of Eden to water the garden lurks a scorpion, a

near, very near reincarnation of the serpent. In Villa Lante the

river is the serpent itself.

Drinking this serpent-water is a somewhat shocking moment,

but also an important one. Because here I understand, not in an

intellectual way, but physically, how much the garden is also

an internal reality. The serpent, Adam and Eve, the trees, the

expulsion, Cain. Cooper writes that the garden teaches you to be

in the position of a co-creator. You are never the sole author of

the garden, or of anything else, as some artists believe today.

The sun, the wind, the earth, the insects, and other innumerable

factors are the gardeners full partners (as they are partners of

the painter, writer, and cook). In the story of the Garden of Eden

in Genesis Adam (man) was supposed to be such a co-creator. The

Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till

it and keep it (2:15). But the partnership failed, because of

38

the serpent, that is because of the serpent within Adam and Eve.

Anyone dealing with a garden today, and for whom the Genesis

story is meaningful, is involved somehow in atonement for that

failed gardening partnership. Every garden is a quiet refusal of

the expulsion edict, and of its ratification in the gaze of the

murderer Cain. As Cooper writes10, the garden every garden

is a lesson of hope. Not the desire for something in particular

to happen (I hope I win the lottery), but a basic affirmation

of existence (I am full of hope).

Every garden is therefore, also, a rainbow, that is a sign from

god, or from nature. The sign of a covenant, of the continued

partnership. I look at the flowers of Villa Lante and think of the

colors promised to Noah; gaze at the water flowing wondrously

here and think of the flood: When I bring clouds over the earth

and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant

which is between me and you and every living creature of all

flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy

all flesh (Genesis 9:14-15). The garden counteracts the flood

with its actual and present spectrum of colors, here on earth,

and through its human treatment of the water, which does not

rise to flood, but gathers into one place, into the pool, just

like on the third day of creation.

The phone rings, its someone from Tel Aviv. Air-forces jets

have bombed fuel installations in Lebanon. Thousands of tons of

oil are spilling onto the shores of the Mediterranean. I draw my

face toward the water. A self-portrait, a feeble reflection with

black sunglasses.

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4. Sacro Bosco (The Holy Wood), Villa Orsini,

Bomarzo (1552), 28.7.06

The garden must not include a ruin, nor should it cite a landscape

related to destruction, teaches us the Sakuteiki (p. 191). The

garden which faces home must not be allowed to remind us of a

10 Ibid, p. 96.

39

destroyed home. Romantic Europe, it goes without saying, has

not heard of this prohibition, and had it been heard it would

not have been heeded. Albert Speer, Hitlers architect, thought

about construction based on the value of the ruin how the

building would look in ruins (recall, the Reich was supposed

to dominate for a thousand years). He thought of architecture

from the perspective of death. Apparently he had not perused

the Sakuteiki. In any event, in Bomarzo I understand what had

troubled the author of the Japanese treatise. Bomarzo is a very

strange garden, a kind of stationary ghost train of the mid-

sixteenth century, a garden which is a contemporary of Villa

dEste, and like it, comes under the rubric of Mannerism, yet is

utterly different from it. The entire garden is a symbolic ruin

of the concept of the garden as realized previously in the Villa

dEste and later in the Villa Lante. This is a garden destroyed

by a fierce irony toward the concept of the garden ruined not

from without, but from within. Everything in it is in excess,

clumsy, crooked, frightening, consuming, and wild. Everything

in it takes some subtle element from the notion of a garden and

either violates it or exaggerates it. It is a self-violation, like

a self-goal in football. Yes, it is an achievement (a goal was

scored), but the great achievement is matched by a great failure.

It is not a garden but a thoroughly elaborated self-parody of a

garden.

What is this place? Its essence is captured in one detail: a house

tilted sideways at an angle. This garden is not a home alongside

a home, or a home within a home, but a crooked home. This is the

mood that infuses all of the gardens details: the temple in this

garden is guarded by the dog of Hades, Cerberus, the demonic

triple-headed dog; and in the temple (decoded immediately as its

negation, the netherworld) there is nothing but an inscription:

But what did you expect? a sort of prophetic prolepsis of

Frank Stellas postmodern what you see is what you see (1964);

the garden as womb (see the painting by Fra Angelico mentioned

earlier) is replaced by a devouring, gaping maw, inviting one to

enter (inside sat three Italian youths, making sounds, enjoying

40

the echo, drinking Coca-Cola); in another place there is an

extravagant show of the gardens flora statues of giant acorns

and pine cones.

What is wrong here? For this, one must first define what would be

right for the garden. David Cooper put it nicely11: the garden

is the embodiment of the close interdependence between mans

creative activity and nature, and furthermore, the garden is the

place where mans basic relationship to the mystery at the root

of existence (of man and nature) occurs and is exemplified. The

garden is the revelation (Cooper rightly uses the religious term

epiphany) of this relationship. This revelation is the very

meaning of the garden and its raison dtre as a special kind of space and time. It explains its effects. It explains the verses of

Israel Eliraz poem, which serve as an epigram for these notes.

The mystery which Cooper points to seems similar to me,

although not quite identical to, what the Chinese call Dao: The

nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth; The named was

the mother of the myriad creatures. And Wang Bi comments that

the principle according to which things are born and actions are

completed is, perforce, that they are born of formlessness and

are derived from namelessness. The formless, the nameless is the

progenitor of multitudes of things; it encompasses the heavens

and the earth, and there is nothing in the world that will not

pass through it.12 As Wang Bi explains the opening of the Tao Te

Ching, the Dao (Tao) is the power which if we give it a name, it

cannot be a fitting name; if we point to it with designations, the

designations will never end. Cooper saw clearly how the garden

is a place in which, more than other places, one can observe the

connection between Dao and man. The garden is the place that

helps us perceive to what extent we are dependent upon that thing

which encompasses the heavens and the earth (every inch of the

garden attests to this, even the inches of the gardeners or of the

visitors bodies). But its also helps us perceive to what extent

this Dao is dependent upon us for it to turn from a transparent

abstract force to a reality. Cooper quotes Ezra Pound: A Japanese

garden designer creates a theater for the wind to speak.13

11 Ibid, p. 145.

12 Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. D. C. Lau, Penguin 1963, p. 5.

13 Ibid, p. 141.

41

If the garden is an embodied celebration of the condition of

interdependency of man and nature (nature not only in the

sense of visible nature, but the nature of nature, the progenitor

of the multitude of things, which is mysterious and irreducible

to the laws of nature in the scientific sense), anything that

is not reconciled with this condition, contradicts the idea of

the garden. Therefore, some of the nineteenth century gardens,

which were designed in the mixed style, missed the potential

for a true dialogue of the garden when they created a dialogue

between imported images of other gardens (Humphrey Repton first

proposed the idea of a garden as a collection or an exhibition

of different garden traditions an image of a Chinese garden

next to an image of an Egyptian garden, next to an image of an

Italian garden): this is not a dialogue that takes place within

the garden, but rather a whimsical-cerebral ironicization of it.

The garden at Bomarzo also produces a similar contradiction,

because it turns this interdependency into a grotesque,

hyperbolic artifice. Perhaps this is the reason that the Sakuteiki

forbids ruins in the garden: the ruin, like war or violence,

is anathema to the garden precisely because war and violence

are forms which imitate in vulgar fashion the form of dialogue

and interdependency that the garden embodies. War and violence

are not merely unsuitable for a garden, they smite it with

the murderous and precise weapon of cruel parody and nullify

it. Therefore the garden cultivated by the constant gardener

in Kenya is an impossibility, and is bound to be destroyed: it

pretends that its violent and miserable surroundings dont exist,

and has pretensions of being an enclave. Etymologically the word

garden is related to guarding and enclosure, but a garden cannot

be closed. A garden is an instrument for opening up.

The principle of interdependency as the basic premise of

the garden justifies, paradoxically, the destruction of the

constant gardeners garden. For a true garden does not deny

its interdependency with the city, the government, the system

of power which envelops, crisscrosses and traverses it. A true

garden cannot be content with applying the principle of mutual

42

interdependency to the world of nature sun, water, plants,

etc. A true garden is conscious of the way in which, even as a

place formally enclosed, it functions as a weave of aesthetic

interdependencies, at once natural and political.

I wrote these notes in the summer of 2006 in Israel. More than

once I asked myself whether a person may write about this quiet

locus, the garden, amidst the actual destruction of places.

But, here the garden has resolved my dilemma. For a true

garden is not a place where war and ruin have no presence or

are elided. It is a place from which it is possible to see war

and destruction and to properly understand, among other things,

their relationship to culture and to the garden. The true garden

is not a blinding mechanism. But it can perhaps provide hope, and

an illusion-less understanding of reality at a time of perplexity

and hopelessness.

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5. Epilogue:

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 30.11.06

Hadas Ophrats installation is not a garden; it is rather a

comment on a garden. A sculpted tree in a garden, is not a tree

either, but rather a thought about a tree (i.e. nature), and Hadas

Ophrats garden is a thought about a-thought-about-nature.

Hadas Ophrats garden does not treat the garden as a totality

of phenomena which are perceived by the senses. All these have

been reduced here to a quotation (a burnt quotation at times).

The subject of this garden is, chiefly, the power that creates

the garden. This is the riddle of this garden: the riddle of

creation, expressed here in the contorted figure of the artist

packed with peas, like a pomegranate filled with seeds. The

force which brought this garden into being contains the seeds in

his own body (and contains also their destruction, their black

ash, which is concealed within them from the very beginning).

But these black-eyed peas are also eyes, gazes. From within one

body the body of the artist these eyes look out toward our

43

eyes, which are gazing at him. The moment when the spectators

eyes meet the eyes of the peas is an important moment, because

at that moment we are likely to comprehend how much all of this

the garden, art itself is intended for us, but also how much

our presence as spectators is important. The garden needs us no

less than we need it. In the garden of Hadas Ophrat I understand

that perhaps we create gardens precisely so that we can suspend

and expand our body-time, and give it to others as a gift. Our

single body in and of itself could never give so much. Only in the

act of procreation does it come close to doing so.

And, indeed, a garden is always a place of rebirth, and there

is no wonder that in the period defined as the Renaissance,

the garden attained some of its heights of achievement in the

West. If the garden is a womb (as in Fra Angelicos painting,

and differently in Ophrats work), exiting it is a birth. But

it is not a birth in the sense of becoming an infant, but it is

rather a birth that comes about from the ability to gaze directly

at the transient, which is to say at death also, without being

destroyed by it, but on the contrary to attain happiness in

light of its existence. This is a birth that is an awakening, a

birth that sustains a vital connection (just as the artists of

the Renaissance do) with the past and the future, from within

the present. In the garden you are simultaneously old and young,

because the garden is always old and young, an infant and a dead

person, and someone not yet born, and someone who has already

been born several times.14 A garden worthy of its name is one in

which flowers are allowed to wilt, not only to blossom.

The important question to my mind, in relation to every garden,

is how did you leave it for a place where flow the streams of

time, which are not the times of the garden. How to exit a

garden? Like someone banished to the world of violence who does

not look back, like Adam and Eve? Like an exile, who remembers

the garden only from his parents tales, and returns to look at

it from the outside, with a gaze threatening to destroy it, the

gaze of Cain, the farmer-become-murderer? Anyone with a place

14 See my essay: An Enclosed Garden: Thoughts on the Tel-Avivian Garden after Fra Angelico, in: Birshut Ha-Rabim ed. Yael Moriah, Sigal Bar-Nir, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2003, p. 146-158. Or online: http://www.notes.co.il/burstein/12857.asp [Hebrew].

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in his heart for the garden cannot stand facing it like Cain

or like his parents; that is, not violently, nor indifferently.

He chooses to leave the garden for another garden, or for the

world, understanding that there is no place in the world that

is not a garden, there is no place that does not bespeak the

interdependency between things, even if, fortunately for us,

in some regions the garden-ness of the garden is much more

visible, more present, more beautiful. From the gardens of these

notes, I lift my gaze to meet the eyes of Cain, waiting outside

the garden, east of Eden. He too is part of the picture.