A Flaming Sword for Every Garden

Reflections on ‘The Walls’, by Rebecca Solnit

The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared by someone who, uprooting the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow-men: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all and the earth to no one! -- Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.

Wars have only been fought about two things: territory and religion. Within territory are included both physical territory – land – and perceived possessions. Religion, or rather, oppressive religion, is also closely tied into territory. Territory is marked by building walls, drawing lines – creating differences. When religion oppresses, it marks another group as different, lesser. Without territory, without these drawings of differences, there would be no oppression, either – and thus no war.

Such a land of peace and freedom is seen as a sort of paradise, but ironically, paradise was the first place where walls were built. Adam and Eve were the first refugees, the first expelled from their country for their sins. The angel with the flaming sword is the first guard.

We have these guards now populating our gardens and homes, our paradise – guards in the forms of people or dogs or alarms. Golden Gate Park is one such example of it. It’s been reshaped by what’s called “police gardening”, where shrubs and low-hanging branches where people might hide or seek shelter, are cut down. It was proposed that infrared-equipped helicopters be used to find the homeless who were sleeping in the thickets of the park.

This proposal, and the gardening, were supposed to make the park safer, but only made it more of a battlefield as borders were drawn between those worthy of being allowed in the park, and those not. Similarly, borders have become battlegrounds all over the world, between those within the walls of the perceived paradise, and those outside of it.

When someone is within the walls, those walls don’t matter, and what is with them no longer seems so much a paradise. But from outside the walls, what is beyond the walls and the guard is imagined as some version of paradise – but only as long as the walls remain. Thus, Solnit says, paradise is a violent place.

I find this a very interesting and true idea. It was in the garden of Eden, the first paradise, after all, where sin was born, where punishment was first metered out, borders drawn. The angel and the flaming sword turn the garden into a battlefield over who is allowed in and who must fight for entrance.

This has been shown over and over again with many different ‘gardens’ or ‘paradises’ – indeed, with the US itself. How many people have died on their journey to reach this land of the free? How many people have arrived exhausted at the gates, only to be turned away by America’s own proverbial angel? All this to keep paradise’s inhabitants safe – but without borders and walls, such measures would never be necessary.

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