The Glass Garden

Back to Maturity and Modern Life page
THE GLASS GARDEN
(LOVING IN A COLD WORLD)
taken from The Flying Bird Brings the Message:
Lessons from Life as Metaphor
by Mary Leue, 1992
I began this writing early in the summer of 1972, at a time when I had decided to leave my husband for a while and go to live by myself at my "office," a small apartment two doors down from our school where I had taken refuge from my pain in a kind of blind, mole-like instinct akin to burrowing into the earth, as I now see the action. I have a fascination with houses, have had all my life. In Erik Erikson's opinion, a woman's preoccupation with her "house" comes from a pretty deep layer of her being. He says that small boys who build with blocks build towers, but girls build enclosures with a gate. I remember building houses with ours. My house was to be an igloo. The blocks were approximately the shape and color of bricks, only flatter and thinner, and more earth-colored. I used them flat, and laid them in circular rows, each of which shelved in toward the center a bit more, trying to approximate the dome shape which would ultimately allow the roof to fill in the gap until one block would make a capstone and my igloo would be complete. I never made it. The weight of the bricks would topple the whole before the center was completely filled in. But I tried again and again, and I still have a vivid picture in my mind (from quite an early age it must have been) of how those blocks looked.
Images which come from close to "the beginning" are the ones that go deep. Later images derive their power from this well of memory, I believe. Jung seems to feel they tap into a deeper well than the individual memory, into what he calls the "transpersonal" - and he speaks of archetypes, images which human beings hold in common, which turn up in the mythologies of a thousand different societies as diverse as the surface of the planet is wide. Wilhelm Reich speaks about the layering like an onion of the "character armor" of the neurotic which, yielding its secrets in the process of the psychoanalytically-oriented vegetotherapy, (as he called it) takes the form, very often, of animals or of other semantically significant somatic forms which recapitulate an ex-perience or feeling about himself the person underwent at an early age and did not manage to resolve or live through at the time.
Reich tells of a man who took on the look of a fish at one point in the therapeutic process, and in fact, did experience himself as a "poor fish." My own oldest son was a mouse - Stuart Little - for quite a while when he was four. Fleeting images also occur which represent dissociated dimensions of the personality, operative but disowned by the person, such as demonic or monstrous elements in the personality, or sometimes, such relatively simple emotions like sadness, suspiciousness, hate, and the like, all de-nied on a conscious level but evident in the "look" of the person, present in the expressive shape of his musculature if elicited by the therapist.
In fact, I have a friend who has written a book on body reading, Ron Kurtz. He and Hector Prestera, authors of The Body Reveals, maintain that one's whole history is written in the body if one knows but how to "read" it correctly. They make a pretty impressive case for this belief.
But back to the train of my own imaging which I began with. The state of mind (by which term I include the mental component of my body - my imaging state) I was in last summer, a combination of hurting and instinctive pulling back within my own center for survival against the hurt, generated a rich flow of inner experience which prompted me to begin writing these chapters, or whatever you would call them, which make up this book. This one, from which the book takes its name, actually came to me first, but the drive to begin writing it down only came to me this summer, at a time when I feel that my "house" is finally beginning to form a roof.
Sheldon Kopp, a marvelously rich image-maker whose book,The Hanged Man ( subtitled, Psychotherapy and the Forces of Darkness) says, in his first chapter, "Sometimes just being alive feels like having no skin, just raw flesh...vulnerable, responsive, irritable, in constant danger." Well, yes. Yes, dear Shelly. It does feel like that. The picture comes to my mind of one of my tiny patients when I was a student nurse at the Children's Hospital in Boston - my dear little Haakon Augustson, from Iceland, a tiny boy strapped to a canvas frame suspended over his hospital crib clutching his music box, his only tangible grasp on reality in a world gone apparently mad, crying pitifully for "Fiske, fiske," when we would try to feed him his meat and vegetables.
This child's bladder had no anterior wall. He had been born that way. The mucous membrane of its inner wall was open to the outside. It was our job to try and build him a front covering for this bladder to keep his kidneys from collecting infectious contamination. The image of unfitness to live is an indelible one. And yet, I would have done just about anything to help him stay alive! And he was one of the lucky ones. Because his parents were members of the government in Reykyavik during World War II and Iceland was important to our country at the time, little Haakon and his mother were flown to Boston, to the Children's Hospital in an American army transport plane for the plastic surgery which would fit him for survival. He and I managed to establish communication - of a sort, seeing that he spoke no English and I no Icelandic. But I did speak a little Norwegian, thanks to an old boy friend I had had in junior high, and Haakon would seem to derive some kind of pleasure from my singing of "Mons, Mons, Pusse Katt," a children's song which I learned phonetically from Inge's little brothers and sisters, without ever knowing how to spell the words. But Haakon did seem to understand it in a dim sort of way, and would temporarily give up his own pitiful mewing about "fiske" to listen. (We did finally manage to persuade the diet kitchen to serve him fish before he wasted away completely!) - but he remains imprinted on my memory forever, crying and at the same time playing his little music box, tiny fingers clutching it tightly, asleep or awake.
Back again to last summer, a summer spent in the back yard of my little inner city row house, a summer spent cultivating my inner garden of images and memories, and trying to write them down. When we first acquired the house at 4 Elm, I told myself that the school needed it for income production. Well, this was - and is - true. Because three-quarters of our families pay no tuition, our school income remains under $10,000 a year, and survival requires that we generate as much income ourselves as we can devise ways of doing so. Tapping the resources of Social Services (welfare, to the middle class person) has seemed like a natural solution. People need housing. Social Services pays the rent of poor people, are prepared to shell out pretty healthy amounts to slum lords for their clients. So why should some non-resident lawyer or real estate man who gives not a damn for the upkeep of their property get this largesse of the government? Especially when we could who do care?
So I told myself, and felt "justified" in spending the ($3400) for my favorite toy, a HOUSE of my own. I still am not quite sure whether I began doing psychotherapy to make money to pay for my apartment or bought the house to do it in - but I do know I needed an excuse to have a place of my own - so maybe I started the therapy as an excuse for needing it as well as the other way around. Like most things I do, it was all of these and a lot more too, I'm sure. Things seem with me less a matter of "this-in-order-to-that" than that they seem to come to me in yoke form, arm-in-arm, as it were, like Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum.
At any rate, when we acquired this house, I was particularly taken with its back yard, which, although sheltered from the outside world by buildings on two sides, and a high wooden fence on the third, had a way of filling with sunlight in the middle of the day that gave it a very open feeling as well. The backs of the houses which faced the street at the bottom of ours, at a right angle, came into my yard - in fact, shared the yard with my house, their windows looking into it from one side - and so I had company in my little yard. My neighbors upstairs, Fred and Maude, a delightful old pair of sinners in their seventies, kept me company too, hanging out their back window to pin clothes onto their high line of a sunny morning, shouting a greeting. The black family that lived in the street-level apartment around the corner would tap on their kitchen window and smilingly nod their approval and delight as they watched me cart out trash barrel load after trash barrel load of junk from that yard, and as the rich earth gradually began to take back its natural heritage as the bearer of gifts. But mostly I was alone with my thoughts and images as I turned over the earth and mined its depths for their history and their messages.
I learned a lot from that work. It served me well as a contact point with my world in a nourishing way. The task of clearing the ground was well suited to my inner need, and the work helped me to discharge pent-up feelings. And I suppose its function as a source of rich imagery follows from this fact. The mental flow, the psychic component of my feeling state, was like a melody - better, a symphony of thoughts about the human condition, and too, was well suited in mood to my inner need.
When I was an adolescent, my mother took to occasionally sitting down at our piano and playing the accompaniment for "art songs," sometimes the Lieder of Schubert or Schumann, sometimes more operatically sentimental songs of the kind that used to be popular at the recitals given by tenors like Richard Crooks or perhaps a contralto like Madame Schumann-Heinck. I remember one about the New Jerusalem which my mother and I would belt out like the best (or worst!) of the recitalists: "It was the New Jerusalem, that will not pass away...Je..ru..sa..lem, Je..ru..sa..lem, lift up your heads and sing....Ho-sannah, in the highest, Hosannah to your king; Hosannah, Hosannah, Hosannah forever more!" Something like that. The idea was to pound the piano and sing your lungs and heart out. Oh, glorious, glorious
Well, my thoughts that summer went along lines like those - only my "song" - the theme that kept running through my head as I worked - was less certain that the "new Jerusalem" is a sure thing than the song would seem to suggest, was more apocalyptic than utopian or inspirational in the old Gospel tradition. My thinking-feeling-imaging went along pretty dark themes. The one I kept coming back to was the one which sprang right out of the rich, dark loam under my feet. I would put in my fork, push it into the soil, press down the handle, and come up with a forkful. Time and again, sharp pieces of glass would turn up, as untouched by time or weather as though they had fallen into the ground just yesterday. And yet, I knew from other indications that the glass must have been there at least since the twenties. I found a whole collection of tiny treasures in that earth - clay marbles, of the kind kids played with when I was little - a tiny bulldog made of hard white rubber - jacks - glass marbles, the kind they call "aggies," I think. It was like re-living my childhood. But those cruel shards seemed endless in number. I must have hauled out four or five trash cans-full - the size we used to call "ashcans," from the days when furnaces were always coal furnaces and the ashes had to be collected in galvanized cans.
There is a song by a black guy named Len Chandler that I first heard in 1967, when I was acting as Girl Friday for a black ghetto mens' action group named The Brothers. It's a good song, with a poignant melody:
While sittin' on a crowded southbound train -

It happened just the other day

I coulda sworn that I was rollin' back

As the train beside me slowly pulled away.

Well my whole lifelong it seems I've been on that track

With everybody rollin' on and me just slippin' back,

And they don't wave goodbye and they don't look back ...

So I guess I've gotta... keep on keepin' on.

Some people always say what I should do -

Now that's something they seem to know so well -

Ah, but it's what I've got to do that's on my mind,

And they never seem to listen when I tell.

But it really doesn't bother me that no one seems to care,

That the stairs are full of splinters and my tender feet are bare,

And I just can't keep from thinkin' there's trouble everywhere...

So I guess I've gotta... keep on keepin' on.

Well I know you wish my tongue would turn to stone

Or that I'd a kep' it still the other day...

I said I'd like to see you walk the sea,

And you sank just like your feet were made of clay.

But there's a mountain in the bottom of that sea we flounder in;

If we find that mountain top, we wouldn't need to swim,

If we'd found that mountain sooner, just think where we

could have been...

So I guess I've gotta... keep on keepin' on.

One ship sails east, and the other sails west

While the very same breezes blow -

It's the set of the sail, and not the gale

That bids them where to go.

And like the ships of the sea is the way of our fate;

The seas are gettin' stormy and the hour's gettin' late.

If that ship starts seepin' water, you know how to bail ...

You can't change the weather but you sure can change the sail -

And a harbor looks much better when you've made it through a gale!

So I guess I've gotta... keep on keepin' on!

From the album,"To Be a Man," Len Chandler

In 1967 and 1968 I very much needed that theme to hang onto my faith in life by. It rang in my head for a long time, and it still comes back once in a while, because that's how it feels when you're going a bad time. That summer, the sharp pieces of
glass I picked up somehow brought back Len Chandler's line, "The stairs are full of splinters and my tender feet are bare."
My tender feet are bare. I am a child growing up in this city. This is my back yard, my playground, my marbles, my little toy dog. This is my plot of earth, my pied à terre. But what kind of "terre," earth, has my society given me for my kindergarten? What kind of garden is my "garden of children," as Froebel advocated it be for them? - and as Pestalozzi and Rousseau with his Emile, H. G. Wells with his Joan and Peter - all those people, men and women - the grand old lady herself, Montessori, all those others - old Neill with his Scottish burr and rough village language (Ah, you're clean daft, lad) - blunt, kind, sweet, sour old Neill, the universal Granddaddy of children - as all of them said it must be for children?
I am a child with tender, bare feet. What is my garden? What kind of garden have we provided for our children in the "downtowns" of our American cities? A glass garden! A garden of broken glass - a garden whose chief crop is non-biodegradable slivers of glass that cut into the tender skin and let out the red blood onto the dark earth. Not a fit place for a child to grow up in!
So much of what we provide for children - by default or by design - is indigestible or unfit in one way or another. It starts at an alarmingly early age - when our good American babies first begin to eat solid food. The image of the chipmunk-cheeked baby crowing with joy is the symbol of our glass garden, as it looks out at us from the jars and packages of baby food on our shelves - food dosed with good old American cane sugar to "hook" baby into his lifelong craving for concentrated sweet! Of course, even before that time, we begin the corrupting process which destroys the natural balance, the center of equilibrium from which life is supposed to start - by polluting the minds and bodies of young girls who are to bear the children such that they consider the most basic process there is, barring none! - the nursing process - as somehow disgusting and degrading, so that if attempted at all - and hospitals where mothers give birth make this extremely difficult, almost to be apologized for or shameful in some way - it is attempted with a kind of inner doubt and sense of a need for secrecy which virtually equates nursing with masturbation, a thing done, if at all, in private and in secret. And don't tell me a baby doesn't sense that ambivalence, doesn't drink in that poison along with his milk!
I saw a program on TV a while ago with mothers who were members of La Lèche League, a group that advocates nursing and tries to help educate and support women who want to nurse their babies do so with dignity, joy, and a sense of their womanhood in wanting to give this supreme gift to their children. They spoke about the sense of moral outrage they had encountered when caught nursing in public - by both men and women! Like the little old lady on the Closeup toothpaste commercials who claps her mitted hands to her bonneted cheeks when the phrase "sex appeal" is used, exclaiming, "Oh!" with such great shock. (Never fails to send me into a gale of laughter. I am a real sucker for some commercials!) But that's how it is with a much larger segment of the public where nursing in concerned - and this despite the fact that, as two of them demonstrated on the show, you really can't tell whether the baby is nursing or just sleeping! That's how incredibly far we "civilized" human beings have managed to stray from the natural outlook toward the glass garden that grows only weeds and old bottles and cans and cigarette butts!
We poison the baby's blood stream with sugar as a tranquilizer, and his inner being, - that delicate, finely tuned, richly endowed and versatile "organ," the soul - with foreign images implanted to condition his fantasy life, and thereby his appetites, to crave all sorts of consumer goods, the message being one of an equation of consumption with inner happiness - by eating - or owning - or watching - (fill in the blanks) Mars Bars, G.I. Joe, a Big Wheel, Crackerjacks, Barbie, The Towering Inferno, or whatever. I guess if my ongoing sense of outrage - my "love and squalor," to paraphrase J.D. Salinger - has any one central theme that acts as a trigger, it is the corruption of the inner life of our young that does it. Grr.
We seem to have developed a real genius as a society for this universal corruption of the beauty of life for our children. The old stories have been reissued in Disneyized cartoon form, with vulgarity and subtle or not-so-subtle degrees of uglification, to quote the Mock Turtle, by our movie and TV companies, cartoons which replace old children's books with rich illustrations by Jessie Wilcox Smith, Howard Pyle, Arthur Rackham, and the like with gross stereotypes whose voices are Frank Gorsham-style imitations of Frank Morgan, Cary Grant, Edward G. Robinson, Don Adams, Kirk Douglas, and so on and on and on, until one cartoon blends into another in a kind of dirty grey image like the "Brand X" detergent in commercials for washing powder.
I adore Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen." In fact, my inner images of all sorts of tales have assumed the character of Jungian archetypes. I cannot IMAGINE living with the vulgar Disney-style cartoon illustrations of this tale which I saw recently - or the gross characters of Disney's Bambi, "cute" as they are, for that matter, instead of the ones I came to know after my father had read the story to us children. The story I remember is one of real power - the old prince, the gentle mother, sweet Faline, the thunder of the Man's terrible weapon, the torn and bleeding animal who fell victim to its power - all reduced to a kind of common denominator along with Tennessee Tuxedo and Bullwinkle, only cuter. Blecchh.
And perhaps worst of all, the simple fact of the easy availability of an incredibly profuse out-pouring of these debased images, like the ready access to sweetened food, drink, and candy, creating a sickening garbage dump of the mind in every child in the land. And this, mind you, without even dealing with the issue of the steady stream of porno-violence with which these tender minds are being polluted and desensitized! Yech! Vomit!

Surely a society which poisons minds as it poisons foliage and the air and the food and invents nerve gases and other horrors not to be contemplated without going mad cannot pretend to be concerned about human life! No matter how many heart transplants or kidney machines or muscular dystrophy telethons we devise! No matter how many Jerry Lewises or Danny Thomases, no matter how many St. Judes or Shirley Temples or any other pop images of our child-centeredness we may come up with! Our schools are boring, devitalizing, intimidating, conformity-producing factories for consumerhood and for the militarized, computerized industrial-economic-sociological-urbanized society which is built around the theme of acquisition, consumption, ownership, the whole spectrum of variations we have learned to play on the theme of GREED.
No - we don't grow fitting food for growth in our gardens for children. Gresham's Law, which says that bad money drives out good money, bad culture drives out good culture, that very law that operates today all over the world where Coca-cola and Esso drive out both cumis and the mare that gives the milk to make it, that same law that taught the Indians to crave whisky and the other white man's goods - that same pandering to the vulnerability of human life as a way of enslaving the person and rendering him helpless - still operates, does a thriving business at the same old stand. Step up, folks! Supply and demand is the real American dream in the good old U.S. of A. where the N.A.M. is the last frontiersman, the rugged individualist! Freedom, ain't it grand. Whoopee. Yeah, I can really get off on that one.
I called the conference we held at the university a while back, "Children of the Broken Dream." Yup, there it lies, in fragments as brittle, as sharp, as anti-biological, anti-human, anti-life as broken glass, because that's what it always was - a fragile, too easily shattered, airborne glass bubble of a dream, like a children's snowstorm inside a glass ball, to be shaken up and set aswirl with a miniature semblance of life, only to die down again and resume its real function as a paperweight on some businessman's desk, the tiny figurines really clumsy china dolls, the scene crude and lifeless: the American Dream! Still whole, it is a charming illusion for entrancing children, a lovely, delicate thing - broken, it is trash! What have we done? What are we doing? It it too late?
During the conference I read aloud a passage from a pamphlet by Steven Erlanger on the living conditions in my home town, Boston, in 1775, which had been a part of the program at a church service we had put on on the Bicentennial. Here's a quote:
Clearly life was harsh, even in the best of times, centered on trade and 12-hour days of monotonous manual labor, well-oiled with rum. Workers lived near their jobs, in small houses, multi-family tenements and abandoned warehouses.

Sunlight itself was a luxury, for window-glass had to be imported, was expensive, and not often clear. Winters were spent by the kitchen hearth, with one hot meal a day.

Whale oil and candles were extravagances: most workers' families spent the few hours between supper and bedtime suffering the unmistakable odor of burning codfish oil in their lamps. They ate from heavily leaded pewter, for china and glassware were out of reach.

Water itself was scarce, since there were few springs, and the costly wells were usually polluted by neighboring privies. Garbage mounted in gutters, feeding packs of wild dogs, pigs and goats.

Infections and epidemics were common. Infant mortality was high: the newborn had an even chance to survive a few days, the same chance again to reach maturity. Infanticide itself was much practiced. Few women, though married young, lived a decade in wedlock: pregnancies were biannual occurrences, and a rare woman survived her fifth child. As the irreverent Edward Ward commented: 'The Women, like Early Fruit, are soon Ripe and soon Rotten.'
It sometimes seem as though the chief function of our "revolution of rising expectations" has been to maintain the gap between haves and have-nots of all kinds, since in our own times, when universal plenty is within our reach as a practical possibility, we continue to tolerate a social system which keeps the majority of human beings either at or below the subsistence level while elevating the minority so far above their real needs as to be equally destructive of true living! Blechhh!