stlkn

It was small and quiet, with squat houses and narrow streets; it had no particular beauty. I don't know why I talk about it so much, but if I didn't, the shadows of the high, dark mountains around it would smother me. Sometimes at dusk the sky there took on such extraordinary shades that people would come out of their houses and try to name the colors. But the blends were so strange no name was right for them. I have spoken of this already, often, and of the house, our house, but I forgot to mention the trees in the garden. From the start of summer, on one of those trees, we used to find apples that were as sweet as honey, although still unripe. What they tasted like when fully mature is something I never discovered because we always ate them too soon. This has deprived me of a memory, but how could a child have foreseen that? It's late. Back there, the nights were still. The drawn curtains didn't even stir. Silence hammered the streets. We were scared, because there was always a bad man in black hiding in the mountains, walking to the city, knocking on the locked and bolted doors. Before the sun comes up, I have to speak about it all. The river, the well with its dark wheel, the happy, reassuring summers, sun on our faces at five in the morning, the garden in the churchyard. Autumn would surprise us in that garden every year with a handful of red leaves falling suddenly from the trees, when we thought there were still plenty of fine days left. It was amazing how they kept falling, forming a thicker and thicker carpet. What would shuffle through them, barefoot—it was still warm—laughing and starting to feel scared again.

At first I thought it was the gardens that were being compared to paradise, as in heaven, but to my surprise the concepts ran the other way round. Our word ‘paradise’, with all its charmed associations, has its roots in Avestan, a language spoken in Persia two thousands years BCE. It derives from the Aveztan word pairidaēza, which means ‘walled garden’, pairi for ‘around’ and daiz for ‘build’. As Thomas Browne explains in The Garden of Cyrus, it was these botanically-minded people ‘unto whom we owe the very name of Paradise; wherewith we meet not in Scripture before the time of Solomon, and conceived originally Persian.’ The Greek historian and military leader Xenophon of Athens encountered the word when he was fighting in Persia with Greek mercenaries in 401 BCE. It first appeared in the Greek language in his description of how Cyrus the Great planted pleasure gardens wherever he travelled: παράδεισος, transliterated as paradeisos. It was this Greek word that was used in the Old Testament to refer both to the Garden of Eden and to heaven itself, irreparably entangling the celestial with the terrestrial. From there, it migrated on into Latin and then to many other languages, including Old English, where it gathered further meanings. By the thirteenth century it had also come to mean ‘a place of surpassing beauty or delight, or of supreme bliss’, which is to say that having ascended to the sublime, it returned to earth again. Discovering this chain of associations blew my mind. It was the garden that came first, heaven trailing in its wake. That had been the acme of perfection, the ideal across centuries and continents: an enclosed garden, a fertile, beautiful, cultivated space. I loved that the material predated the sublime, or rather that the sublime arose from out of the material. It upended the creation myth in a way that was intensely pleasing. I'd once heard it called the English heresy, that paradise can be located in a garden, but actually it was where the rumour of paradise was founded.

What place is wrong for the heart, which is right? Every river is a border; that was one of the lessons of my childhood. It informs our view of what is other, forcing us to stop in our tracks and take in the opposite side. The river is dynamic, a bustling stage, in contrast with which the otherland opposite is integral to the fixed picture, a background painting which impresses itself on our memory. What if the river, beyond its capacity as a border created solely by its own course, is also a border between countries? Could its flow, the incessant press of its water towards an estuary, be more powerful than its significance as a line fixed to determine belonging? Does the water carry something away with it, leaving the stateliness of state-borders diminished and apparently subject to depreciation? Isn't it saying that what we really belong to is the gaze toward the other side?

Since we agreed to let the road between us Fall to disuse, And bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us, And turned all time's eroding agents loose, Silence, and space, and strangers —our neglect Has not had much effect.

From Water-Tower Hill to the brick prison The shingle booms, bickering under The sea's collapse. Snowcakes break and welter. This year The gritted wave leaps The seawall and drops onto a bier Of quahog chips, Leaving a salty mash of ice to whiten