Subdivisions
Sprawling on the fringes of the city
In geometric order
An insulated border
In between the bright lights
And the far unlit unknown
Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone
Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone
Subdivisions
-- Rush, Subdivisions (1982)
I never really understood the trendy American hipster terror of suburbia: you have to live *somewhere*, and anywhere seems as good as anywhere else. Hating on the middle class McMansion seemed like a kind of snobby elitism. I preferred Steven Spielberg's suburban magical-realism, of the suburbs as a place of light, where the weird glow from a window might be just the TV or it might be aliens come to visit; and the two might actually be one and the same, technology as spirituality.
But I wandered today through a subdivision site near what used to be the Sunnyside mental hospital in Addington, and something of that emptiness, the dark side of suburbia, came over me.
Linden Grove, the ornamented gate proclaimed. A park-like setting! And it is. I walked past trees, a river. Birdsong all around and the quiet of grass and small insects. From a distance, I could see the Southern Alps: a rare sight at ground level here in the city. Usually the houses block the mountains.
But as I approached, I could see the fences. The lots, around two hundred of them, have already been assigned, carved up. Access cul-de-sacs and footpaths are laid in asphalt. The tiny patches of dirt are raked and covered with lawnseed. Clusters of utility feeds emerge from the ground like fruiting bodies of a vast fungus: telephone, electricity, presumably water and sewerage there somewhere. Real estate billboards. There are still no houses built to block the view of the majestic mountains, but once they're up it will be just a chunk of expensive residential street like any other.
And the cars will come, and the patio furniture, and the mortgages, and the financial crashes, and the foreclosures, and another layer of toxic human unreality will settle over the sweet green truth of soil and grass and birdsong that really makes the world run.
We read Robert Frost's Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening in high school. Our teacher suggested it was about the temptation to suicide. I disagreed then and still do, because I think I know the emotion that poem relates. I think that poem is not about the wish to end life but the intense desire to join it mixed with the frustration that we can't, yet. It's about the sort of melancholy I felt there in that subdivision today, an ache as deep as life: the sense that as a human, I really don't belong in the world of arbitrary business and schedules that we make for ourselves; but neither do I fit in that world of quiet green things that know how to cope. I am not an animal; I have rules and a mind and heart and obligations and can't just go back to the woods and live there. I have been ejected from Eden but have yet to find a way into Paradise.
I want to go home, is the thought. I don't want to be here. I want to leave a world where the need to survive and make homes for ourselves -- a need that's not wrong in itself -- makes us trample on beauty in order to fit our petty little schemes. One plus one equals two but the answer is wrong. I want to be where everything glows with light that doesn't just attract bugs and zap them.
If we are to take some of the mystics seriously, God is really and literally at the heart of everything: consider the lilies how they grow might be not just a sentimental phrase but a description of how living things somehow are tuned in enough to take their life energy -- their patterning, their fractal organisation, their unfolding -- from an infinite data/energy source which is a Person. If I walk in a grove of trees and can see mountains I can feel something different, a lightness about the air, a sense of space and structure. Invisible frequencies modulating the very nature of shape around me. Reminding me that there is a home that we come from which is not this confusing world we find ourselves in, there is a bright centre to the universe, there is a way of living that makes all of life unify and make sense. Even if I can't presently see it.
When I take a photograph at dusk with my digital camera, and I bring the image into Photoshop and play with the contrast setting, it is amazing how much light I can find. Scenes which are dark to my natural eyes show as bright as day to the camera.
If a mere mechanical device can so amplify ordinary light as to reveal that what we think of as 'night' as just a lack of our own vision -- what might that mean to the other kind of light, the light which comes from God and carries that information, that patterning, that quiet patient joy which the plants and animals seem to be able to tune into and use to structure their DNA? Might we not see it flowing all around us, making our world actually as bright right now as we sometimes dare to dream it might one day become?
How can we learn to see that light, and no longer fear the dark, the casual cruelty of the world, our own casual and blundering trampling of beauty and order? The closer we look, the more it seems like the source of darkness is woven deep inside us; but if like the camera, God can turn the brightness up to infinity and see only his Light -- what might those eyes show to us?