LINNAEUS’ GAZE

Linnaeus watches contently over the precise, systematic taxonomic outlay of plants – from his podium, on axis – merely a fragment of his world-system, metonymy of / for a window on / into the world of unnamed things … watches from the ‘Classground’ along Plane Tree Drive, just inside the north gate … To the south, the ‘Australian Forest’ and the ‘Simpson Shadehouse’, the latter of which neighbors the so-called ‘Italianate Garden’ … episodes within / atop episodes, gardens as palimpsests, structures within structures, Russian dolls … Russian dandelion rising to meet the father of taxonomic botany’s gaze … Plants labeled, beds numbered …

At the far south end of the Garden, the ‘Mallee Section’ and a mesmeric lagoon engulfed in vegetation, a war memorial (to fallen, WW2 Australian / American troops …) in the form of two columns framing an eastward view to the specular pond / lagoon … a haunting by way of dissociation, as if the waters, mercurial and languid, contained the souls (the irreal surplus) of a lost generation …

Strolling through the Adelaide Botanic Garden one encounters ghosts, here and there, of past efforts to encode the very ground beneath our feet … marking a privileged territory at the north-east edge of Adelaide’s classic colonial grid … demarcated by Botanic Road on the south, Hackney Road on the east, and Plane Tree Drive on the north … Yet the Garden overspills these temporal coordinates, falling inward toward a folded time (times within time), each ‘section’ (episode) vaguely situated atop, within, adjacent to a formal gesture … these gestures (wholly unstable forms) evident in plan or master plan yet having little to do or say about the liquidity, ambiguity, and obscurity of the sentient blur that is this garden-world …

The ‘Nelumbo Pond’ is turning yellow, as the waterlilies give up the ghost (spirit) to the air, to the eye … Passing through the ‘Cycad Collection’ to the ‘Simpson Kiosk’, views of the City collide with makeshift bio-geographies (imaginary territories … ‘Mexico’ …), the contours of the sinuous beds startlingly at odds with the jagged nature of the cycads … ‘Deep Water’ to the right … sign of a half-submerged world, signal and sigil … mirrors mirroring mirrors …

The forlorn ‘National Wine Centre of Australia’ crowds the south-east corner of the Garden, neglected save the occasional accidental tourist, a vast display on wine-making making little impact (a low, mostly inaudible ‘splash’ …) … $40-50 bottles of wine, unclaimed, yet gleaming and polished, illuminated like icons, seeking consummation in the present moment but left behind … ‘Economic Botany’ (always a subject of every such garden) is merely a formalization of the idea of the ‘empire’ of plants … one reading of a possible infinitude of readings, program folded into program …

The vague interstitial stuff of the blurred field, the ‘ground’, also blurs any mission, any master plan (master narrative), and all manner (old and new) of pure functionality … The collusion of atmospheric effects overwrites all attempts at ‘structure’, ‘bones’, ‘clarity’, ‘hierarchy’ … Garden architectural devices are always already engulfed by the sublime surplus overflowing beauty … Such vignettes are terms more or less abstract and imposed from ‘above’ (from the ideological purchase / leverage of the plan …) … Such things disappear, in time, time’s program being far more elastic and protean, a secret fire burning in all things …

It is said that ‘the given’ arrives by way of the invisible, through anamorphosis (perspectival ‘arrivals’, vision informed by space, by what is absence itself …) … and, too, anamnesis … One must align oneself with its ‘axis’ of arrival (its irruption into being given / appearing), to receive it (for it / any thing to be given …) … As with Olmsted’s ‘Promenade’ in Central Park, if you step ‘off axis’ it quite literally disappears into the calculated chaos of the a-theoretical whole (milieu) … Each event is singular insofar as its reception is concerned, yet each event is, in fact, a trace of the process of ‘being given’ … that is, what is given every day … or, phenomenality itself (change, flux, dissociation, dissolution, metamorphosis …) …

The Garden (‘place of best-kept secrets’) secrets this secret within itself / within its givenness, its mutating collage of traces, effects, affects, locutions, and sinecures … ‘Here all barrel-hoops are knit …’ … This here not quite here and not quite there, but in-between ‘here’ and ‘there’ … Pure givenness arrives out of a no-where, out of itself, as every thing purely given arrives through a tear in the fabric of time …

Here is the beginning of the beginning, the arrival in time and space … Yet here, too, is the beginning of the end, the beginning of all appropriations (all names and all naming), the origin of all language games, circular, discursive, ideological, instrumental, functional, and -- perhaps -- unnecessary …

Gavin Keeney 
Singapore, 04/19/04