Out of Hopeful Green Stuff Woven
July 6, 2005
When I first visited Washington, several years back, I was surprised at the unkempt quality of the mall. I guess I had expected something more Versailles-like, something formal and just-right.. but what I found was a well-tramped stretch of grass. No need to worry about walking on the grass.. Before long I warmed to this untidy zone, and it seemed a perfectly democratic space.. ground to be used for many recreations and in support of many causes.
The mall is now surrounded by much tighter security.. the streets studded with police vehicles.. but the mall itself remains open and free. People come and go, perhaps walking fast toward one of the museums, or stopping for a posed picture with the Capitol serving as a background for their loved ones, or loitering on the mall.. one person hits a baseball to a friend and another lies away in the shade reading a paperback novel. No signs anywhere prescribe or proscribe.. it is up to you, what you want to do with this space.
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass could be the perfect accompaniment for an afternoon on the mall:
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease.... observing a spear of summer grass.
His great catalog finds its analog here on the mall as different people from different places walk by.. tall and short, Asian and American, white and black, young internist in a grown-up’s suit and middle-aged man with a tattoo on his arm. The grass, as he shows in the original 1855 edition of his life-book, is the perfect symbol for this mixture:
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
If the mall could speak, surely that is what it would say.
This grass could also be taken as an early warning system for our republic. The acceptance of the inherent messiness and untidiness of life is an essential part of democracy, and efforts to get this grass to grow in straight lines and to conform to rigid boundaries.. why, that will be a tell-tale signal of our change.
Last week as Emily and I walked through the contemporary American art in the National Gallery, and I was struck by the lines of Rothko’s shimmering floating works.. or rather the lack of lines. The closer one looks at what seems a corner or a line, the more they dissolve into a mess.. not quite drips, but not under control either.. and these Rothko lines strike me as resembling in a deep way the lines of grass on the mall. Those great luminous boxes painted by Rothko, with their complex colors underneath and palpable glow, take shape from these poor excuses for lines.. and so must our great country.
And I should mention that Whitman’s Leaves of Grass offers a perfect model for this web site.. It was a book that grew larger year after year.. flexible enough to enfold the manifold directions of its author’s life..
