29

The Gaze of Cain

Meditations in Four Gardens
------Dror Burstein

The children walked about between the grown-ups legs

There was some talking in the garden. On the plum
Tree pears were growing.
Israel Eliraz

Israel Eliraz, lifnei ha-delet, me-ever

la-kayitz (Before the Door, Beyond
the Summer), Ha-Kibbutz
Ha-Meuhad 2006, p. 94 [Hebrew].

------1. The Garden of the Constant Gardener (2005)

Tel Aviv Cinemateque (21.8.06)
In the lm The Constant Gardener,2 a white British diplomat
living in Kenya cultivates a beautiful private garden. At one
moment in the lm the camera moves abruptly out of this garden

The Constant Gardener;

Director: Fernando Meirelles,
United Kingdom/USA, 2005. Based
on the novel by John Le Carr.

into the nearby Kenyan space of poverty, epidemics, exploitation,

oppression, rioting, lth, overcrowding, and mostly cruel
violence. In syntactical terms this cinematic transition is like
a sentence that begins in English and ends in Swahili. It is an
impossible suture between worlds, and it exists both in the lm
and in the world as an impossibility. English and Swahili are the
ofcial languages of Kenya, a former British colony.

This relationship between the garden and its neighboring reality,

a reality perceived as its opposite, is an ancient one. The story
of the Garden of Eden in Genesis already contains the internal
contradiction. It is a story (and a garden) which negates itself,

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation,

1433-4, Tempera on wood,
150x180cm, Museo Diocesano,
Cortona

30

locking itself up. In an early painting of the Annunciation by Fra

Angelico this duality is well captured: on the one hand Adam and
Eve are banished from the garden, and on the other, as part of the
same narrative continuum, the angel arrives to announce to Mary
her pregnancy. A violent outward movement (banishment) versus
a gentle inward movement (the angels words as a sublimation of
sexual intercourse). But even the pregnancy in the painting will
ultimately lead to an expulsion from the Garden of Eden, to
the crucixion. The garden is the place which we have already
left, or which we are bound to leave. It always faces some sort
of desert. And there are times and places where it seems that the
desert is everywhere. Even in the garden. I write these lines in
the summer of 2006, in Israel. A war is going on.

For Mary, and for Adam and Eve, the garden is the place from
which one exits into the real world, where the givens are not
gardens, but rather the crucix or the earth, which symbolizes
all that is material in man: Therefore the Lord God sent him
forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he
was taken (Genesis 3:23). When a person plants a garden today
he is like someone who sends himself a gift by post: he sends
himself from the desert (the city too is a desert) to till the
ground from whence he was taken. He creates for himself the
thing which was denied to him, the gift. From now on the soil of
the garden is also an intimation of exile, a present symbol, the
seal on his verdict. Perhaps this is the reason that the ow of
water is so important in the garden (and the transparent ow of
gravel for the Japanese is also a ow, mixed inseparably in the
soil). Water as the grace of the garden, as against the weight
of the earth, the goddess of gravity. The gardens foliage is the
offspring of this meeting, between water and earth.

Adam and Eve exit the garden, immediately, into a world of murder.
The story of Cain and Abel occurs right after the expulsion from
the garden. It is the rst story after the expulsion. Thus, the
ever-turning sword protects the garden from the world of murder
lying outside it: So he drove out the man; and he placed at the

31

east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a aming sword which

turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. (Genesis
3:24). And what is the following verse? And Adam knew Eve
his wife; and she conceived, and bore Cain (Genesis 4:1) and
immediately after: And when they were in the eld, Cain rose
up against his brother Abel, and killed him (4:8).

When Cain is banished, after the murder, he says to God: Behold,

thou hast driven me this day from the face of the earth (4:14).
Yet he continues to live on the face of the earth. And what is
the place on the face of the earth that he goes to? Then Cain
went away from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land
of Nod, east of Eden. East of Eden, may it be remembered, is the
place of the cherubim and the aming sword which turned every
way. The murderer returns to the gates of Eden. He fullls,
wordlessly, the motive for the expulsion. His gazing toward the
garden is retroactive justication for his parents expulsion, a
seal ratifying their verdict. For his parents knowledge of good
and bad immediately turned into the sons perpetration of the bad.
Not to eat from the tree of life is to eat from the tree of
murder. The garden is the place whose inhabitants are sentenced
to leave it, because of what it contains: the serpent, the trees,
and mainly, the human beings and human nature. There is an alien,
an even hostile, quarrelsome element between humanness and the
space of the garden; this is the storys conclusion in Genesis.
Every true garden is an attempt to deny this lesson, that is
to say, to make a different claim about humanness. Suddenly I
realize that Adam and Eve were banished from the garden not only
because of what they did, but also because of what their son was
destined to do. Imagine what would have happened had Cain and
Abel been born inside the garden.

------2. Villa dEste (1550), Tivoli, 23.7.06

In front of this fountain it is easier to understand the
Fountains of the Villa dEste, from Franz Liszts Years of

32
3

Les jeux d'eau la Villa d'Este.

Pilgrimage for the piano, composed following a visit here3.

The great Neptune fountain is only one locus in the garden,
which is full of water features, yet it is the explanation for
everything that occurs here. It is a wondrous work producing the
manifold out of an ostensible uniform material: water. There is
here water rising, and water descending, quiet water and frothy
water, swift water and sluggish water, smooth water and rough
water, trombone water and violin water. How different are this
fountain and this garden from the garden of gravel and stones,
the Japanese dry garden, and how similar they are in essence.
The piano composition by Liszt, this water-works musical
counterpart, claries the meaning of these Jeux deau precisely
because it translates the material (water) into music, that is
into something that transpires through time: the statue spouts
forth a lecture about time, about the multiple voices of time
in the garden, and in the world as well. Out of this wonderful
cool that it sends to you on a very hot July day, the fountain
appears to say: you do not live within time, but within its
multitude manifestations. You are a collection of the ows of
time. Neptune is to be understood here not only as Lord of the
Sea but also as the God of Time, Chronos (in Greek mythology
Chronos/Saturnus is the father of Neptune/Poseidon). This god
hides within his water-and-time machine, pulling at the strings
of the water and of the entire garden (its water, plants, people,
land and air creatures), responsive and alive. This is how time
works: invisible, transparent, and mostly multiple. The heart
of a bird, the heart of a tourist, streams of water, a le of
ants, the barefoot steps of two or three gods walking about the
garden in the heat of day, Liszts music wells up in my memory
right now, my ngers play it upon the cool water this fountain
has already foreseen all of this. It explains, it always will
explain how it works: if the garden is a clock, this fountain is
its clockwork revealed.

When one lends one ear to this fountain one hears the different
sounds produced by the streams of water, just as when one listens
to the rocks in the dry Japanese garden one can hear them too:

33

look at me, Francois Berthier hears a Japanese garden saying to

4

him, dont ask me anything. Just try to nd yourself in me.

F. Berthier, Reading Zen in the

Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape
Garden, trans. G. Parks, University
of Chicago Press 2000, p. 42.

The sound of the Japanese rocks is much softer, and certainly much
slower, than the gushing of the Italian fountains. Its wavelengths
do not reach the outer ear. But the issue, fundamentally, is the
same. For the Japanese themselves, at least from the time of
Muso Soseki (1275-1351), the most important gure in Japanese
garden design in the era dubbed the Middle Ages in the West,
rocks are used precisely to indicate absent water. Rocks that
are a waterfall, rocks that are a pool, rocks that are a
stream.5

Masao Hayakawa, the Garden Art

of Japan, trans. R. L. Gage, Waterhill
1973, p. 62.

It is necessary to observe the water within every rock, to

see how time has been imprinted upon it differently from any
other rock. What has time left upon its surface? How does it
turn its face, furrowed by time immemorial, to the other rocks
in the garden, and how does it turn its face to us? How many
transparent layers of time does each rock in the Ryoan-ji garden
The Garden in Ryoan-ji (Temple

contain? They have been in that garden for 500 years already.

of Ryoan), Kyoto, Japan

But those years are a mere splinter of the time endured by these

End of the 15th or early 16th

rocks before they were brought to the temple in Kyoto.

An ancient Japanese treatise on the art of garden design6 instructs
the gardener selecting the rocks for his garden to leave the rock
in the original position in which it was found in nature. It
is absolutely forbidden, for example, to have a standing rock
recline. It is difcult to be certain what the reason was for
this restriction one of many grave prohibitions set down by
the Sakuteiki but an attempt at understanding can be made in
light of the aforesaid: if rocks are time-capsules, clearly they
must be exhibited as they developed in their natural setting.
The wrinkled face of an old person speaks time differently than
the back of his neck or the soles of his feet.

The time of the garden lasts longer than the time of the tenant,
always. Is this not what every garden says? The rocks of the

century.

Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese

Garden, trans. Jiro Takei & M. P.
Keane, Tuttle 2001, p. 18.

34

Japanese garden denitely say this, because their ponderous

range of tenses hovers above and beyond the human scale of
time. Like particularly old tortoises they squat beside their
diminutive relatives, no less old than they, the gravel stones.
But the Villa dEste says the same thing. The ear attuned to the
different ows of water in the Neptune fountain, and of the
other fountains in the garden, might hear the way in which the
streams of time that compose life (the moment of conception: one
time; the in utero phase: a second time; the moments of birth: a
third time: the rst instants of breathing: a fourth time; and
so on) are indeed a part of the vaster times that the garden
articulates. The garden is transience. The gardener, who rakes
the gravel in the Japanese garden, quits the garden and erases his
own footprints7. After raking he leaves the garden, and the marks
he leaves behind are not a personal signature, like a painters
7

M. P. Keane, The Art of Setting

Stones & Other Writings from the
Japanese Garden, Stone Bridge 2001,
p. 54 .

signature in the corner of a canvas. The gardeners departure

from the garden, without leaving behind a trace of himself, is
the gardens rst lesson.

You do not observe a garden like a painting, as something

which your gaze might imagine it could contain. You yourself
are contained, always, in the garden. To leave the garden and
observe it from afar, like a map, means not to be in the garden.
Therefore the Japanese refused a rigid symmetry in the garden.
Such symmetry is not for solitude, wrote Lord Byron of the
gardens at Versailles.8 The gardens dialogue is not between
two halves forming a whole, because that is not a dialogue, but
rather a doubling of a single voice, an echo. In order for speech
8

Tom Turner, Garden History:

Philosophy & Design 2000BC
2000AD, Spon Press 2005, p. 183.

to be created in a garden, symmetry must be violated. It is

always one who begins a conversation and behold, the dialogue
is already a-symmetrical.

But even the most geometrical garden cannot express an absolute

attitude of regimenting power, because even its most orderly
geometry is something in which its addressee is to be enveloped,
rather than controlling it from above like a drawing table.
When inside a triangle, you dont know you are in a triangle.

35

The garden teaches something that every gardener takes for

granted: there is a timetable to which you are subject. The
trains movements are not subject to your pocket watch. You
cant grow whatever you want whenever you want. You cannot be
in the garden and ignore its rhythms. Therefore the garden is a
lesson in responsibility, just as the birth of a child is such a
lesson. The constant gardener, this title is a near-tautology:
constancy is the meaning of this mtier. It is like saying the
treating doctor. If he doesnt treat, can he still call himself
a doctor?

Edouard Manet has a wonderful, late painting entitled, My Garden

at Versailles (1881): a bench and a table beside a footpath, red
owers. Everything is bathed in a quiet but glad vibrant light.
A small nook within the giant, regal, imperial complex. Manet
understood that the garden as a complete object, contained
within its boundaries, does not exist for us. The garden is always

a fragment, and as such, there is always something in it that

Edouard Manet, My Garden at

is invisible, some lost whole. Every garden contains many

Versailles, 1881, oil on canvas,

65.1x81.2cm, Private collection

gardens. For Manet, this little nook is a world. The bench in

the painting is designated for us, and for us alone, there is no
room in it but for two. Therefore, the garden is an innity of
spaces, an innity of gardens. It is an innity within itself,
but sometimes also beyond itself: the Japanese always knew that
the garden is a place that collects and awakens within itself
far-off sights, be it the sight of a mountain or of the moon, if
only these places are invited into our vision. They called this
technique of inviting shakei (borrowing landscape)9. In the
West the last quarter of the sixteenth century is often noted as
the moment in which the axes of the gardens became guidelines
pointing to distant places, which during the Baroque period
become a central feature of the art of gardening. The garden, if
one only looks at it, always contains more than itself, both in
its inward gaze and its outward gaze. Every garden, whether to a
lesser or greater extent, undermines the possibility of grasping
it as an object. Sometimes, within the garden, you recognize this
of yourself as well.

Hayakawa, p. 10.

36

Mark Peter Keane, and American architect working in Japan,

saw how the Japanese garden is always an emphatic symphony
of change, whether it contains gravel and stone, or whether it
contains fountains and rich foliage. This changeable quality is an
expression of the transparent array of times, which suddenly
becomes visible. Keane observed that the garden is a place where
you can understand how your human times and how the time of the
insect in the garden are part of one whole in relation to the time
of the cherry blossoms. For humans it is a blink of an eye, for
the insect an entire life. And for a ower? It seems not to
compare its time to any other; it simply blossoms. At the Ville
dEste I sipped the cold time. The avor of life.

------3. Villa Lante, Bagnaia, 27.7.06

As opposed to Villa dEste, which is a steep descending garden,
this garden follows a moderate upward incline. It leads from
nish to start: from the neat organization of topiary forms
on the ground oor, until the end of the incline, where the
garden begins: a triple grotto where the gardens water, that is
the entire garden, has its source. Walking through the space of
this garden is walking backwards in time: from the present to
past, from effect to cause, from the ordered to the primordial.

This is a garden of return. A return back to primordial nature

from the culture of the trimmed gardens and the fountain, in
which stone boats oat (a small wonder of civilization a
stone oating on water, facing a great wonder of nature water
gushing out of stone, at the top of the garden). Turner views this
garden as the fall from a mythological golden age to quotidian
reality, but this interpretation, it seems, is reversed, when
one reads the garden in the other direction, which in fact is the
natural direction for walking through it: not a fall from the
golden age, but an upward ascent toward it. Or perhaps an ascent
to the beginning, which always ends by walking backwards, by
falling?

37

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden (Genesis

2:10). The walk in Villa Lante goes from the river that goes
out to water and leads to Eden. The most famous and outstanding
element in the garden is the water chain, a channel made of
circular links (the design is attributed to Vignola) a stone
canal that has learned from the water something about the
relativity of the concepts of stone and water. The water
chain creates something that is neither completely stone nor
completely water, but is rather water sculpted (as stone) and
stone owing (as water). I dip my hand into the cool water,
touching the cold stone. It is 35C outside. I splash my face,
and drink.

Only on the way out do I notice: at the end of the water-chain

a bizarre form unfolds, like two hands. No, these are the claws
of a scorpion, and the water chain is the segments of its tail
(The scorpion was the symbol of Cardinal Gambara, the owner of
the Villa when it was developed and when its current shape was
designed.). Only in retrospect do I realize that the pleasures of
water and stone of this garden are also a camouage. Within the
river going out of Eden to water the garden lurks a scorpion, a
near, very near reincarnation of the serpent. In Villa Lante the
river is the serpent itself.

Drinking this serpent-water is a somewhat shocking moment,

but also an important one. Because here I understand, not in an
intellectual way, but physically, how much the garden is also
an internal reality. The serpent, Adam and Eve, the trees, the
expulsion, Cain. Cooper writes that the garden teaches you to be
in the position of a co-creator. You are never the sole author of
the garden, or of anything else, as some artists believe today.
The sun, the wind, the earth, the insects, and other innumerable
factors are the gardeners full partners (as they are partners of
the painter, writer, and cook). In the story of the Garden of Eden
in Genesis Adam (man) was supposed to be such a co-creator. The
Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till
it and keep it (2:15). But the partnership failed, because of

38

the serpent, that is because of the serpent within Adam and Eve.
Anyone dealing with a garden today, and for whom the Genesis
story is meaningful, is involved somehow in atonement for that
failed gardening partnership. Every garden is a quiet refusal of
the expulsion edict, and of its ratication in the gaze of the
murderer Cain. As Cooper writes10, the garden every garden
is a lesson of hope. Not the desire for something in particular
to happen (I hope I win the lottery), but a basic afrmation
10

Ibid, p. 96.

of existence (I am full of hope).

Every garden is therefore, also, a rainbow, that is a sign from

god, or from nature. The sign of a covenant, of the continued
partnership. I look at the owers of Villa Lante and think of the
colors promised to Noah; gaze at the water owing wondrously
here and think of the ood: When I bring clouds over the earth
and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant
which is between me and you and every living creature of all
esh; and the waters shall never again become a ood to destroy
all esh (Genesis 9:14-15). The garden counteracts the ood
with its actual and present spectrum of colors, here on earth,
and through its human treatment of the water, which does not
rise to ood, but gathers into one place, into the pool, just
like on the third day of creation.

The phone rings, its someone from Tel Aviv. Air-forces jets
have bombed fuel installations in Lebanon. Thousands of tons of
oil are spilling onto the shores of the Mediterranean. I draw my
face toward the water. A self-portrait, a feeble reection with
black sunglasses.

------4. Sacro Bosco (The Holy Wood), Villa Orsini,

Bomarzo (1552), 28.7.06
The garden must not include a ruin, nor should it cite a landscape
related to destruction, teaches us the Sakuteiki (p. 191). The
garden which faces home must not be allowed to remind us of a

39

destroyed home. Romantic Europe, it goes without saying, has

not heard of this prohibition, and had it been heard it would
not have been heeded. Albert Speer, Hitlers architect, thought
about construction based on the value of the ruin how the
building would look in ruins (recall, the Reich was supposed
to dominate for a thousand years). He thought of architecture
from the perspective of death. Apparently he had not perused
the Sakuteiki. In any event, in Bomarzo I understand what had
troubled the author of the Japanese treatise. Bomarzo is a very
strange garden, a kind of stationary ghost train of the midsixteenth century, a garden which is a contemporary of Villa
dEste, and like it, comes under the rubric of Mannerism, yet is
utterly different from it. The entire garden is a symbolic ruin
of the concept of the garden as realized previously in the Villa
dEste and later in the Villa Lante. This is a garden destroyed
by a erce irony toward the concept of the garden ruined not
from without, but from within. Everything in it is in excess,
clumsy, crooked, frightening, consuming, and wild. Everything
in it takes some subtle element from the notion of a garden and
either violates it or exaggerates it. It is a self-violation, like
a self-goal in football. Yes, it is an achievement (a goal was
scored), but the great achievement is matched by a great failure.
It is not a garden but a thoroughly elaborated self-parody of a
garden.

What is this place? Its essence is captured in one detail: a house

tilted sideways at an angle. This garden is not a home alongside
a home, or a home within a home, but a crooked home. This is the
mood that infuses all of the gardens details: the temple in this
garden is guarded by the dog of Hades, Cerberus, the demonic
triple-headed dog; and in the temple (decoded immediately as its
negation, the netherworld) there is nothing but an inscription:
But what did you expect? a sort of prophetic prolepsis of
Frank Stellas postmodern what you see is what you see (1964);
the garden as womb (see the painting by Fra Angelico mentioned
earlier) is replaced by a devouring, gaping maw, inviting one to
enter (inside sat three Italian youths, making sounds, enjoying

40

the echo, drinking Coca-Cola); in another place there is an

extravagant show of the gardens ora statues of giant acorns
and pine cones.
11

Ibid, p. 145.

What is wrong here? For this, one must rst dene what would be
right for the garden. David Cooper put it nicely11: the garden
is the embodiment of the close interdependence between mans
creative activity and nature, and furthermore, the garden is the
place where mans basic relationship to the mystery at the root
of existence (of man and nature) occurs and is exemplied. The
garden is the revelation (Cooper rightly uses the religious term
epiphany) of this relationship. This revelation is the very
meaning of the garden and its raison dtre as a special kind of
space and time. It explains its effects. It explains the verses of
Israel Eliraz poem, which serve as an epigram for these notes.
The mystery which Cooper points to seems similar to me,
although not quite identical to, what the Chinese call Dao: The
nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth; The named was
the mother of the myriad creatures. And Wang Bi comments that
the principle according to which things are born and actions are
completed is, perforce, that they are born of formlessness and
are derived from namelessness. The formless, the nameless is the
progenitor of multitudes of things; it encompasses the heavens
and the earth, and there is nothing in the world that will not

12

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. D.

C. Lau, Penguin 1963, p. 5.

pass through it.12 As Wang Bi explains the opening of the Tao Te

Ching, the Dao (Tao) is the power which if we give it a name, it
cannot be a tting name; if we point to it with designations, the
designations will never end. Cooper saw clearly how the garden
is a place in which, more than other places, one can observe the
connection between Dao and man. The garden is the place that
helps us perceive to what extent we are dependent upon that thing
which encompasses the heavens and the earth (every inch of the
garden attests to this, even the inches of the gardeners or of the
visitors bodies). But its also helps us perceive to what extent
this Dao is dependent upon us for it to turn from a transparent
abstract force to a reality. Cooper quotes Ezra Pound: A Japanese

13

Ibid, p. 141.

garden designer creates a theater for the wind to speak.13

41

If the garden is an embodied celebration of the condition of

interdependency of man and nature (nature not only in the
sense of visible nature, but the nature of nature, the progenitor
of the multitude of things, which is mysterious and irreducible
to the laws of nature in the scientic sense), anything that
is not reconciled with this condition, contradicts the idea of
the garden. Therefore, some of the nineteenth century gardens,
which were designed in the mixed style, missed the potential
for a true dialogue of the garden when they created a dialogue
between imported images of other gardens (Humphrey Repton rst
proposed the idea of a garden as a collection or an exhibition
of different garden traditions an image of a Chinese garden
next to an image of an Egyptian garden, next to an image of an
Italian garden): this is not a dialogue that takes place within
the garden, but rather a whimsical-cerebral ironicization of it.
The garden at Bomarzo also produces a similar contradiction,
because

it

turns

this

interdependency

into

grotesque,

hyperbolic artice. Perhaps this is the reason that the Sakuteiki

forbids ruins in the garden: the ruin, like war or violence,
is anathema to the garden precisely because war and violence
are forms which imitate in vulgar fashion the form of dialogue
and interdependency that the garden embodies. War and violence
are not merely unsuitable for a garden, they smite it with
the murderous and precise weapon of cruel parody and nullify
it. Therefore the garden cultivated by the constant gardener
in Kenya is an impossibility, and is bound to be destroyed: it
pretends that its violent and miserable surroundings dont exist,
and has pretensions of being an enclave. Etymologically the word
garden is related to guarding and enclosure, but a garden cannot
be closed. A garden is an instrument for opening up.

The principle of interdependency as the basic premise of

the garden justies, paradoxically, the destruction of the
constant gardeners garden. For a true garden does not deny
its interdependency with the city, the government, the system
of power which envelops, crisscrosses and traverses it. A true
garden cannot be content with applying the principle of mutual

42

interdependency to the world of nature sun, water, plants,

etc. A true garden is conscious of the way in which, even as a
place formally enclosed, it functions as a weave of aesthetic
interdependencies, at once natural and political.

I wrote these notes in the summer of 2006 in Israel. More than

once I asked myself whether a person may write about this quiet
locus, the garden, amidst the actual destruction of places.
But, here the garden has resolved my dilemma. For a true
garden is not a place where war and ruin have no presence or
are elided. It is a place from which it is possible to see war
and destruction and to properly understand, among other things,
their relationship to culture and to the garden. The true garden
is not a blinding mechanism. But it can perhaps provide hope, and
an illusion-less understanding of reality at a time of perplexity
and hopelessness.

------5. Epilogue:
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 30.11.06
Hadas Ophrats installation is not a garden; it is rather a
comment on a garden. A sculpted tree in a garden, is not a tree
either, but rather a thought about a tree (i.e. nature), and Hadas
Ophrats garden is a thought about a-thought-about-nature.
Hadas Ophrats garden does not treat the garden as a totality
of phenomena which are perceived by the senses. All these have
been reduced here to a quotation (a burnt quotation at times).
The subject of this garden is, chiey, the power that creates
the garden. This is the riddle of this garden: the riddle of
creation, expressed here in the contorted gure of the artist
packed with peas, like a pomegranate lled with seeds. The
force which brought this garden into being contains the seeds in
his own body (and contains also their destruction, their black
ash, which is concealed within them from the very beginning).
But these black-eyed peas are also eyes, gazes. From within one
body the body of the artist these eyes look out toward our

43

eyes, which are gazing at him. The moment when the spectators
eyes meet the eyes of the peas is an important moment, because
at that moment we are likely to comprehend how much all of this
the garden, art itself is intended for us, but also how much
our presence as spectators is important. The garden needs us no
less than we need it. In the garden of Hadas Ophrat I understand
that perhaps we create gardens precisely so that we can suspend
and expand our body-time, and give it to others as a gift. Our
single body in and of itself could never give so much. Only in the
act of procreation does it come close to doing so.

And, indeed, a garden is always a place of rebirth, and there

is no wonder that in the period dened as the Renaissance,
the garden attained some of its heights of achievement in the
West. If the garden is a womb (as in Fra Angelicos painting,
and differently in Ophrats work), exiting it is a birth. But
it is not a birth in the sense of becoming an infant, but it is
rather a birth that comes about from the ability to gaze directly
at the transient, which is to say at death also, without being
destroyed by it, but on the contrary to attain happiness in
light of its existence. This is a birth that is an awakening, a
birth that sustains a vital connection (just as the artists of
the Renaissance do) with the past and the future, from within
the present. In the garden you are simultaneously old and young,
because the garden is always old and young, an infant and a dead
person, and someone not yet born, and someone who has already
been born several times.14 A garden worthy of its name is one in
which owers are allowed to wilt, not only to blossom.

The important question to my mind, in relation to every garden,

is how did you leave it for a place where ow the streams of
time, which are not the times of the garden. How to exit a
garden? Like someone banished to the world of violence who does
not look back, like Adam and Eve? Like an exile, who remembers
the garden only from his parents tales, and returns to look at
it from the outside, with a gaze threatening to destroy it, the
gaze of Cain, the farmer-become-murderer? Anyone with a place

14

See my essay: An Enclosed

Garden: Thoughts on the TelAvivian Garden after Fra Angelico,
in: Birshut Ha-Rabim ed. Yael
Moriah, Sigal Bar-Nir, Tel Aviv
Museum of Art, 2003, p. 146-158.
Or online: http://www.notes.co.il/
burstein/12857.asp [Hebrew].

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in his heart for the garden cannot stand facing it like Cain
or like his parents; that is, not violently, nor indifferently.
He chooses to leave the garden for another garden, or for the
world, understanding that there is no place in the world that
is not a garden, there is no place that does not bespeak the
interdependency between things, even if, fortunately for us,
in some regions the garden-ness of the garden is much more
visible, more present, more beautiful. From the gardens of these
notes, I lift my gaze to meet the eyes of Cain, waiting outside
the garden, east of Eden. He too is part of the picture.