Appendix 13-III: Back to the Garden (Jeanne Morningstar, June 8th, 2011)
The garden is not the monstrous jungle you had been expecting, but a beautiful place where plant life of every kind imaginable and some you had never heard of grows together, seeming somehow both wild and ordered. Butter ies y around you as if in an eerie ballet. Even the light seems brighter here. It is a place of peace and contentment. Or it would be if it weren’t for the wizened old man, moving far faster than he should, who’s hacking away at you with a machete. You desperately dive for cover beneath some bushes, soon followed by the gardener’s blade. He then begins to sing, in a deep but strangely serene voice: “He thought he saw an Elephant, That practised on a fe: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. ‘At length I realise,’ he said, ‘The bitterness of Life!’”16 You’re running for your life, but you are far more frightened by the glimpses you catch of him re ected in the glass. You see a creature with a great many wings, bearing a aming sword.17
16
In the comments: Jeanne Morningstar: “The song is, of course, ‘The Mad Gardener’s Song’ by Lewis Carroll. The poem appears in Volume 1 of Carroll’s two-part novel Sylvie and Bruno (1889).
This revelation con ates the Garden with the Bibilical Garden of Eden, and the murderous, insane Gardener with the aming-sword-wielding angel said to guard its entrance from any human intrusion following Adam and Eve’s banishment. The Book of Ezekiel describes Cherubim as having two pairs of wings, and Genesis 3:24 states th at Gods placed Cherubim (plural) with the aming sword to guard the eastern gate of the Garden of Eden. In the comments of Back to the Garden, however, THX 0477 identi es the angels guarding the Garden as “Seraphim”. 17
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