Appendix 13-III: Back to the Garden

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. Butterflies fly 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 fife: 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 reflected in the glass. You see a creature with a great many wings, bearing a flaming 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).

17

This revelation conflates the Garden with the Bibilical Garden of Eden, and the murderous, insane Gardener with the flaming-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 that Gods placed Cherubim (plural) with the flaming sword to guard the eastern gate of the Garden of Eden. In the comments of Back to the Garden, however, THX 0477 identifies the angels guarding the Garden as “Seraphim”.