Lecture by Alan Chadwick in New Market, Virginia, 1979
Lecture 4: Man, Nature and the Garden, Part 2
An Introduction to Alan Chadwick's Lectures and a Glossary of Terms
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Contents of this Segment:
The geography of mountainous areas. Leadership in biological communities. Areas of discontinuity. The bloom on the skin of a tomato. Microcosm and macrocosm. The changes of the seasons. The oasis of fertile soil formed through a natural process. (11:45)
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New Market, Virginia, 1979
Lecture 4, Man, Nature, and the Garden, Part 2
... round which the elements are performing their duties, raging and beating. And you come down to the shoulders, and down towards below the shoulders, towards the hips, and they start to be mantled with some sort of moss, and verdure. Mosses and lichens and such-like. And then you enter the scenes of small shrubs. And then you enter the scenes of trees and forests. And out of the forests you come into pasture areas as you go down the slope of the body of these mountains. And as you go down the slope of the body, you also come to the region of those moistures we spoke of, that fell over a little stone into a tiny pool, and then disappeared into the ground again, and came out some hundreds of feet down as a little tiny dribble running over.
And when you listened with your right ear you could hear that dribble, and when you listened with your left ear there was another dribble, further away over. And so when you walked round the edge of the mountain, you found there was another one, and you find that there’s a whole lot of them. And then they go in again, and they come out and run out, and they meet in sufficient quantity to form a little tiny rivulet. And now that runs over a rock, into a pool, and you suddenly have little things jumping on the water. And you begin to suspect that you see a newt, and numerous matters living in the water. And so you go down this mountain into those matters, those have collected into streams, and they’re singing songs, and there’s music with it. Until these foliages are changing. And so these pastures also are changing now into areas that are surrounded by areas of discontinuity. Like trees in lines, trees forming protections, hedges of bushes, and indeed, the great walls of rocks.
And so, it is still roaring up here with winds, and the violence of the four elements performing their duties, and you can imagine all the invisibles that work there, at those periods when the mist is on, when the snows are falling, and at nighttime, and in daytime also. And it is all a very different world. And that you are also aware that there are very different parts of those little streamlets which seem to rule the others. They seem to sing a song that governs the water, which goes down with the water and still governs it, telling the song of the rulership of that area where there’s a pond. Likewise, one tree stands out and governs the forest and the wood, and the others are in accord with that government. And that there are plants in those pastures that are governors of those mass of plants. And that all those different pastures have different governments of different plants, and they’re surrounded by these little areas of discontinuity that separate them.
And so, as you go down, you suddenly come into an area where all of those streams have formed the river. And the river has met its tributary coming around the mountain, and the other mountains even, the family of mountains. And they’ve all met together and are now a big estuary, flowing into the sea, which flows into the great, deep oceans. And they too, have their areas of discontinuity. For we must perceive that such matters as the Saragasa, and indeed many of the parts of the oceans off California in the Pacific. But that that Saragasa... You can put your hand out of one side of the ship, and it is hot, and you put it out of the other side and it’s cold. And those waters do not meet. If you say they must, because water… Yes, that’s verbosity.
Likewise you must be aware that in the Pacific, at full moon, there are whole sub-areas of the Pacific Ocean, sub-areas like a great Mantua that all rise up, through the water, the great deep oceanic, rise up through the sea, and come right to the surface, and almost boil, and are very turbulent, and can throw a ship into a complete spin. This is caused by the influence of the revolutionibus. But that all of those waters have areas of discontinuity. And you must understand that the saline, and the numerous contents that we would apply by mineral into the waters that run from what we call a river, into an estuary, into a sea, into an ocean, all become totally different to such degree, that like summer and winter they become reversed. For indeed, an estuary water is the very reverse of the content of an oceanic water. And that therefore they must somewhere have incredible areas of discontinuity.
And to make it clearer, I would apply to you the area of discontinuity of the tomato. The skin of a tomato is its area of discontinuity by which it is able to breathe in from the revolutionibus, and breathe out through the plant, through the soil into the revolutionibus. And it works perfectly. It stretches, it goes with the procedure of metamorphosis, and does this perfect protection. You [ ] prick it with a pin, and the whole life of the plant is finished for hours, in a few hours. You’ve only to leave it, and not damage it, and that area of discontinuity proceeds to a climax in the law of nature.
Let us go back, then, to this estuary which is running now into the great ocean, and is running down all the side of the mountain, increasing, and meeting others, and getting bigger and bigger, and running down. And here it meets then, the sea and the ocean. And here you have got this huge pulsation, governed by the enormity of the revolutionibus, particularly eight-ninths of the moon, of this “Hoh, hoh; Hoh, hoh...” And it is interweaving with that, do you comprehend, this breathing in and breathing out of this enormity. And that all of these little rills are indeed exactly the same as us with our veins, into our arteries, into the heart and this pulsation. It is given to us out of the revolutionibus.
Now, around that estuary, before it becomes mixed with the oceanic, you’re running still through areas of land, which are still sweet lands and sweet waters. And suddenly you have a peace, you notice, where you sit out. You’ve come down from the roarings and noises that are up in the mountains. It’s extremely peaceful, and the movements of the air are very gentle, and you come into poetic parlance, of balmy air, and such matters, as whereby the poets would begin to write about the odor of violets. And so you have a happening, that after the summer comes the fall, where the falling in love with death with the revolutionibus causes outrageous performance of this amorosity. And these great gales sweep in from the sea, and sweep out off the land. And out of the trees, they bring down the boughs.
And here you have an area, that you have been sitting on a rock, and here is an oasis. It’s one of those pastures that you met on the way down the mountain, surrounded by trees. And it is a piece of open land, looking up at the stars and the sky, but with great trees all round in plantations, in groves of different kinds. And inside is all very sweet, and it’s lush. And as the gales blow over, very high up, they are now gentle, and sweep down the side of the mountain, and release themselves into relaxation, and merely flow over this. But when these gales come, they blow through these trees in great ferocity, and in their intent of love of death, of destruction, bring down all those boughs that have died. They prune the trees, in other words, and bring down the rotted wood, and throw it into and around the oasis.
And then with the coming of fall, those more gentle fall winds follow, that concern sleep, and the god of sleep… Morpheus, thank you. And that, with the coming of the buds that form in the boughs also, push off the old leaves, and they all flitter down. And now a leaf flies down into the oasis and meets its shadow, and both disappear. Areas of discontinuity have gone. And so you get a bed of leaves falls upon a bed of boughs.
And then you get another great wind coming right off the mountains, very high up, a great gale is blowing. And it is blowing the hard face and the neck and the shoulders of the mountain, and all of this grit, this beautiful mineral grit in many variations of [ ] matters, flying through the air, flying, held up by these north, south, east and west winds intermingling, holding it up in great clouds. And then a heavy rain pours through it, and pours down and drops into the oasis, bringing these sands and grits down with it, and depositing it all together in these gentler positions, building up quite a bank of sand in some areas in this oasis. And so during the winter months these formations are going on.
And then they start, with the early spring inclination of excitement, they very slightly start to decompose...