May 21, 2005
Bad Fences
When I saw the link for this article, entitled "The Paradox of the Hedge," I just knew that it would contain a reference to Robert Frost's "Mending Wall.". I feel strongly that most people, and the author of this article is no exception, miss some salient facts about the poem: one, that the famous line "good fences make good neighbors" is not uttered by the persona in the poem most identifiable with the author himself (and is instead spoken by a character who is being gently mocked); and two, that it is the implied author who initiates the wall-building itself. In short, my reading of the poem is that it is bad fences in need of repair that make good neighbors, insofar as they are the occasion for social contact, even if that social contact is all about erecting boundaries. To my mind, this makes the poem much more interesting; instead of being a self-righteous claim that we should all get along, it becomes a meditation on the fact that the construction of inside and outside is itself the origin of society.
But the article itself, no matter how knee-jerk its use of Frost, is a worthwhile read because it addresses those very facts; a discussion of hedges in L.A. becomes a deeply interesting analysis of public and private, of the semiotics of landscaping, of what we want out of neighborhoods and of our own homes.
Posted by Miki at May 21, 2005 11:24 AM