114 _ Manicure

We can grow any kind of fruit, vegetable, or plant in effect, with the help of studying the seasons and by using a greenhouse. We are extricated from a pretence that a garden is only an English Country Garden, when rock pools, curving white walls, turquoise, aqua-marine water, and tropical plants can play a fitting part in our slice of Lanzarote at home, or any other tropical island, we care to mention. Tropical feels what nature intended!

But is nature scary? It feels evil to know it could take us over. The war goes on. We envision brazened bare-naked bodies scarred by brambles and thorns, a single rose in their mouths. From spirit to nature, we know the spirit can be evil, and so, so can natures. A lot of good-looking plants are, after all, poisonous so, will you be invited into Pandora’s box? The alternative is candy floss for nature, and the forbidden fruits. We have a human desire to tame nature and manicure its abnormalities. Nature too has its disabilities up against man, and his Godly power to change the World, into a seemingly man-made world. We can expect 75% of all species by 2050 to be extinct if this sticky, glutenous, humid ice-age continues, and CO² levels rise! So, our love of all those people with an evident or silent disability means we can still make life happen, however hard it becomes.

An uprising of growers is in fact ready to manicure nature, from the bank to landscape design, as we see a full U-turn on career making. In our battle with the environment undoubtedly there will be new pockets of domestic heavenly bliss! Genetically purified, formulaically formed, and bearing an earthly, heavenly, pure image of what we will all want a part of in the new school. But do our domestic environments reach our true expectations? From ‘gorgeous’ girls on Instagram in Nouveau-Riche palaces, with an etiquette for skin-coloured style, made-up, and make-up for the house too, we are becoming ever more ostentatious in our images of stylish ways of living. How are we to design each other to protect us from Nature’s crown of thorns? Well, how do we design today? . . .

 . . . By ‘Death of the Author’ (Barthes, Roland, https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf 1967).

 . . . Through anonymity, nameless, minimal, neutral, naturally, out-of-necessity, autonomous design.

 . . . Honest, innocent, ecclesiastical, morally right, decent, pure, whole, righteous, objective, unbiased theory.

 . . . Certainly not the subjective kind, or neo-phobic, by authorship, but a part of the new collective.

 . . . And something sexy in its innocence or pervasion.

We have wasted 30 years from 1980-2010 in which government did not work with private sectors to protect biodiversity. Then came the environmental petition and the Paris agreement in 2015. If government were more based in nature, maybe we would agree with it more? Yet, we are reminded of our fear of the brambles, the branches, it’s foreverness, and its juxtaposition with the modern neo-order to society, at least for the rich. So, we need environmental law to find a re-birth, and re-love for it, and a similar natural design ethos for the new nature to come as we design today:

. . . Something of sobriety, pared down, a gestalt, of plain, mute, singularity.

. . . And something sexy.

We need to change the way we produce food and industry, currently using rivers and estuaries as sinks for pollution. And what will our bodies be like, without the chemicals in food production? How perfect can we expect the food to be? Will natural disease creep-in if we let nature in, in abundance? The fear of nature taking over. How much are we dictated by the psychology of the perfect food we expect at the supermarket? Do we need to unlearn our eating habits, and the image of food? Or should we all be self-sustainable and growing our own? All we know is we need to avoid the old, and detail the brand-new buildings, nature, food, clothes, and objects, tools and notes, literature, and film of tomorrow.

From Great Expectations (Film, 1946). The film of dread, we can see we must be frightened of natures wilderness, from the crag to the river, and forest. We must overcome man’s mortality, and the sheer authorship of natures desire to strangle itself in old cotton and dead bark, we must therefore, harness it and make it man-made. I am a pro-neo-naturalist. Still natural but trying to re-frame it. I want to be a billionaire, to house my part of nature and make a manicured architectural National Park, somewhere in England.

So, will nature envelop us? Not now man has more power than before, but as we know with COVID-19, it will react. The power of disease is 50% psychological, so remember that, should you be unfortunate. In effect with all this laboured construction in concrete, these vicious thieves – the cars, and energy industries, man is committing suicide. So, let us think. Are sex and food, animal instincts, is man in fact closer to nature than we believe, and so are we overdoing our manicuring of image, or is that the future of a purer form of nature. Man has always played with future man: from Jesus being described as possessed by a Jewish Rabbi, of his time, to the eugenics of the 1600’s, using strains of genes in birth, we go on to make our species ever stronger.

We should enjoy our images, but maybe turn to a paradigm of more real images.

RAW IMAGES.

Maybe it is time to read Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari, and get back to reality and some anonymous, ‘OBJECTIVE’, buildings!

If we end up with a wilder Britain, we will allow the biodiversity to creep back in, and we must remember nature works on all scales by rules, and so we must respect those rules, and only have a reason to manicure it. Without reason we must leave it well alone to replenish itself, and to conserve itself for the future, and future generations, so, get out now and enjoy the harmony of the Great Outdoors!