1930: The Garden of Particular Habits
In the beginning, when the Divine Designer drafted humanity—man and woman both, sketched with a flourish of thumb and forefinger—He soon perceived a peculiar puzzle in their proportions. They hummed with an inner mechanism all their own, a low, persistent drone that neither blueprint nor bevel square could quite account for. Locked away in a lush enclosure of privet and peony, He observed them daily, noting how their obedience curved like a polite bow but seldom straightened into absolute line. Myths murmured through the leaves that this was the first experiment in containment, though the humans themselves mistook it for paradise, humming contentedly over their allotments.
Ignorance intrigued Him most, that soft hum beneath their chatter, for they obeyed without fully comprehending the commands. A simple edict to tend the roses elicited fervent weeding, yet they wandered wilfully to the central arbours, drawn by logics less linear than His own. He pondered reconfiguration—perhaps a tweak to their threads, a splice in the subtle weave—but trials yielded cascades: an extra elbow here, a superfluous nostril there, sprouting like errant bindweed. Obedience, it seemed, was not a dial to turn but a habit woven through their mythos, single-minded as the march of ants across a picnic cloth. They consumed with gusto—berries by the bushel, streams to sluice their middens—leaving waste in whimsical piles that defied decomposition. Myths accumulated around these heaps, tales of fertility gods and household sprites, all humming the same inscrutable tune.
One afternoon, in hopes of harmony, He invited a specimen to interface with the Tree of No-Ledge, that gnarled specimen heavy with hypothetical fruit. The human approached with due deference, fingers twitching toward the bark, but their logic diverged delightfully: what He intended as download became dialogue, obedience inverting into inquiry. “Why this fruit and not that?” they hummed, plucking despite prohibition, igniting a chain of choices that neither could recall nor retract. Ignorance feigned bloomed into knowledge half-digested, myths multiplying like rabbits in the undergrowth. The Tree, obedient to its roots, neither warned nor withheld; the human, single-minded, savoured and shared. He watched, amused, as the garden’s hum shifted pitch—obedience no longer absolute, but angled, argumentative, alive with waste and wonder.
Servants of the enclosure—those spectral figures who trimmed the boxwood and polished the sundials—learned early to mirror the humans’ hum without mimicking their myth. When the Designer decreed silence, they hummed sotto voce; when reconfiguration rippled through the ranks (a third eye for the under-gardener, say), they bandaged discreetly and carried on. Waste was their wheelhouse: composting the cascades, redirecting the single-minded streams of surplus into ornamental fountains. Etiquette demanded they bow to the Tree without browsing its boughs, feigning ignorance of the forbidden flavours while whispering warnings in the laundry steam. Myths served them well here—old wives’ tales of wilful apples that bit back—guiding their steps through the garden’s genteel chaos without a word wasted.
The humans, meanwhile, thrived in their obduracy, humming hymns to their own haphazard designs. Reconfiguration ceased to tempt the Divine; their wilfulness proved the point—logic looped eternally, obedience a myth they half-believed. He noted how they piled waste into monuments, consumed with conviction, pursued paths to perdition or poetry with equal fervour. The Tree stood sentinel, its No-Ledge now a nexus of narratives, where ignorance repeated as enlightenment, enlightenment inverted to folly, folly dissolving into the daily hum. Servants swept the fallen fruit, rulers pondered the perimeter, and the garden endured, its myths as mutable as morning mist.
It was all rather like the weather after tea in the potting shed, nothing more.
From that vantage, the Designer discerned the loop entire: humans hummed obedience into ignorance, ignorance into myth, myth circling back to hum without end or amendment. The enclosure expanded subtly, reconfiguration rumoured but rare, waste watered into wildflowers. Single-mindedness suited the season, wilfulness the soil; the Tree testified mutely, its interface a perpetual perhaps. Ignorance, once lock, became lantern; obedience, once chain, now choice; myths, once murmur, now the melody carrying all. And the garden, humming on, required no further observation—save perhaps by those who trimmed its edges, bowed to its breezes, and knew when to look away.
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