Meditations on Mowing

After three or four weeks of rain, trips out of town, and other excuses to avoid the task--mowing. Grass (more properly weeds) two feet tall, a daunting jungle to children, an ad hoc ecosystem home already to a few frogs, snakes, small crickets, fire ants, sharp mesquites, and poison ivy. The last dismays me as I discover it has breached the border of our backyard fence and begun sprouting small, lovely plants in the first few feet of the yard's far regions. Remember to attempt eradication lest another playmate fall victim. Each patch requires a pendulum motion to behead the bidirectional grass: forward and back, forward and back. Sweat down my face and legs; the familiar smell of cut grass, so often evoked (smell: the conduit of memory, Proust was a neuroscientist). As the tamed begins to overwhelm the wild, a passage prepares itself somewhere--unbidden, but welcome:

The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no long his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly down on its own. These were the most blissful moments.

It was hard only when he had to stop this by now unconscious movement and think. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (252-53)

Yet the murmur of the internal combustion motor mounted on four wheels might induce the same trance, the same extension of the body into machines--Haraway's cyborgs confirmed not just by cognitive science, but also experience. What Tolstoy describes, and what the lawnmower today provides, is the repetition of physical movement, a decent stretch of time in which nothing else matters, and a hypnotic noise conducive to cognitive flow: a mental state made of easy focus, the athlete in the zone, the writer spilling words onto the page, the monk following a breath... and the mower laying waste to nature. The way is many.

The lawnmower, technology so humble (Charlotte: near the ground) we've demoted it to mere tool. But, technology it is, clearing not only fields and lawns but space for wondering why we use it at all. Yes, the HOA fines me when I let the grass grow too tall, no doubt worried about property values and appearances. Still, why the aesthetic injunction against weeds? What questions can we raise when we consider the mower as technology, as pointing toward something significant? We need not talk only about computers here.

Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, discusses this question about lawns in passing. One of his basic assumptions is that the mind evolved in response to early human environments in ways likely to keep us alive. While he sometimes tries to force this claim to explain too much, his few words about why we mow our lawns are persuasive. Early humans would fear too little visibility; predators, enemies, unseen dangers might spring upon one unprepared. Perhaps unkempt yards evoke the wild too much, suggest the house's inhabitants might seek to hide. The well-manicured lawn might remind us of the emotions evoked by ancestral grasslands? (A recent study finds, unsurprisingly, nature makes us happy, more compassionate.)

Still, novelty--the opportunity to explore multiple pathsis also important for happiness. When every yard unto the horizon lays leveled, where rests the chance for discovery? The sterile neighborhood of Edward Scissorhands suggests itself. Maybe we have exchanged the spoors and trails of the forests and grasslands for broad, angular concrete. Either way, technology affects aesthetics and demonstrates that, despite some of Pinker's too broad claims, culture as much as biology still has a place in explaining our desires.

I pause and examine the yard. The grass, a uniform hieroglyphic and the beautiful uncut hair of graves now lies cut and strewn across the driveway or clumped in mounds destined for mulch. Tamed, quiet, the smells of fuel and chlorophyll rises from it. What other common, neglected technologies can we explore here? We should not let our questions become too limited, too computerized. This is, after all, a haystack, is it not?