Written from and about her garden on the lower slopes of Canterbury’s Port Hills, with its sleight “declivity of one in ten feet”(i) Ursula Bethell’s poetry is a melancholic register of life’s transience. Taping into a long tradition of using the garden as a “setting for a mediation on time”, particularly as it relates to the “mutability of worldly things”(ii), Bethell’s poems constantly highlight the immediacy of the present, how it guides and shapes memory and desire. Often this is achieved by foregrounding the physicality of the work it takes to maintain a garden — the digging, the planting, the hauling, the weeding, the watering — as a never ending endeavour, a Sisyphean task “whose work is never done”(iii). But it’s also achieved by registering the psychological toll of the garden as well. In the garden she invests her hopes and aspirations. It is her bulwark against the “trivial city”(iv), her solace. Constantly she is seeking some other moment, whether it’s the witching hour before dawn (v), or during the “rock-garden’s toy symphony” (vi), there seems to always arrive in Bethell’s poetry a moment when she registers something else. Something or sometime when the “petulant questions” stop.vii. When she finds a primeval peace, “an appeasement / not justified by reasons of commonsense”viii that allays the burden of time’s omnipresence.
Over and again you will find this balance in Bethell’s writing. On the one hand she is overwhelmed by her garden, the physicality of it, the aspiration of it, but she can’t help delight in her rapturous enjoyment of it. She describes and lists the varied microcosm she is building with such detail and yet she is always eclipsed by it. Witness for instance the loosening of mind and body in this opening vista:
When I am very earnestly digging
I lift my head sometimes, and look at the mountains,
and muse upon them, muscles relaxing. (ix)
Her proclivity to abstract from the garden exists in direct correlation to her own bodily temperament. She yearns for escape from time’s omnipresence but her pragmatism won’t allow it. This yolking explains the contentment that pervades Bethell’s poetry. This is an attribute that is forged in her pragmatic relationship with the tenuous experience of earthly pleasure. It is all, pessimistically, only “for a very short time” (x), but it is also equally a fugitive beauty. Fleeting, momentary and there to be appreciated. The two go hand in hand. To be fugitive is to find peace. The fugitive appreciates the changing seasons, not as an opportunity to mourn, but to honour a natural cyclical exchange.
Such pragmatism explains the aloofness in Bethell’s poetry. She seems to disdain the ordinary preoccupations of everyday life. The city isn’t just “trivial” but a source of amusement. She describes our settlements as temporary, as “fond human enclosures” whose hubris is unbridled (did “superior skulls” ever sound so sardonic?)(xi) She finds “vegetables fatiguing” (xii), meals are at best “satisfactory” (xiii), but she comes to life in the presence of her garden and its inextricable promise. And yet, this to, is constantly cut down to size. She may describe the potent potential of some newly acquired rose, rhapsodising on its “large round blooms of “copper-carmine”” only to give way to the pessimism of the present: “the facts are / Two bare thorny twigs with a pink label”! (xiv) Or take her constant preoccupation with death, whether that’s the Irish heather that she has planted for her lover that is said to be “so well suited / for small gardens” and “for graveyards” (xv), or her preoccupation with returning our bodies to the soil as fertiliser (xvi). This unique appreciation of mortality seems to be taken from Bethell’s observation of the garden itself, especially come spring when the “tenuous colours”, the “arrowy jets of limpid hues” “spring again” with all “their fugacity” (xvii). Such is the cyclical nature of the garden whose only constant seems to be the sheer physicality, the “hard toil”, the “backache”, “the muddy boots [and] scratched hands” (xviii).
Almost a hundred years after Bethell and across a harbour, Brenda Nightingale also actively tends a garden. However, unlike Bethell, Nightingale adores vegetables. Marrows are no bad thing. Strawberries by the bucket. Artichokes, corn, tomatoes and peas. The bounty goes on and on. She pickles and preserves and she eats. To visit her house is to find a deep contentment in the well planned meal. But like Bethell she too feels the omnipresence of time in her garden. The constant chores, the constant work. Like an accomplice the jobs are always there. A pressing need. An obligation with no end. Just constant planning, constant shaping. What Bethell said of the watercolourist springs to mind: “would your aquarellist be kept waiting / one, two, three years for their accomplishment” (xix). And yet, Nightingale is known as a watercolourist, though the amount of over painting she endures you might wonder? Bethell too was a watercolourist so perhaps that’s no impediment to the appreciation of a garden’s peculiar time-scale. More recently, though Nightingale’s watercolour sketches have given way to large abstract paintings, lushly colourful, and bursting at the seams with a figurative mobility. Perhaps you can see the same long term planning in her paintings as both gardeners put into the development of their microcosms!
Given this correlation it’s no surprise to find the same fugitive impulse in Nightingale’s paintings. Like Bethell, Nightingale’s paintings are haunted by time’s omnipresence. She has a tendency to focus on gesture as the trace of activity. Her paintings are palimpsestic. Meaning they are layered up, overpainted and re-painted. The abstraction has its source in figurative painting, but it’s an odd sort of figuration. It’s a figuration that is preoccupied with that fugitive beauty, of a moment that is fleeting. Here then we can take our cue from Agamben’s notes on gesture, especially when he writes of gesture marking the “being-in-a-medium of human beings” (xx). That is, gesture is the unmediated movement of humans, it is almost the unconscious. No wonder Nightingale will focus on these moments. The handstand on the beach, the yoga pose, the peace sign. These are all moments that happen without a second thought. They are pure and evade, as Agamben would say, “the orbit of mediality” (xxi), that terrible secondary condition in which we are all helplessly caught. That is of time’s cruel linear flow in which all we have is the memory of the past or the hope of the future. How important it is to stay within the moment, within the immediacy of being.
For a long time now a dog has been Nightingale’s subject matter. It has haunted her paintings like a recurring motif. For a while it was doubled up like in a pack of playing cards. The queen with two heads. Designed for reversibility the second dog becomes a literalised shadow. Sometimes symmetrical, sometimes doppleganging, it exists there as a trace of memory, or a projection into the future. One possible outcome of many, or one grounding point in time. These are fugitive strategies. The dog moves, the dog remains. It is inescapable. Today’s dog paintings are more fluid, they’re palimpsestic. They trace the movement of the dog, the bodily motion as so much trace, as so much occupation. The paintings are nondefinitive, awash in the gesture of the “just-been”. How fitting then to have such a fugitive subject, the dog that is almost there. The dog haunts the paintings but then it is a very specific dog as well. “Harry”. Himself a regular interloper. A regular of Nightingale’s garden. The dog intercedes on our behalf. It registers that fugitive moment. That pressing need to find an abatement in time’s omnipresent flow.
Remember what Michel Serres said of time and how like a napkin we might crumple it. (xxii) Memory operates as such. We can plot time’s effervescence, its consummation of the singular moment as so many ideations, totemic moments that we can compress and fold. Levering one moment into the next so that near and far collapse. Time in this sense is flattened, opened up so that old and new can co-exist. This sounds senile but it enhances our contemporary moment, holds open time’s promise, but also allows us to find those enchanted moments when the petulant questions stop. Look at Nightingale’s garden paintings do they not expand and breathe, momentarily abate sensation. They’re awash with colour, with possibility. They’re fecund like compost. They’re fertilizer for our skulls. Soak it up.
___
i Ursula Bethell, “Gradient”, Collected Poems (Ed. Vincent o’Sullivan, Wellington: VUP, 2021); 67.
ii Peter Whiteford, “Ursula Bethell, 1874 – 1945”, Kōtare 7.3 (2008); 99-100.
iii Bethell, “___”, Collected Poems, ?.
iv Bethell, “Compensation” Collected Poems, 55.
v Bethell writes: “While others slept I rose, and looked upon the garden, / Lying so still there in the rare light of
the soon-to-be-setting moon”, (“Trance”, Collected Poems; 84).
vi Bethell, “Alpines” Collected Poems; 50.
vii Bethell, “Glory”, Collected Poems; 72.
viii “Glory”, 72.
ix Bethell, “Pause”, Collected Poems; 33, my emphasis.
x Bethell, “Response”, Collected Poems, 32.
xi Bethell, “Pause”, Collected Poems, 33.
xii Bethell, “Perspective”, Collected Poems; 73.
xiii Bethell, “Discipline”, Collected Poems; 48.
xiv Bethell, “Ruth H.T.” Collected Poems; 35.
xv Bethell, “Erica”, Collected Poems; 62, my emphasis.
xvi Two of Bethell’s examples: “When our impulsive limbs and our superior skills / Have to the soil restored
several ounces of fertilizer”, (“Pause”, Collected Poems; 33) and “These ashes I will now spread / for nutriment
about the roses, / Dust unto fertile dust, / And say no word more” (“Dirge”, Collected Poems; 85-6).
xvii Bethell, “Kakemono”, Collected Poems; 57.
xviii Bethell, “Prepare”, Collected Poems; 41.
xix Bethell, “Water Colour”, Collected Poems; 47.
xx Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End; Notes on Politics (Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino,
Minneapolis, London; University of Minnesota Press, 2000); 57.8.
xxi Agamben, 56.7.
xxii Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Trans. Roxanne Lapidus,
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995); 60-61.
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