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An absence of explosions, whips, car crashes, food, gunplay, conversation, and romance is one reason mowing the lawn has a hard time competing with the movies, or summer barbeques. The noise of the mower means that lawn mowing is an activity done largely in a combination of your silence and its noise, since the sound of the gas engine will drown out any kind of conversation worth having. “THAT'S WHAT A LAWN MOWER IS SUPPOSED TO WORK LIKE!!” my wife shouted at me yesterday as I pushed the neighbor's mower across our too-tall grass. (Ours, dear reader, is in the shop, after only two days of use, waiting for a new engine.) WHAT? I shouted back. She gave up shouting and mouthed the sentence again. I nodded. This is much too much effort for very little communication; you would have to be figuring out some kind of revolutionary interpretation of Kant or Aristotle to make talking while lawn-mowing worthwhile.
Even an iPod shuffle turned to a very high volume will not ameliorate the pistonic rumble that accompanies any act of lawn mowing. Though it is possible, we have heard, to mow the lawn electrically, or even mechanically, we will believe it when we see it. The lawns in our neighborhood feature no such machines.
Another disadvantage of mowing the lawn is that the grass gets all up in your feet, or, if you're wearing shoes, all up on your shoes. I have a special pair of lawn-mowing sandals, which did not start out as a special pair of lawn-mowing sandals, but became one after their first use. Wearing sandals while mowing the lawn gives me a frisson of danger, as I am always slightly afraid of mowing over my feet and, to use the parlance of lawn-mowing, mulching them. I feel safer in a shoe, but I do not wish to sacrifice another pair of shoes to the habit of lawn-mowing. Hence I tread behind the mower with a great deal of respect for the machine.
What are the advantages? First among them is not embarrassing the neighborhood. An unkempt lawn is, like all unkemptness, testimony to a failure of will, of desire, or of dignity (at least that's what people seem to think). The public health consequences are immaterial (hiding places for rats, etc.), and will only be raised by those who mistake their veneer of rationality for the harder ratios of the social. Like the ever-more-popular shearing of pubic hair, the mowing of the lawn attempts to enact civilization's victory over unruly barbarism (and, I will add, childhood's victory over puberty).** The well-manicured lawn is a Benjaminian document of that transformation.
To mow the lawn, to tame the grass, is to experience the satisfaction of ownership and domination. I made this, you say, as you walk behind the gasoline cacophony of a small internal combustion engine, wearing shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt. No one really says hello to you when you are mowing the lawn, forcing it to submit its desire for growth and life to the harsher, whiter demands of fashion and propriety: like making hot dogs, it is a process best unobserved, though everyone enjoys the results on a nice summer day.
Because of that, and because I too enjoy those results, lawn mowing will be done. The upside on a a nice day involves being out of doors, walking in the sun and enjoying the smells of the new-cut grass and the flowering perennials by the front door. There is something, too, in the geometric regularity of the process, the horizontal lines laying themselves out one by one across the unmarked rectangles of the front and back yards, that satisfies some aesthetic or mathematical urge, related to the civilizing one, but differentiated slightly from it, to make patterns out of blankness, to see regularity and to shape it, to divide the world into some comprehensible geometry that is the mark of our presence here and our battle to have it remembered: no church of cut stone, sure, but still: Hayot me fecit.***
** This sentence a tribute to S Shirazi.
*** No endorsement of EP's position on usury implied.
Between this post and H Saussy's thoughts on hay, reading printculture is starting to make my eyes itch and my nose tickle. I need to take an antihistamine before opening my web browser.
Just sayin' hay.
Achoo.
On the subject of lawn mowing and books read in childhood — in one of those Judy Blume-ish books there's a scene in which the father cuts his finger off while mowing the lawn. The main character goes out to search for the severed finger. I can't remember which book it is but it took the enjoyment out of mowing the lawn in adulthood. Plus my geometric designs were always under- appreciated in the neighborhood.
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