EDEN
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EDEN
Invented by Irrigator and Irrigator-Boosters in the nineteenteens, in the wakes of the Kimberly-Buhl Corporation’s completion of their Milner Dam Project on the nearby Snake. Experienced obliquely these days, by way of the truck stop by the Freeway = the scandalously remodeled “Garden of Eden”.... It’s about a ten minute drive off the Freeway, north then east, from the Garden of Eden to Eden. The truck stop is named for the town. The town is named for the paradise.
Thesis: Irrigation is a form of allegorization. Irrigation means the transformation of the desert into the shapes of hidden meanings.
For illustration, compare and contrast John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952) with Annie Pike Greenwood’s We Sagebrush Folk (1934): Both are books. Steinbeck’s takes place in the Salinas Valley, CA, but, at the same time, in a deeper sense, East of Eden…. Greenwood’s takes place on a failing farm past Hazelton, 2J, which is the town exactly 4.0 miles east of Eden.
Like: Steinbeck, the Allegorizer (= the composer of his allegory) forms and guides his characters through the overtones of his deeper meaning(s). Greenwood, the Allegorizee ( = the half-inhabitant/half-interpreter of someone else’s allegorical composition) has no such guide. Her allegorical landscape, being non-fictional, is partially pre-created when she and her husband arrive and start trying to farm it. But the farm does not farm right, and Greenwood’s reminiscences tend to ramble…
Greenwood on the way to Eden (p.274):
Note: The novelty of the speed limit sign… The reason the Greenwoods are driving to Eden is to see Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, 1925, which would date this to somewhere around then = about simultaneous with the birth of the US Numbered Highway System (1926).... This pretty road to Eden will be not included, though, in the US Numbered Highway System. It runs parallel to the more-obvious route for the transnational Highway 30 (Atlantic City to Astoria by way of Twin Falls), which passes not far south of Eden, but on the opposite side of the Snake River Canyon…. A mistake? The current Freeway diverges from “Old Highway 30” here — takes Eden’s side of the Snake — runs parallel to Eden’s State Highway 25, just a mile or so south...
Note: The wife-work… The imaginary official perhaps lounging around Eden, enforcing the town’s speed limit while his wife farms the farm… See also Greenwood’s biblical speculations (p.5): Most men long for the soil. Adam, I am sure, regretted the lost Garden of Eden, but I suspect that Eve fed him the apple in order to get off the farm. (....) See also the first sentence of her last chapter (“Economics”): We lost the farm, thank God.
Note: The rambling… Greenwood writes that she is writing “in a rambling sort of a way” her “rambling record” in her “book of rambling reminiscences”.... Her rambling, though, is not yer traditional sort of rambling. Say Like: Yer traditional sorta rambling generates an increasingly complex nexus of points which it never gets to. It moves from direction to direction to direction and, in this way, rambles laconically, dry farmer style, waiting for the rain… But Greenwood rambles with more urgency — point to nowhere to point to point to nowhere to point to point to point — pinball-style. There is not time to resonate the meanings hiding in the depths of the points — only to touch upon their hiding-place there — to utilize the powers of their hiddenness there to turbocharge her immediate launch off topic.
Note: The allegorical complex… To the irrigatedness of her farm corresponds the perfectness, and also the worthlessness, of Greenwood’s fore-knowledge of the weather:
The old mystery (= meteorological forces which may or may not be signified in the swollenness of an old man’s knee) is not solved, but popped. Through the Irrigated Eden burst new mysteries of world-economic / national-economic / local-economic / religious / political / personal / ecological proportions. Adorable to Greenwood are the men in her life — their old-style rambling, which has now melted into a single-minded and increasingly paranoid effort to “solve the government”. They were rambling not fast enough. Their paranoia is the inevitable conclusion of their rambling not fast enough. We have just too many mysteries now.