On fences
On occasion, we come across an idea that had been kicking around in a vague, spectral, undefined way inside our own head, but which someone else had crystallized decades, perhaps centuries or millenia before. In my case, this is the idea of Chesterton’s fence: “the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.”
We come across a fence in the woods. Perhaps the fence is old, dilapidated, rails missing. This for me is the more interesting case, a story to be told. Who built the fence, who failed to maintain the fence. What lies on the other side of the fence?
The new fence in the old woods raises some of the same questions: who built the fence, what lies on the other side? What is the fence protecting us from, separating us from? And I like this lens that my mind sometimes takes on the wider world: each idea, like a log in a fire, brings forth a bundle, a cloud of sparks.
This idea of the fence in the woods plays a role in much of fantasy: we do the thing that then creates what then comes to pass, which then requires vast amounts of treasure, blood and steel to unwind.
But then the imagination starts to spiral. What if the fence had never been tested? Who was it that knew, a fence is needed and then went through the effort, spent the time, to build a fence. And then I dive into the small details: what sort of fence, wood or stone? How robust a fence. Does the fence enclose some specific area, on one side or the other, or does it just extend to the ends of the world in both directions.
Back in Georgia, in the neighborhood where I grew up, there were local woods that had at one point, decades ago, were farmland, fenced off into individual fields. During our family walks, we would sometimes come across the remnants of these fences, the occasional post, a bit of barbed wire.
I never explored, sought the records, of what the land had been all that time ago. Perhaps I should have. Regrets that arise from choices made when we were young are tricky, because they have a power to them that comes from their origin during those days before we knew how to protect ourselves from them.
Perhaps one day, I’ll try and find what records that might exist. Or perhaps, I’ll try and work these ideas into stories to be written, stories taking their place in an increasingly long queue of potential stories. A fence, a ruined farmhouse, lost among trees that have grown up around them. A lovely setting for a story to be written.
multijimbo 