Future Landscape Architecture

A satirical social media look into future landscape architecture.

I feel the sand giving way under my feet.  It must be that dry quicksand of the desert that I’ve heard about.

Strangely, I do not feel panic or fear.  I am slowly sinking through the sand, like the sand has larger air spaces between the particles and can not support me…I feel, not out of control, but moving down at the speed of a slow escalator.

As the sand reaches my chin, my nose, my eyes…my breathing and sight have not been affected.  My downward speed has increased but I am still upright. If I have gone under the sand how can there still be daylight?

…however, I can breathe and what is it that I am seeing?

The light level is low, but enough so that I can still see.  It is cooler and there is humidity.  It reminds me of the large, centuries-old, university buildings in London, or Istanbul, just barely tolerable low light, huge spaces, high ceilings that always disappear into some historically ambiguous, uncertain details, dissolving into distant mists…  In front of me there is a lecture hall with the doors open, and a lighted lectern, and I can see inside…who is lecturing?  And on what?  I try to look in, but my movement forward can not be impeded.  I can not slow down.  I can not turn around.  I can not go backwards.

My movement feels more like an airport people mover, except I am moving down.  But wait, my feet are moving like I am walking…I can not tell if I am moving vertically or horizontally and I am suddenly dizzy…getting dizzier…losing all orientation of up and down…

Fight the flow…or…go with it…

There is someone next to me, I turn.  I can just see the rear 3/4 of a hooded figure, in a Maghrebi djellaba, dark brown coarse wool, deep hood, well over his face.

I ask, “Can you help me?  Where are we?”

The djellaba’d character agitatedly spits out over his shoulder, “Shaikh will fix, Shaikh will fix.”

“Shaikh?”  I ask, “Shaikh who?”

The djellaba’d man disappears around a corner.  I follow and am confronted by another large double door entering another lecture hall…this time with a large crowd, dimly and indirectly lighted all about…I see a spot lighted lectern at the front…who is that lecturing and what is he saying?

It sounds serious.  The lecturer sounds like he is serious.  Who?  What?

Before I can process any thought, I am aware, in my peripheral vision, of a growing uproar…I strain to turn my head to look…there is a huge crowd in the hall and way up high, in the fourth balcony, a major ruckus with banners, ‘DON’T CRAMP ME STYLE’ banners…rowdiness…Rastafarians, Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, South Africans, Australians…it looks like a Cricket World Cup crowd…all trying to shout down the speaker…

I hear, I hear…it is in English…but there is too much rowdy noise…what’s that he is saying…he is saying, “…and the importance of green to landscape architecture is…”  What, what?  …the crowd noise interrupts and the speaker…I can’t believe my eyes, who is the speaker…it looks like…it is…it’s Will Ferrell…it looks like Will Ferrell…all hell is breaking loose…cricket gloves, stumps, bails, pads, stuff, all are being thrown from the balconies…

Ferrell shouts, “What do you think this is some kind of fucking holiday?  We are serious here.”

The crowd goes wild…someone comes up behind Ferrell and starts trying to wrestle the microphone from him…it…it is…no it can’t be…the guy is threatening, shouting, “Don’t walk through MY words!!!”

It is, no, not Charlie Rangel…no, it’s Eddie Murphy playing a Charlie Rangel part…it looks like Eddie Murphy is on stage trying to elbow Will Ferrell from the microphone…and this time he’s got the microphone and yells, “Got to show some respect!!!”  Eddie Murphy and Will Ferrell are wrestling and shouting over each other.  “Don’t walk through my words, got to show some respect!!!”  The crowd is screaming…it’s wild…chaos reigns!

…from the back of the stage dozens of Star Wars type sand people in black, fine wool burnooses, with large oversized hoods, emerge, each with an old English Bobby truncheon…all at the same time converging on the melee at the lectern…both Ferrell and Murphy are still yelling at each other, “…you ain’t heard me out yet, you ain’t heard me out yet…”

Before I can even assess satire and reality, I move along and almost bump into the djellaba’d man still mumbling…“Shaikh will fix, Shaikh will fix.”

I try to grab him to talk, he slips away into a lecture hall saying, “See the Shaikh.  Shaikh will fix.”

I don’t know any Shaikh…and now the lighting is from a very high clerestory, I look up to see the sky and the light source is so high up it is like a visual pins and needles experience in my peripheral vision.  I’m blacking out…vertigo has descended on me.  My knees are weak.  I look up again at the clerestory and see twice as many pins and needles, this time they are moving, they are beckoning me, they are calling me…increasing and decreasing in brightness, throbbing in my head and causing me shortage of breath.  Then…then it is…all black…

Conscious again, I am sitting in a seat, a lecture hall seat, in the front row with two lighted lecterns directly in front of me.  The lecterns each have a speaker and each speaker has his name plate in front of the lectern.

The man speaking is Professor Hartmann, talking about the history of landscape architecture and its purpose being to preserve and protect those landscape experiences that captivate and inspire humans to higher goals in life.

Hartmann then says to us all, “I am sure you would all like to hear what the Shaikh has to say on this subject.”  I hold my breath.  The crowd rustle with anticipation.

Hartmann continues, “As soon as the Shaikh finishes his ablutions, I am sure he will comment.”  The other lectern occupies my attention.  There is a heavy weight, bald man, bent over a bowl, taking water to his face, in ablution style, slowly and deliberately massaging it over his shaven head, then over his forehead, as if purging himself of all that could be unwanted.  The Shaikh’s name plate reads, not Shaikh, but Colonel, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz.  Taking a clean white towel to his face, he speaks while daubing off the water.

Even still his voice is clear, “Pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth…”  …the crowd are alert.  He puts his towel down and looks out for the first time over the amassed crowd, and continues,  “My students, these are immortal; and so is our fight against them…”

I can not begin to address these words because the face and the emotions of the Shaikh are the face and the emotions of Marlon Brando as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz in ‘Apocalypse Now’.

I turn to the ‘student’ next to me, it is the dark brown djellaba’d man, his hood still well over his face, saying to me, “Shaikh is good, Shaikh is good.”

I look over my shoulder at the rest of the large numbers of ‘students’ in the lecture hall and see more dark brown djellabas dotted here and there always with faces hidden within the shadows of the hood; but even more disconcerting are the diverse group of ‘students’ taking up the rest of the seats…they look like garden gnomes, live garden gnomes…looking like iterations from ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’.  I feel trapped as never before, can’t think, can’t breathe, can’t move.

Then I opened my eyes. I was flat on my back, my arms bound to my sides by loosely woven netting. I was uncertain. I wanted to hear Shaikh. I closed my eyes, all was dark. I opened my eyes, all was dark. I tried to move, tried to stretch. Nothing.

Oh…I started to realize…am I trapped in a hammock? I tried hard to focus my thoughts…some linear history opened for me…some clarity…no, not yet…edge of dream…not dream…what…where…and…a mystery…always dark…humans and landscape…it is not resolved.