A few cryptic lines in Hebrew (Genesis 2:9–17). From these precious lines spring forth carpets, paintings, myths, and more. Nature. Artifice. Humanity. God. Writing. Habitation. America. Europe. The Middle East. A whole world lies furled in these brief verses.

Genesis presents an axis mundi: two trees, and the enclosed space of a garden called Eden. Then one nameless flowing river which ramifies into four—Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates. The writers of Genesis furnish a geography that describes the abundance of fruits and precious metals. The biblical verses are etiological—they give name to something that pre-existed (the rivers), and they demarcate human-made boundaries. To mention Havilah, Ethiopia, Assyria is already to suggest some sort of territory dispute.

The Persian carpet in the Victoria & Albert Museum presents a complex system of modular design. We see fractal rectangles that enclose tree and flower motifs, for the geometric and the vegetal have exponential growth functions. From the circular petal centre everything radiates forth. Carpets were luxury objects as well as liturgical ones—a Muslim uses a rug on which to pray in the direction of Mecca five times a day; there are many Persian carpets in Renaissance sacred paintings; and today many Catholic Churches in Italy and elsewhere still have them in the sanctuary.

The Bosch triptych presents scenes of riotous exposure that are revelatory of much more than a mythic past. Like many Renaissance triptychs, whether made for private meditation or for public liturgy, it was hinged. The vision of scenes of creation, delight, and cosmic undoing can only be seen though the act of closing and opening two doors. Every viewing then, enacts a spiritual disclosure.

Thomas Cole’s painting presents Eden as mapped on to the American Sublime. At the same time that Cole was conjuring up the majesty of America in his art, Tocqueville wrote in his journal:

An American thinks nothing of hacking his way through a nearly impenetrable forest, crossing a swift river, braving a pestilential swamp, or sleeping in the damp forest if there is a chance of making a dollar. But the urge to gaze upon huge trees and commune in solitude with nature utterly surpasses his understanding. (Nemerov 2023:11)

Perhaps Cole’s answer was that he did indeed gaze upon huge trees, and that in doing so he imitated what Adam and Eve had done in Eden, hand in hand, in their shared solitude.

Taken together, we see that carpets, gardens, and paintings are microcosms. As enclosed spaces, they offer a refuge from inhospitable climates; they seek to capture some permanence in the flux of time and the interchange of states.

‘In an immortal Eden there is no need to cultivate, since all is pregiven there spontaneously’, writes Robert Pogue Harrison in his meditative Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (2008: iii). The nameless makers of Persian carpets (almost certainly a team of women, since it was a heavily gendered craft), Bosch, and Cole all in their own ways used the Edenic story, conjuring up new Paradises in their own contexts.

If the innumerable permutations of the Edenic myth teach us anything, it is that while real gardens are rooted in place and time, the imaginary ones that are found in carpets, triptychs, and paintings might be even more potent, for they travel far and wide and can be accessible anytime and anywhere.

Eden was a gift from God, but the price humans paid after their disobedience was death, pain, and suffering. Perhaps life is only bearable when we take up the vocation of care, and this activity can be aided by thinking about scriptures, carpets, and paintings, for in so doing, we all create our own little gardens.

References

Harrison, Robert Pogue. 2008. Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)

Nemerov, Alexander. 2023. The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s (Princeton: Princeton University Press)