Something There Is

You’d think we were living in Jericho, what with all the talk of walls falling down.  The Berlin wall is down. Europe has no more borders. Technology ignores the political map of the world. Not to mention all the conceptual boundaries that are being breached. And that’s a good thing, since walls do nothing but segregate and dominate. To build a wall is to commit an injustice.

In his brilliant Walls, Thomas Oles argues that the perception of falling walls is only part of the truth. And with regard to anti-wall ideology, he, with Robert Frost, wants to interrogate walls rather than demolish them. 

His book stretches out here and there to talk about metaphorical walls, but generally Oles, a landscape architect rather than a postmodern theorist, sticks with real walls. Some real walls are falling, but many, perhaps more, are being built:

“more and more countries are backing up [legal or procedural] restrictions with real fences and walls. The 730 miles of fencing mandated by the Secure Fence Act of 2006 has now been built, much of it on private lands seized by eminent domain. The fence has split Mexican-American communities, impeded trade, and disrupted natural process along its entire length. A double chain-link fence ten feet high and topped with barbed wire surrounds the Spanish Moroccan enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, designed to prevent Africans from entering the European Union. Botswana has constructed an electrified barbed-wire fence to block refugees from Zimbabwe, and India has built a chain-line and barbed-wire fence along much of its border with Pakistan” (10-11).

Oles admits that wall-building is a visceral offense to his liberal sensibilities, but he knows that “People have always made walls, and they always will. . . . this is not something to be lamented or resisted, but rather an opportunity to be seized and an obligation to be met” (xx). Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, but there is such a thing as a good wall, and good walls, like good fences, can make good neighbors.

Part of Oles’s project is to resurrect ancient conceptions of walls. Moderns regard walls mainly as protection for property and ways of enforcing sovereignty. Ancient cities depended on protective walls too, not only the walls of the acropolis but the boundaries and fences that protected the fields and corralled the livestock that kept the city fed. But for ancient cities, walls were so much more: they marked off places of nurture, they were locations for ritualized exchanges, they were associated with the gods. Throughout the book, he explores ways in which, for instance, walls can once again become instruments of nurture, and not only for those safety within the walls (he commends “the medieval hedge that bore edible fruits,” 166). He observes that some contemporary walls – the Vietnam Wall in DC – evoke the sacred. He suggests that architects pay so much attention to the “center” of their projects that they ignore the walls at the margins that may have a more profound effect on social life.

Crucially, the difference that walls make must be seen as a difference that facilitates fruitful exchange. He writes, “No wall is impermeable, no matter how solid it may appear. Like the walls of cells, every walls in the landscape is a filter rather than a barrier. Every wall has apertures of various sizes, allowing certain things to pass and blocking the passage of others, in either direction. . . . Walls can therefore help or hinder exchange, but they never stop it entirely. The ethical question is therefore one of porosity, of the extent and type of exchange the wall allows or encourages” (162).

The last word goes to Ezekiel Rogers, early settler of Massachusetts Bay Colony, who wrote to John Winthrop: “I have thought, that a good fence helpeth to keepe peace between neighbors; but let us take heed that we make not a high stone wall, to keepe us from meeting” (quoted, 3).