Mending fences

In my limited backyard, a small portion of a white fence abuts in one area a next-door neighbor's property. It is a flimsy thing to start with -- made of some kind of plastic -- and when I keep my windows open on a windy night I often hear it creaking eerily outside my bedroom. Therefore, I wasn't entirely surprised -- actually, I didn't even notice -- when on a particularly blustery evening a few months back, a whole section of the fence popped out of its bracket, leaving a top corner of a section of the fence to flap occasionally against the column that otherwise sustained it.

This is, in fact, very much the kind of thing that I would never have noticed or fixed at all. Years might have gone by without my caring. I realize now that I was hearing it flapping at night all that time, but as I have mentioned, there was so much spooky creaking and rustling going on already, that my brain was willing to just add it to the mix.

The way in which this fence issue was driven to some sort of crisis necessitating action came in the form of my two neighbors in the house next to mine. One of them pointed out to me, a few weeks ago, the wound that had formed in the top of the fence section. "Oh," I said. "We can hear it flapping at night sometimes," she said. "Oh," I said.

I figured we were just making conversation. The fence is fairly tall and I had no ladder or any other obvious way to get to the top of it. Plus my other neighbor and I had previously mended another length of fence (one closer to the ground) that had been burst from its socket by someone making an overzealous turn in our driveway, and that had required my using a kitchen knife to very slowly saw off one corner of the top of one of the slats. I didn't think anyone was going to ask me to go through such a thing again, especially when the fence in question was not visible from the road and wasn't completely broken through, just torn out in a corner.

But then yesterday my neighbors brought it up again, as I was passing by. "We really should get that fence fixed one of these days," one of them said. "Oh," I said. I tried my best to guess at what the underlying concern might be. Why were they bringing this up again? Why exactly did this matter to them? "Does the noise bother you?" I asked. "Oh no," they said, "we just hear it flapping sometimes at night." Okay, so yes, apparently the noise bothers them. But we live next to an active train track so I'd think it would be the sort of thing we could both get used to.

Then they also mentioned that their child "probably wouldn't" press upon the section of fence of which the top portion was slightly out of socket and thereby tragically bring it down upon himself. But I gathered from this remark that "probably" was still a higher degree of risk than they were willing to tolerate in this case.

Of all the possible things that can go wrong in this world, this fence-toppling one seemed a very unlikely scenario. Plus the fence did not appear to be in any actual danger of collapsing, as far as I could see, and it's a cheap plastic construction that could hardly do any damage if it did.

But this conversation happened to be occurring on the first real day of spring of the year, and I was therefore in the mood for an outdoor project, and throughout my life I have sometimes had to recognize the fact that certain things matter to other people that do not matter to me, but the fact that they matter to other people makes it something that will eventually force itself upon my attention.

So I made a deal with myself. I said, if I'm going to fix that fence I will -- at the very least -- need a ladder. I don't currently have one. And I don't have a car either that I could use to go find one. So, I'm going to walk for a while in the general direction of civilization and the T-station. If I spot a place that sells a step-ladder along the way, and if the one I see is lightweight enough that I could carry it home by hand, I will buy it and use it to fix the fence. If I do not, I will give up with a clear conscious because I tried.

I walked for about three blocks. And there, astonishingly, was a paint store. Leaning against the front door was a small, green, lightweight step-ladder.

I bought it and went home, hoping my neighbors might see me carrying it and note what a good person I was. I climbed the fence and labored trying to fit the top plank of the fence back into the socket. I tried haphazardly crowbarring it into place with one of those detachable metal bars one finds for hanging clothes in one's closet (oh, because a crowbar is also something -- like a ladder -- that I did not have).

Finally I lifted the entire top plank of the fence up, exposing the row of flimsy slats beneath, wobbling together in the breeze like so many tares. For one horrifying moment, I confronted the possibility that I was about to make things infinitely worse than they had been before. But then, summoning uncommon strength in my panic, I forced the top plank back into place in the socket, re-covering the slats, and everything was as good as new. The fence was fixed.

At some point during this saga, the title of that famous Robert Frost poem "Mending Wall" came into my head. It had been years since I read it. It's the kind of poem I could never forget, however -- not for any intrinsic quality it possesses, but because it was once the answer to a Quiz Bowl question in college, and someone else knew it, and anytime anyone knew the answer to any of the literature questions in these competitions and I did not, it was a lancing blow against my whole conception of self that left a lasting impression.

Otherwise, Frost has not meant a particularly great deal to me, as poets go (apart from "Fire and Ice" -- because who can't love that?). I suppose I thought he was the kind of poet who only really made sense to you at an emotional level if you were a homeowner and a resident of New England.

I am now bizarrely both of those things, however, and I have to mend walls and fences of my own, it would seem, so I looked up "Mending Wall" again.

I discovered that it deals with exactly my situation. The poet -- whose property at the time you can still visit in Derry -- has a neighbor who insists that he mend his wall, even in those sections which are already sufficiently blocked by trees. He therefore asks the neighbor why he insists upon the completeness of the fence, particularly seeing as there seems to be some force in nature -- some sprite of entropy -- that insists on knocking it down again each year. (Oh, and apparently spring is always "mending-time"-- I had unconsciously stumbled upon a universal climatic truth.) The neighbor just repeats the bromide, "Good fences make good neighbors."

There are a lot of things this poem is about -- at a thematic, symbolic, metaphorical level, etc. I'm sure if I had been made to write about this poem in high school, we could have come up with all manner of things it was "really saying." But having had now to mend a wall of my own, I suspect that it is primarily about exactly what it appears -- that is, having to accommodate the preferences of a neighbor for completeness, even when they defy all reason. I suspect this poem was written because Frost did in fact have a neighbor, and he did in fact have to mend a wall to suit that neighbor's preferences.

As one discovers with most great poetry -- once it is no longer being taught to you in school and thereby ruined -- it is a lot more interesting and a lot less mysterious than one had previously been led to believe.

As I had discovered in the case of my own neighbors, and as Frost found with his, there is plainly something in the human psyche that longs for any fence -- once started -- to be finished. There is something that associates a break in a fence with danger, even when there is no possible danger that could result. Anyone who wants to get into my backyard can already just lift the latch and do so. I have no cameras or special lights or laser matrices or security alarms. No real harm was threatened by me not having a 100% complete fence.

But, for some reason, that corner of a section of the fence that was out of joint just seemed to portend danger to the people around me.

Not to do my neighbors a disservice by an unjust comparison, but it is hard not to be reminded at this point of a particular high-visibility individual in our society, who is also obsessed beyond reason and necessity with the project of completing a "Wall." (Which may also be a fence, and which involves slats -- but steel ones in his case, rather than plastic.)

Particularly this week, after the Senate finally rejected Trump's national emergency declaration, forcing his first veto in office -- all because he is just that anxious to construct an enormous metal barrier along the border of a friendly allied nation and key trading partner -- one is reminded that the human obsession with walls is not to be constrained by any mere rationality.

Those of us in the advocacy community have been casting around for a while for a good literary or historical exemplum to help people see the titanic absurdity of the Trump wall. So far, we've come up empty. Comparing it to the Great Wall of China doesn't work -- however ineffective that engineering project may have been as a military fortification, it is nonetheless majestic. Invoking the shade of Robinson Jeffers, who apparently collected stones from famous walls throughout the world for use in building his famous Tor House, also merely succeeds in making walls seem cool.

So too, I was at a press conference recently, when a faith leader tried to use the example of the "fabled walls of Jericho" (to quote the Music Man). Her point was that these walls revealed the weakness and corruption of the city, and that truly strong, morally upright nations wouldn't need walls in the first place.

But seeing as the Israelites used the occasion of toppling Jericho's walls to invade the city and ostensibly commit a genocide against all its inhabitants, this might not be the best example to use. As Justice Breyer would say, "I question the strength of that precedent."

But here in Frost, at last, we find an emotionally resonant literary case against walls. Before I built a wall, he writes, I'd ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out/ And to whom I was like to give offense./ Something there is that doesn't love a wall./ That wants it down.

We need to be quoting this against Trump more often. Remind me to do so.

If I argued before that Frost's wall was probably less symbolic than people think, one wall that truly is  symbolic is Trump's. As a policy move, it is supported by no one and nothing. It is so obviously wrong-headed and ineffective, indeed, that it is almost as baffling that people have devoted so much energy to opposing it, as it is astonishing that it matters so much to Trump's base and the far-right commentariat.

After all, as stupid as the wall is, it is not the most dangerous of the ideas the president supports. The "Muslim Ban" is far more odious and evil a thing, yet the Supreme Court somehow allowed that to pass as within the scope of American jurisprudence and constitutionality. Likewise, during the last round of spending negotiations, everyone was exercised about Trump's demands for wall funding -- but meanwhile, in the same legislation, Senate Republicans tried to pass a provision to make Central American refugee children categorically ineligible for asylum unless they apply through a dangerous in-country process that has yet to be devised -- and almost no one noticed that. Why are we oblivious to so many horrors, but everyone seems to have an opinion on "the wall"?

There is a sense, though, in which people are right to care so much about the wall. If it is a symbol, it is a potent one.

There is a passage in John Keegan's A History of Warfare in which he is speaking of ancient Roman fortifications such a Hadrian's wall. In the end, he argues, these architectural wonders were not mere military formations. They were ideas. "Once frontiers are defined by fortifications," he writes, "[...] they take on a symbolic significance for the soldiers who defend them [....] It is impossible that the soldiers' consciousness did not eventually come to be circumscribed by the geography of the frontiers."

Trump -- with his usual insidious grasp of the baser motives of our nature -- has understood this power of the frontier fortification as idea, as metaphor. Incomplete walls make people feel unsafe. They imply that others, outsiders, might get in. Whereas walls make people feel more secure. They ensure their exclusivity and protect their prerogatives. They keep out danger and contagion.

In other words, "Good fences make good neighbors." Trump has seen into the heart of Frost's irrational New Hampshire neighbor, and has found how to exploit his tried-and-true non-logic -- the bromides he mistakes for thought.

To leave a fence incomplete speaks to other aspects of human nature. It implies a degree of trust and goodwill. One is choosing not to believe the worst about one's neighbors. One is allowing others inside, because one assumes that they mean well. Of course, they might not always and in every case mean well. You can never know with certainty. So leaving the fence incomplete implies something else as well, at the symbolic level. It implies accepting a degree of risk as an inevitable feature of human life. It means that risk is in some ways the necessary price for living in a free society -- one grounded in civil liberties and constitutionality rather than a fantasy of total control.

These are excellent, generous emotions. They are the emotions to which Frost appeals, in his poem. They draw upon values that we will have to continue to invoke in order to defeat the specter of xenophobia, nativism, and neo-fascism that is currently abroad in this country.

They have to compete, however, with the extremely powerful human emotion that Trump has so well learned to invoke. The emotion that F.M. Cornford once defined as "the Political Motive," par excellence. Namely, fear.