Yards

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As it happened I was on my way to my car which I had parked on Lawrence St. in East Rock as opposed to its usual designation on ‘Artisan’ street, which in the fall winds billows with chip bags, plastic crack pipes, leaves and other detritus. I figured it was better in a spot technically ‘free’, where the worst ticket I could get is for street sweeping, whereas charges could build up if they had started to check on ‘Artisan’ during the two week period I was gone.

It was a windy day, the sort of day where you smell winter in the air, and out of something like animal habit, instead of continuing just a few more feet on Orange and hanging left, I cut across maybe 5 or 6 feet of someone’s lawn. Apparently it was the owner who was at the same time roaming the edge of his property when I was walking across and a dialogue soon ensued:

‘Hypotenuse’, I said, smiling in a neighborly way. He shook his head like I’d done something wrong.

‘Is it okay?’ I asked.

‘Actually it’s not. This is my property. I live here.’ Then I guess I got a little squirrely.

‘So?’

‘So?! You don’t believe in property--what are you, a communist?

’‘Actually, I am’ I said. Though obviously one could deny a basis for property without recourse to communism, I figured I hadn’t had a spirited argument with anyone in a while. ‘Well, it’s my yard’, he repeated.

‘How many meters down do you own, or is it just the topsoil?’

‘I maintain the lawn...’

‘So you’re the one with the leaf blower’ I said, with obvious distain for the yearly noise pollution.

‘What else do you do with the leaves?’

‘Nothing’, I told him, and was about to elaborate that the leaf-blowing culture is a very American thing. But then the real name calling began.

‘Why are you being an asshole?’ he said and stepped closer. I happened to have my violin with me, in its case, so I pushed the case towards him, effecting a barrier:

‘Back up, I don’t want to get covid’

‘Covid?!’

‘You could be asymptomatic’, I emphasized.

‘You’re an asshole—why are you so condescending?’, he continued.

‘Name-calling isn’t conducive to public discourse’, I replied and straddled with one foot on the sidewalk and one on his yard, saying

‘Why don’t you call the police? They can decide if I am on your property or not’. By his reaction I could tell that he was more interested in painting my character in a certain way, as opposed to taking seriously the hard questions about indeterminacy of property boundaries I was raising my means of my body.

After a few more slurs I finally called him a big pussy and went to my car, the faint echo of‘public discourse’ ringing in my ears. What a lovely start to a day.

I later told my girlfriend about the entire incident and as usual she shook her head and emphasized the usual things, that I am not Socrates in the marketplace, that most people don’t want to have an argument, that I am immature, and that you can’t change people’s preferences. ‘It’s like asking you to like chocolate cake, when you don’t’, she reminded me. Still, I felt unconvinced. Why should it not be among a citizen’s preferences to enjoy a rational argument, in this case an argument about the foundations of property ownership? (It made me wonder whether similar arguments didn’t occur between 19th century English garden executors and the rabble in neighboring regions, gingerly jumping over a ‘ha’ on their romp—so-called as that was the appropriate expression when you encountered a dug-out boundary only visible when you stumbled upon it).

The more I thought about it the more it seemed to me that any property owner ought to be able to make more of a defense than he’d provided. For instance, his gesture towards law nmaintenance was only a start. Perhaps he might have elaborated along Lockean lines that he’s entitled to his property and stewardship over it by dint of mixing his labor with it. To which point I could have, like Nozick, pressed on the concept of ‘mixing’ (do I own the ocean by pouring some veggie juice I’ve made into it?), or else suggested that he didn’t labor enough to justify his absolute sovereignty over it, as it was clearly not a garden I had crossed, and it wasn't his labor anyway but hired landscapers who blew their noisome hell in summer. I could have bolstered my point by appealing to utilitarian considerations, if we suppose it common to cross his lawn that way, how much time would be saved by the public, and aggregating that saved time into pleasurable experiences (including the experience of walking on grass rather than pavement), might have suggested the stronger recommendation that he provide signs inviting others to walk across his lawn, or perhaps even paving the hypotenuse I’d crossed to make it abundantly obvious; to which he might have rejoined as is common in ethical debates, with the Kantian point that if everyone crossed his lawn at their leisure, it might wear down into a muddy groove and be impossible for anyone to safely navigate, especially if they are looking down at their phones while walking, as is the custom here.

But as I didn’t think to ask his profession—a foolish mistake on my part—I had no indirect gauge of his capacity for or interest in philosophical repartee. So we had left it at that, with name-calling no better than schoolyard bullies, a pale imitation of Schopenhauer’s ‘stick’ whose persuasive alternative is ‘reason’.

I blame myself for not stopping to reflect in advance¹, on what might have been said. How exactly do you change a person’s attitude towards property ownership, in an entrenched case? Philosophy doesn’t really help, in the ethical exploratory sense which simply recapitulates given positions at a higher level of abstraction. But suppose I had begun not with ‘property’ but with the yard. Perhaps I could have offered an alternative way to think of his yard, not as property someone is responsible for maintaining, but the yard as a reminder of a wider natural world, in this case a prelude to experiencing the trails at the nearby East Rock park²; the yard as something you enjoy as a natural being, like a deer run on your way, a stomping ground for squirrels, a pissing ground for dogs as they trace each others lines of scent through the unmown grass, a welcome area for pollinators, grasshoppers, a bed forbirds to descend upon when they want respite from picking apart bread in the street each time averting oncoming traffic.

The idea of being philosophically convincing to another party already assumes enough common ground to put forward shared premises; but in cases where disagreements run more deeply on account of large differences of preference, one can only appeal to a different set of overlooked concepts to begin to sway someone’s view, to soften them up a little, and hope that in their cool moments they do not recollect their interlocutor as an asshole or combative fool (though I rather like playing the fool, if more people did it the world would be more interesting).

Besides saying ‘sorry for all that’, or ‘sorry your yard is such a burden’, I might have asked him whether he thinks the nice patch of grass popping with heads of dandelions and aster, whether the adjacent oak tree raining down acorns for the squirrels will still be there a hundred years from now, when the two men standing opposed in his yard will be two skeletons coffined in the graveyard.

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¹ It was also very anti-dao my behavior. I later remembered the story from Chuang-tzu about the monkeys who are irate if they receive 3 nuts in the morning and 5 in the evening, rather than 5 in the morning and 3 in the evening, a preference with no apparent explanation to the zookeeper. The moral being, if it’s no big cost to you, it’s more harmonious to respect the strong preferences of others.

² The ancient Japanese monk, Kamo No Chōmei tells us in his account of his small hut: ‘No one owns a splendid view, so nothing prevents the heart’s delight in it’, a sentiment echoed in Emerson’s remarks centuries later... though it may only be a matter of time before corporations allow selected viewing of the horizon.

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