The Toe Rag - Issue 7 The Pastoral

There is a man who listens to a forest. It is an old-growth forest that he pays a subscription to have preserved in his name. He is editing a manuscript, and susurration plays through his noise-cancelling headphones. He receives monthly satellite photos of his acreage, green pixels on a screen. He never visits. His relationship with his land is abstract, a silent patronage. He feels a swell of pride, a genuine love for this place that he protects and will never know. The forest in his ears has no mosquitoes. No rot. The trees fall in perfect, muffled stereo, and no one is there to hear them. He is achieving deep focus. 
Close to that forest, a landscape architect is commissioned to design a private garden for a residence that borders a vast, off-limits industrial zone. The brief calls for ‘total immersion’. He specifies a twelve-foot wall, not excessive for privacy, and layers it with evergreen shrubs known for their dampening qualities. He selects a water feature – a recirculating granite rill – whose gentle burble is calibrated to mask low-frequency noise. The client is pleased. The garden is a masterpiece of seclusion. The air, tested regularly, is pure. The soil, imported from a distant valley, is rich and uncontaminated. The architect takes pride in his work. He has successfully designed a paradise that does not acknowledge the hell whose perimeter it elegantly traces.
Elsewhere, a girl walks through a meadow. The meadow is a very good idea – an algorithm designed it. It’s owned by a holding company. The grass is sharp, and it has just the right amount of clover. She is applying a filter. The filter is called ‘Golden Hour’. It adds a glow that the sun, a busy entity with its own agenda, failed to provide. She posts the picture. The caption is a line from a poem about authenticity. The signal is very strong. The girl’s feet do not touch the ground. 
Not far away, a composer generates a recording of a brook for a symphony about the loss of nature. The recording is so pristine, so sonically exquisite, that it sounds more like a brook than any real brook ever could. It is accompanied by a ‘synthetic landscape’ projected on a vast LED wall. The algorithm cross-references and merges visual data from every green space in the United Kingdom, creating a seamless and non-existent vista. As they look and listen, viewers report a profound sense of calm and recognition, a feeling of being ‘home’. They are moved to tears – the beauty of the artifice is what convinces them of the truth of the loss.
Months later, a couple pays the landscape architect to ‘rewild’ their suburban garden. The man arrives with a truck of native flowers and grasses and a detailed planting schematic. He installs the disorder according to plan. The clients are pleased with the new aesthetic. That night, a mole, a real one, enters the garden and digs through the bed of oxeye daisy, red campion, knapweed and yarrow. The couple insert a battery-powered vibrating spike into the hole and the mole does not return.

FEATURING: 

Greg Afinogenov, Rachael Allen, Em Bauer, David Blandy, Alex Clark, Amie Corry, Arístides Vega Chapú, Joe Dunthorne, Alma Feigis, Christian Flamm, Charlie Fox, Ellen Poppy Hill, Lorenzo Giusti, Niven Govinden, Peli Grietzer, Tom Kew Gregory, Andy Holden, Fanny Howe, Rose Higham-Stainton, Institute for Postnatural Studies, Katie Kadue, Bhanu Kapil, Oliver Leith, hn. lyonga, Nicole-Ann Lobo, Dani Marcel, Naeem Mohaiemen, Allegra Mullan, Sufwan Najjar, Grace Nicol, Nick Norton, Noah Perez, Chris John Poole, Ethan Price, Issa Quincy, Filipa Ramos, Sam Kriss, Slavs and Tatars, Jame St Findlay, Cecilia Tricker, Isabel Trindade, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Territorial Agency & Georg Wilson.