Preamble on the Soul of the Grassplant

Lawn maintenance is a vicious business, and a burdensome duty to those who pursue the status that flows from a handsome lawn. It is good practice to trim a lawn regularly, and a discerning groundsman will never allow a lawn to grow thick and unkempt in between trimmings. Unmaintained, a grassplant becomes comfortably entrenched and established, its stems begin to thicken as it matures, and soft fine blades grow fat and coarse.

But worse than looking haggard and dumpy, the plant’s soul acquires a taste for grandeur— it will never again accept the regulation and stricture expected of a sensible suburban lawn. One sip from the chalice of ecstatic, indulgent liberty precludes a return to the ranks of the uniform suburban garden. Even lopped back to size, a tuft once-thickened will be forever a disobedient eyesore. A mature grassplant only becomes more gruesome when mown, a gory mess of angles and stumps, at war with itself. How could such a misbegotten and debased creature forget its past and fall back among the rank and file?

Tragedy and Rage of the Grassplant

One might even attribute to this thwarted tussock a nostalgia for its former grandeur, an emergent will to self-redemption in tribute and aspiration to its former godhood, and even a restless, impotent rage at humiliating vanquishment. It sits obese and overdeveloped among its naive kinsmen, fat and blunt as an amputee. No, there is no return now. The plant carries in its very physiology the stinging brand of a fallen being… Steeped in shame; poisoned, wicked shame…

A Bosnian man once told me that a father should beat his children every day; for even if he does not know why, the child surely will. This is the fundamental concept behind lawn maintenance. The grassplant is a living floor, and as discussed above, a striving and prideful being much like any other.

Lawngrass will never know its role without constant reminding, and so must be brutalised— regularly and proactively— if a groundsman is to maintain his public image. Indeed, a lawn may be mown fresh, but even to a casual onlooker it is readily apparent that the grass has been left to grow thick and entrenched before being trimmed, and that its groundsman must be an irredeemable washout.

Mechanics of an Improperly Maintained Lawn:

When grass goes too long untrimmed, it grows taller and thicker, and the stems of the grass may even show. (Note: grass stems are a more root-like and unappealing part of the plant than the leaf. To achieve a soft and comfortable-looking lawn, stems are best kept out of view.¹ In growing tall, the grass also grows thick toward the lower end, and the cross-section matching the height of the lawnmower’s blade is concomitantly widened. That is to say, a greater total of grassflesh is cut through when this thicker grass is mown, and as a result the visage of the lawn suffers. Why? Read on.

The blades of a properly maintained grassplant are thin, because regular mowing prevents the lawn from growing tall; when it comes to grass, tall is thick, and thick is ugly. When a thin blade of grass is cut, the mower slices through a minimal total volume of grassflesh. Thusly, cutting thinner grass leaves a smaller total area of ‘grass-wound’².

Grass-wound is a deeper color of green than the grass’s skin, and the moisture present inside of the grass gives it a sheen. Furthermore, the way that the mower’s blade slices horizontally to bisect a blade of grass forms a more jarring angularity the thicker the grass is. The leaves’ tips are rendered rectangular, a shape that the viewer intuits as unnatural compared to the usual pointed tip.

Warning to impoverished groundsmen

Too much exposed grass-wound makes even a freshly-mown a lawn look poor, and reflects a clumsiness and negligence of its groundsman— to onlookers, this signifies low social class. Even an opulent mansion with an unkempt lawn acquires a grotesqueness, and its occupants are revealed to be mimics of status, lower class cargo-cultists, or perhaps immigrants. Old money maintains its public-facing lawns.

Toward a Handsome Lawn, Together

From a distance, the pointed tips of natural uncut grassblades give a soft look to the lawn as a whole, while the rectangular tip of a recently-cut grass blade appears abrasive and harsh, despite an uncut blade actually being ‘sharper’ (that is, tapering to a more acute angle at the tip, rather than two more obtuse angles) than it would be if it were cut. Why? Because from afar, the sharp angle at the tip of an uncut blade is too small for the eye to process; the tips of the blades recede into a mass of imperceptible infinities, unparsed by the brain and apprehended instead as a single mass with a soft, undefined edge ³. Consider how a group of 3 people is mentally parsed as 3 separate entities, while a crowd of people is parsed as just one.

We can rightly posit a dichotomy between two value-clusters variously applicable to handsome and decrepit lawns. On one hand, values like smoothness, softness, downiness, and plumpness. On the other; angularity, roughness, coarseness, and spikiness. The values of the former cluster characterise grass that looks pleasing and comfortable to lay upon, while the latter cluster typifies bad grass. Noting the above, one will realise that the natural uncut grass actually achieves such a comfortable look precisely because of the increased frequency of signifiers of the second cluster of values, not the first. More angles, and sharper. I know the reasons behind this mysterious phenomenon, but I will never tell a single soul, even under threat of death or torture. An endeavouring individual could cut off my hands and feet and burn me alive, but I would still take this secret to my grave.

1. The blade of the grass plant is in fact a leaf, though something feels intuitively wrong about referring to them as leaves, being that they are so low to the ground, and so often stepped on. To the mind of man, the rightful place of a leaf is above the ground, and certainly not underfoot. Man turns his gaze upward to see living leaves made to glow by the sun, venation on display and a thin silver aura of God’s light… But casting his eyes downward, man sees dead leaves melting to brown mush. He may walk on these dead leaves below, but never on those living leaves on high.

   In man’s own estimation, walking about on living leaves would be as ridiculous as stepping on trees, or on the sky; trees and sky, like leaves, belong up, while grass and its blades belong down. It does not vex one’s conscience to step on dead leaves, but to trod on living ones feels cruel. It is therefore lucky that living leaves do not appear on the ground where we do trod— that is, unless we acknowledge that blades of grass are indeed leaves. More fool to man, for may shame follow he who falsifies his deeds and his nature, and who carves up and rearranges God’s own world with the keen blade of mendacious wordplay.

   The word ‘blade’ for a leaf of grass emerged as just one of many instances of subconscious delusional micro-deceptions that the collective human psyche compulsively self-inflicts to squeamishly edit and obscure reality as it truly is. I’m not afraid to say it: We Walk on Leaves; living ones at that.

   Language is the artifice of the Ghoblin Kings. These warlocks are misshapen beings, born of slime— they live at odds with God’s world, and so are saturated eternally in pain and hatred. Bloodless lords of trickery, fallen beings that transcend mere genetic expression, more a manifestation of an arcane demon than a species, marked as they are ; they keep the flame of an ancient spirit deeply entrenched in God’s world, but which seeks to destroy it.

   These Ghoblin Kings amassed their spells and opened a door to another world— a false world, where Satan does live. Enter this world, and you must play by ghoblin rules. It is long since this profane illusion descended over the race of man like a great dome. A long time indeed, but ghoblins live even still, loitering in darkness, gobbling snakes and insects. They draw symbols and speak in black tongues, and they throw children through their portal. In speaking and writing alike we exalt the slime kings.

   So, we rush to obscure the fact that we do regularly walk on living leaves— God’s leaves. Man may wake each day considering himself an entity which walks not ‘pon the leaves of God… To this, in his chirpy importunity, man surely must add: “unless those leaves have died and fallen groundwise, that is! For indeed the ground is where I do walk, and it is known that groundwise no leaves do live; only blades. I’ll leave the birds and insects to walk on living leaves, while I remain aground.” Fools? Liars? Who is to know, and what does it matter anyway? We are sinners, complicit in a poisonous delusion.

   What else are we afraid to admit, and what other grotesqueries do we breathlessly suppress in shame and disgrace? Well, we also shudder to admit how much grass we eat: Corn, oats, rice, wheat and sugarcane are all grasses. Bamboo too, a grass. Again the jester’s farcical refrain: “Man eating grass? Japery indeed! Cows eat grass, but never man.” No wonder man cannot look himself in the mirror— for who walks on living leaves and eats grass? The Devil himself. ↩

2. Grasswound is the area of sliced, exposed internal grassflesh that results when a blade of grass is mown.Though we don’t experience nearly the discomfort at the broken and sliced appendages of plants that we do at those of humans, there is still a certain low-level gore to the open wound of a plant— as everyone knows, woodchips are mincemeat to plants.

   The act of mowing a lawn is a kind of disciplinary ritual wherein millions of semi-chaotic, semi-uniform individual manifestations (blades of grass) of a unitary will (an entire grass plant) are targeted by the hyper-optimised machine weapon technics (lawnmower) of a higher race (man), and ritualistically ‘mowed down’ (physically traumatised into total uniformity).

   The groundsman is implicitly fascistic: Visions of one billion kneeling green subjects, seeming from afar to melt into a great unitary blanket that splays across the earth like the hide of some great scaled beast. Such is the dream that the groundsman enacts— a dream of slavery, discipline, and ritual abuse.

   But forsooth, the groundsman too is a slave, to the regular obligation to mow his lawn. See here, a superior enslaved by his obligations to discipline his inferiors, a dominator’s indomitable duty to dominate— but a duty to whom? The latent implication in the mower’s situation is that that all the way up the chain of being lies an infinite procession of enslaved slavers. But where does it end? is God himself a slave? No, I reject this. ↩

3. An edge is of course a mental designation for a point where one object of concern ends and another begins. Soft objects have edges that are difficult to define, and so a soft ‘edge-value’ is attached by the brain. For example, a fractal edge such as that presented by a substance like fur or steam, or a diffuse shadow— It is of course not acceptable that the difficulty of defining an exact edge means that these things have no edge at all, and therefore the edge-value is interpreted as a range, rather than a concrete value. That is, we are sure that the edge exists between two concrete points, but not of the exact point of the edge.

   Such is the mental territory where a quantified value turns into a qualitative one; that is, when a value becomes too complex to quantify, it must be apprehended as a qualitative phenomenon. A figure that is too large ceases to be a figure at all, and becomes a concept. Plainly, it is a mercy on man that he may wrap unfathomably complex values in the skin of a single undefinable concept, saving his mind from being redlined by unprotected confrontation of infinity. This would look like a computer processing an infinite dataset, and the stress would render him non-functional.

   Nested soft edge-values are also possible, eg. in an instance where possibility-parameters of a soft edge value are also uncertain, yet bounded in potential, and so must also be parsed as ranges. The brain’s interpretation of uncertainty as a range of potentiality can be seen both as a shorthand placeholder for extremely complex values, an acknowledgement of sensory limitation, and a finite being’s mechanism for safely contending with infinity. Without mental demarcations like this, we would instantly go insane. ↩