Art/Nature Analogies
Music, painting, sculpture, architecture, landscape design, pretty much everything that comes under the heading of “art” . . .
We justly pride ourselves as a species—more often, unfortunately?, as individuals—on our talent and creativity along these lines. We carefully guard and preserve our more inspired artifacts, display them in museums, analyze and write about them, and pay each other huge sums of money to acquire them . . . .
But somewhere along the line our pride has carried us off and made us forget our teacher, the real master of all these arts, whose works, incomparably greater and more beautiful and more vast and multitudinous and complex than ours, we have come to take for granted, even to the point of considering them valueless. We are little kids with our galleries of crayon stick-figures proudly displayed on the refrigerator door, while the Mona Lisa lines the birdcage.
[Develop analogy of (at least our part of) the Real World as Louvre or Hermitage filled with priceless works of art, by the million. The building we are in (i.e. the gross landscape) is impressive enough, imposing and massive yet perfectly proportioned and pleasing to the eye . . . but the individual treasures housed in it are what you really came for, what delight and captivate you, intrigue you, draw you in, leave you awestruck, keep you transfixed to one spot or magnetize you ever onward to discover new and different treasures, treasures that seem to go on forever. Now let loose a herd of chimpanzees in your great museum . . . Well, in the California Louvre, the Nike and the Mona Lisa and most of the other big-ticket items in the main galleries (these are the Great Valley and the coastal plain) are long gone except for a few dirty fragments scattered over the floor. But you can still find a good number of only partly damaged pictures in the basements and upper floors and miscellaneous nooks and crannies, some just recognizable, some still in pretty good shape. Still, unless the chimps become art connoisseurs pretty soon, there isn’t likely much hope for anything within reach.]
[Put in something about “reading a landscape”, prospecting for the treasure troves (the goldfields!), and how to recognize botanical (even aesthetic???) treasure when you find it.]
