The Weekly Screed (#730)

Good fences?
By David Benjamin

“Something there is that doesn't love a wall…”
                                                   — Robert Frost

MADISON, Wis. — The only fence I ever loved was here in Madison, erected around an immense construction site for what became the Elvehjem Art Center. Known modestly as the University Avenue fence, it became a magnet for art students, frustrated poets, revolutionaries and disgruntled English majors. One undergrad spent several gallons of paint to compose a list of at least 100 pet peeves, starting — brilliantly, I thought — with The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole.

My favorite fence artist was the anonymous illustrator who painted an enormous image of the Buddhist deity, spectacularly fat and nude but for a loincloth, his face conveying an attitude of pleasurable mischief. The demigod’s blubbery hams and epic thighs sprawled horizontally across twenty feet of fenceboard. Squished beneath this Hotei (his Japanese name) were countless tiny people, flattened, subsumed, suffocating and struggling pathetically to escape. The artist had titled this subtle masterpiece, “Buddha Will Crush You.” To this day, I scold myself for not taking a photo of the great Elvehjem Buddha.

The University Avenue fence appeared when I was in high school, before the word “graffiti” became part of the vernacular. But the fence was a mecca for graffiti. Four city blocks around, it cried out with caricatures and comic strips, messages, love sonnets, hateful haikus, feuilletons and fearful words. I went downtown every week to see what had been painted over and to discover what fresh outrages the restive student body of the University of Wisconsin had splashed and scrawled. Of course, nobody ever encroached on Hotei’s space. He was sacred.

The guy who got me thinking about fences lately was Donald Trump, when he vowed to build a Mexican border wall — “the biggest, the strongest, not penetrable, they won’t be crawling over it.” If I dared to hope that eager throngs of ironic muralists would flock to the border to cover Trump’s foolish fence — over and over — with wit and inspiration, I’d be tempted to contribute to the project.

But if it ever got built, Trump’s wall would repel only the human imagination. Timid tyrants since Hadrian have been putting up fences that looked formidable but turned out easy to either circumvent or clamber over. Besides, usually there were “friends” already inside the fence more sinister than the enemy beyond. While the Ming emperor lined the Great Wall with soldiers to stall the Manchu barbarians, Li Zicheng’s rebel conspiracy in Peking was bringing down the dynasty.

The Bastille, whose walls symbolized French tyranny more palpably than any other edifice, was demolished by hand. Afterward, it literally disappeared.

The Berlin Wall’s main accomplishment was to epitomize the terror and misery of the people stuck behind it. When he urged Soviet premier Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” President Ronald Reagan intimated a possible end to the love affair between our own tribal patriots and their fences.

It was but a respite. After the Gipper retired, his disciples went right back to the hardware store for more barbed wire. Fence-lovers have erected a ludicrous patchwork of barricades along the Rio Grande. If he could work his will, President Trump would expand this mess into “a wall like nobody can build a wall…”

Meanwhile, Hungary’s reaction to refugees from all the strife-torn countries eastward and southward is a wall against Serbia. Tunisia wants a fence to foil terrorists from Libya. Israel is two-thirds finished with a breastworks of concrete, steel, concertina wire and a 60-meter “exclusion area” (in Berlin, this was called “the death strip”) to encircle the Palestinians of the West Bank.

Predictably, that project has bogged down. The explanations are numerous, but the unspoken intuition is that the bigger the wall, the less it can contain.

The vast canvas along University Avenue was a “good fence,” because it didn’t really keep anything in, or anybody out. The crumbling stone wall in Robert Frost’s poem — separating the neighbor’s pines from Frost’s apple trees — was equally useless and, hence, as good a fence as a fence can be. That thing on the West Bank, on the other hand, is a piss-poor fence indeed.

Right-wing Israelis and pent-up Palestinians are not the sort of neighbors who’ll walk the fenceline on a day in spring, studying how thaws and winds, scuttling squirrels and climbing kids have displaced stones and widened breaches. Nor are Hungarians and Serbs likely to peer across their border through a damaged stretch of razor wire and playfully suggest that the mischief was done by elves.

Frost was coy when he suggested no culprit in the gradual dismantling of our man-piled barriers. He knew who that “something” is that doesn’t love a wall. Those who build fences do so despite knowing that no fence is perfect, nor will it ever be — especially if it’s meant to isolate one half of humankind from another half. A really big fence — like Trump’s hypothetical colossus out by Laredo — is therapy for the fearful, the small-minded, the ignorant. Something there is in a wall that thrills the reactionary mind.

There is a healthy human instinct to look at a serious fence the way we look at crosswords and murder mysteries. The fence is a conundrum that tests our wits, summons our ingenuity and demands ¬— no matter how difficult — a solution. It’s a black line drawn by hand that arbitrarily divides an empty expanse in two, making another hand itch for an eraser.

Most of us, all our lives, have never built a fence or raised a wall. But we’ve peeked through, climbed over, circled around, pushed down, crawled under and — best of all — painted, on more fences than we could ever count.