Wasting and Recovering Time: The Golf Course as Shangri-La

Abstract

I have a friend who critiques my urban lifestyle. He lives in a golfcourse suburb, or, as he puts it, “nature.” While his position is easy to mock, more interesting is the puzzle his subjectivity and mine present: what kind of representational apparatus would account for his vision of nature and my mockery of his vision? Do we balance each other on a semiotic teeter-totter? Intrigued, I carried out a “phenomenological” experiment one Sunday afternoon by driving through a Calgary golf exurb named Elbow Valley, a neighborhood in a gorgeous section of foothills, well treed, designed with views and seamed with parklets and pathways. For the first ten minutes I marveled, and thought about complexity and integration; after ten I found everything tedious. I couldn’t discount the cliched sense that I was touring a film set or section of Disneyland. Something felt missing-not absent, but attenuated, like an imbalance between order and turbulence. Surely this landscape, like all others, was haunted by excess. But the repressions felt so strong that I doubted there was any chance of genuine novelty or creative advance ever arising. Of course, my experiment was really anything but phenomenological, since I could not remotely bracket the local; indeed, the local-from the architecture to my preconceptions—suffused my consciousness. How much did it cost to live in this nature, so carefully bundled around and into this golf course? How did the landscape loan its meanings to the course, and the course, in turn, to the exurb, in a cycle both centrifugal and centripetal?