Separation

Separation is the theme today. You see it everywhere: in the dog behind a gate, separated from his pack, in the Latin binomials used by Carl Linnaeus and others to abstract individual beings from their ecologies, in agriculture, in urban planning . . . everywhere. I am not saying anything new, of course; Freud and others discussed this in various discussions of modern life, and it is the crisis that marks the meaning of the first book of the Christian bible.

Is some separation good? Probably. The nuclear family shows major weaknesses but I am sure its logic was clear to those who suffered within the extended family, but like many things it is probably more the result of aggressive marketing with corporate profit as its ultimate motive and motif. Separating the words in a sentence? The medieval habit of writing sentences with no spaces between individual words seems awkward now but maybe it was not such a hardship for readers of the time. A few days ago I was puzzling out an inscription carved into a stone baptismal font, the entire perimeter containing an unbroken chain of letters. The task left me deeply immersed in the text. I wonder if, by making the assumption of written language easier, the scribes who inserted spaces between their words did not also lessen the power of their writings. There does not seem to be an appreciable spacing between spoken words. So why was it deemed necessary to render written language this way?

The most marked change I have experienced since moving from an American city to the Italian countryside has been my reemersion in the nonhuman world. First it was the forested mountains above Lake Como, now it is the more rural Alpine valley of Chiavenna. Trees dominated the first landscape, animals the second, although both features obtain in both places.

Without a doubt, the reconnection with the nonhuman environment has made me more of a human, or at least a better human. The hunter-gatherer tribe, the family farm . . . it is easy to romanticize these configurations but it is clear that we lost something essentially human when we moved away from them, although one can make the argument that agriculture was the beginning of the end. I suppose I speak in relative terms.

Our cities are social and environmental disasters, precisely because they separate us from our fellow nonhuman residents. Inserting plants and animals into them is just a cruel deception and abuse. Trees do not thrive, aligned like soldiers along a boulevard; they need to congregate in their natural ecologies, ecologies that no doubt have space, and a need for, human beings.

Irony and Play in Nonhumans

I have the great fortune of sharing a living space with a very playful dog named Fulmine. He is small and quite possibly the fastest dog in the world, hence his name, which translates as ‘Lightning’ in Italian.

He likes to play a game with a crushed yellow plastic bottle, the classic one where I throw it and he goes to get it. More often though, the game involves him grabbing the bottle in his mouth, and then getting my attention by jumping up on the backs of my legs. When I turn around to grab the bottle so that I can throw it, he quickly turns and takes a step or two away so that it is out of my reach. As I said, he is extremely fast, both in reflexes and on foot, and there is no chance that I can ever get anywhere close to grabbing the bottle. In fact, my efforts are so pathetic as to be comical, I am sure.

So here’s the question: Why does he offer me the bottle only to snatch it away? He must be aware of the irony in the gesture, hence its capacity to constitute a game. He is only pretending to give me a bottle, and he knows he is pretending because it is more fun that way. If he were an earnest human toddler, or a little puppy, I imagine (he’s about two), he might trot up with the bottle and gently lay it at my feet, which would be adorable, but not ironic, and not playful, at least not in this teasing sense.

There are times when he wants to be vigorously petted, and I am good at that, but I am afraid that he is getting bored with me as a sporting challenger. He even slows his reaction so that the game becomes more of an even match, but even then I disappoint him.

It is easy to read dogs. (Sorry, all of you behaviorialists who say we make too much of canine personalities, you are just dead wrong on this). It must be much harder to read unicellular organisms. Perhaps their ontologies are just too far out of reach for us. But I am convinced that the trajectory of animal studies is putting us on a path that will lead us to greater understanding of nonhuman personalities and personhoods. I have never seen a news item in which it is announced, for example, that, ‘you know what, folks, parrots aren’t as bright as we thought they were’. No, it is always in the other direction, towards greater recognition of the sophistication of nonhuman sensibilities.

Agency, Consciousness and Irony

A new study indicates that ova exert influence over sperm selection; that is, to some extent, an ovum can choose which sperm fertilizes it. This is a clear example of agency, but does it indicate that the ovum is conscious?

The answer depends, in part, of course on how you define consciousness. The psi group considers everything to be conscious: when a photon hits a carbon molecule and the molecule reacts, that is a sign of consciousness, and I think it is a valid argument. Social scientists are more likely to look beyond agency to something like perception or self-awareness to identify the presence of consciousness in an entity or being, but again, it depends on how you define, and empirically investigate, these terms and characteristics.

Again, I like the psi understanding of consciousness, with mere agency being sufficient to determine its presence, but maybe the social scientists, and natural science behaviorialists, would find this proposal intriguing: if it could be demonstrated that an ovum selected a sperm ironically, would it not indicate the presence of consciousness rather than mere agency? For example, if the ovum secreted a fluid that inhibited sperm A but assisted sperm B, even though sperm B would lead to the development of an entity with greater evolutionary fitness, would that not provide evidence for consciousness?

I suppose it would depend on whether the action was considered an error or dysfunction, and in this case a statistical study would be helpful. Evolutionary biology does not explain all, or even most, behavior. Understanding the role of irony in behavior would be helpful. How one would conduct a study to examine this is a puzzle. Perhaps a greater ecological study of ova that routinely choose the evolutionarily disadvantaging spermatozoa would shed light on the issue.

Garden

The ultimate plant fiction, that points toward beauty (see how the themes come together?), is the garden. Like a novel, for example, it is made of characters, put in place by an author, who then begin to exert their own agency, in a time register that is all their own, a remarkably nonhuman slowness.

And their rootedness marks them as particularly integrated placemakers, radically (if you will excuse the pun) different from anything known to animal ontology. A nearby fir tree, the tallest in Europe if I remember correctly, recently fell over, maybe as the result of a storm. The same day I read about its demise, I happened to read a quote from Saint Francis of Assisi, in which he warns against counting on trees for assistance because they, like all temporal beings, will die; only divine help is eternally dependable. I read the quote in Italian, and I cannot find (instantly) an English version at my fingertips, but the word in Italian, that indicates the tree’s death, is ‘seccare’, to dry out. It is a word that evokes a remarkable insight into the relation between plants and water: plants don’t die in the way that animals do - they dry out. I suppose some plants, including trees, rot in the way an animal’s body would (forgive the image), but it seems that plants, being both simpler in composition and closer to water in relation, in comarsion with animals, exhibit less transformation, and less trauma, in death. And while I suppose animals also eventually dry out, returning to dust seems to be easier for plants.

So this fictional garden, authored by a human being, offers a comfortable transition between humans and the globe they inhabit. I would think a poet would not like gardens for this reason - they interfere with the relation between writer and world. I suppose, however, that the garden itself is a kind of poem, or short story, or novel - do gardens have genres? - should the author choose to look at it that way. And why not, words are overrated. Whitman might have composed his work with real leaves of grass, rather than metaphorical ones.

Fiction

The word ‘fiction’ comes from the Latin ‘fingere’ which means ‘to form’ or ‘to contrive’. So when Jorge Luis Borges entitled his collection ‘Ficciones’ I am thinking that his intention was not so much to indicate that the stories were untrue, but that they were formed, without making any comment, necessarily, about their veracity, which really is not relevant or important. As Michel Serres notes, ‘poetry’ comes from the Greek for ‘creation’, without any connotations of untruthfulness. Similarly, I do not think that anyone considers fictional literature to be in any way fake. The academic discourse on cultural production seems to be aimed at making the point that things considered natural are really culturally produced and therefore, viewed in the most antagonistic sense, fake or false. There are more nuanced threads in the discussion that focus on determining the history and origins of culturally produced phenomena, but too often the message is that because a certain feature of a society is culturally produced it must be in some sense invalid; but of course, anything considered valid was also culturally produced. There is no escaping it.

My aim in this post is to focus on the use of fictions, of creating fictions, as a way of managing dissonant scales. In this sense, any human relationship, for example, is a fiction. A family is a fiction, that is rendered to make the world livable, for it is very hard to live as a resident on earth without having some kind of mediating scale, or a set of mediating scales, between a person and the world. Ask any poet.

Plants must serve this purpose. I was watching a documentary on beauty yesterday in which several anthropologists made the point that certain features of the natural landscape are considered beautiful because they provided evolutionary assistance: running water, green plants, and other similarly life-assisting things. There is also the discourse on symmetry of features, waist to hip to shoulder ratio, and other body parameters, that relate to fertility.

Fair, enough, as far as it goes, but there were some dissenters. They dissented not so much by saying that this evolutionary understanding of beauty is wrong, but that it is insufficient, that it does not account for less instrumental postures and engagements of the human mind. I wonder, therefore, if it might be possible to tease out the various reasons why humans find plants to be beautiful. I will have to think a bit more on this and write about it in the next post.

Beauty

Beauty is the ultimate motive for everything.

I developed this phrase, in a fevered pre-sleep, while meditating on the meaning of another phrase, this one already well known, ‘beauty will save the world’.

The second phrase comes from a character in a novel, The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The character, who suffers from epilepsy, reasons that with deep concentration, he can develop a perspective on his disease that renders it beautiful, because how could a truth that is accurately understood, be anything other than beautiful, since it is as much a part of creation as one that is more commonly and conventionally appreciated.

So my phrase, ‘beauty is the ultimate motive for everything’, tries to fill in the contours of Dostoevsky’s claim by playing on the double meanings of two words that it contains: ‘ultimate’ and ‘motive’. The first, ‘ultimate’, denotes for me ‘last’ as well as ‘best’; while ‘motive’ denotes both ‘reason’ as well as ‘design’, as in the word ‘motif’.

I got there with the help of another Dostoevsky quote, this time from the novel Demons.

‘Man can live without science, he can live without bread, but without beauty, he can no longer live, because there would no longer be anything to do to the world. The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here’.

In the midst of this meditation, whIch extended throughout the night and into the morning, as well as into the days following, I happened to see a story on a population that lived by scavenging in an enormous garbage dump that was kilometers long. In fact, an entire village has emerged around this dump as people found enough to use, eat and sell from their scavenging alone, to create an economy.

What use would beauty be to these people, I asked myself, to put Dostoevsky’s idiot’s claim, and the other quote, to the test, and what would it look like, what form would it take? These people certainly live without the benefit of science, at least as it is understood in contemporary terms, and as far as bread is concerned, if the term is construed to mean a regular and wholesome food supply, then it is their sad fate to demonstrate that this is also possible.

But what beauty could there possibly be in such a life, and how would it serve as the the ultimate motive, to use my phrase, to keep on living? Before I answer this question, I want to take a brief detour to the theme of reason, as a kind of anti-beauty. Now, reason, and logic, can certainly be beautiful, but they are not sufficient to serve as the ultimate motive, here with a stress on the ‘mot’ of motive, as found in the words emotion, in the spiritual register, and ‘motion’ in the physical one. What might be the reason for getting up each morning with the expectation or hope (and here’s a clue), of finding something to eat, or use, or sell in order to live another day?

No, reason or logic are not sufficient, but beauty is. Only beauty, in the form of imagination, of a better tomorrow and a better life, serves as a sufficient motive. Reason and logic could lead equally to conclusions that life will get better or worse, but probably the latter. Only beauty, and the need for beauty, and the strategies for fulfilling that need, provide a motive, because it fosters that most irrational and illogical of emotions - hope.

So, as always, at some point, I have to ask what any of this has to do with plants. Answering this question never causes any anxiety, because anything and everything has to do with plants. Simply put, plants provide beauty in abundance and without asking for anything in return. They cling tenaciously to rocks in any wind, push themselves up through cracks in sidewalks and asphalted roads, assaulted by traffic and exhaust, producing their leaves and flowers, extending their roots, in search of light, water and nutrition, to continue the existence of their kind into the future. What could be more inspiring, what could be more analogous and concordant, to a group of people who live with similar grit, determination and ingenuity?

The Haidu and Others

The women who their sang apologies to the birch tree as they peeled its bark to make their baskets had it right. Human civilization and culture have since degraded, and our politics has never seen the light.

In Response to Julia Moskin's Column in the New York Times

I play Flight of the Bumblebee on the pan with a freshly cut cedar branch to get my cookies both crisp and chewy. It helps if the humidity is around 85-87%, temperature between 15 and 16.4 degrees C, with wind coming from the northwest at around 3.7-6.2 miles per hour. After 11 minutes and 23 seconds of baking time (more or less), I start taking the pan out of the oven every 30+2.5 seconds for seven iterations (30, 32.5, 35, 37.5 . . . ). Aim for ripples that are spaced at the Golden Ratio. Cooling is best done in a bariatric chamber until the desired temperature is reached. But if you don't have one, that is okay, you can just let them cool on a rack on the counter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/dining/chocolate-chip-cookie-recipe-instagram.html?comments#permid=24264640

Is there something especially funny about cedar? Why not oak or birch or pine? I will take up the differing personalities of tree types in a future post.

Skammen

Right now I am watching a film directed by Ingmar Bergman, Skammen (Shame), which came out in 1968. Set in Sweden, it has overtones of World War II and is of course also a commentary on the Vietnam War, as well as on war in general. It stars Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow, and while it displays all of Bergman's characteristic genius, I can't help but see also influences from the French New Wave as well as from Italian Neorealism.

But what I want to focus on is a sparkling feature of the work that seems all too absent today: the importance of beauty, especially in the midst of disaster and as a counterforce to cruelty.

Ullmann and Von Sydow are musicians, so the icons of beauty are musical: a violin and a piano that appear at key moments, as well as references to classical works.

What came to mind while I was watching it was a trip to Baghdad. As I rode in from the airport with a German colleague, he pointed out to me how happy he was to see that many palm trees had been planted since the war had abated, at least for a brief period.

How much debt do human beings owe to plants for the beauty that they bring to the world? And how much do we take them for granted?

Shame, indeed.

Sweeping

Can humans be swept?

I ask because today I swept some blades of grass and they appeared no worse for wear. When I was in Haiti I saw humanity as I had never seen it before. A man hauling a cart as I had never seen a man do before, He taught me something new about humanity.

Can humans be swept? Plants can. And they remain intact and whole and (it seems) thriving.

In Response to David Brooks' Column in the New York Times III

If productivity itself is the problem, not distribution, radically different politics is demanded than we’re seeing today. If productivity is the problem, we need more dynamism, not less, more openness, not less, more growth-oriented policies, not more dirigiste and redistributive ones.

No, sorry. We need better distribution and less productivity. Our sweating earth and its suffering and befuddled denizens cannot take any more dynamism from homo sapiens. Enough is enough. Stop growing and start sharing, among humans and nonhumans alike. Our politics has to extend beyond our own selfish and often pathetic and ruinous human concerns.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/opinion/the-economy-isnt-broken.html?comments#permid=24086558

Gravel

Go get some. 

But don't be surprised if you go back to earth eventually. It catches your eye, and thrills your senses, because it is unusual, extracted and refined, as it is, a product of water, once again, the anti-earth? The earth other?

Sugar, white flour, cocaine . . . gravel is the same. Its tactile clacking, its strange motility. It will excite you but it will let you down, eventually, and back you will go to earth, from which both you and it came.

When Europeans first came to what are now the Americas, they described corn as having 'Small fatness'. I feel the same way about gravel. Humus it is not, and therefore not nurturing to biological life. Exciting . . . captivating, yes, but not nurturing. Unlike soil, gravel lacks a plant component.

Here is a stanza from Sappho's 'Supreme Sight on the Black Earth'

Some say cavalry and others claim
infantry or a fleet of long oars
is the supreme sight on the black earth.
I say it is the one you love

For some reason, the person who produced this translation, Scott Horton, chose to use 'black' instead of 'brown', which is how I typically see it in Italian. But fair enough, I like black. Even what might be called green olives can be 'black' in Italian, as can red wine. It makes me wonder if specificity is really so important to expression. Maybe the more general term, if I can put such a label on the color black, is the more accurate one, for its greater inclusion, for its vague boundaries.

Oops, I got that wrong, what might be called green olives can be called 'white' in Italian, but the relation is the same. After all, red wine may indeed be red, but white wine is not really white, at least not in the same way that red - or black - wine is red.

When I was a child I began watching television when all that was available was black and white (as it came to be called only after the emergence of color television). I could not understand all of the excitement. The colors that I saw were perfectly clear to me: grass was green, sky was blue, et cetera. So much of what we consider to be some kind of external and objective reality happens in our minds.

EXCERPT: Davos (10)

It was good to sit down. As much as Franco liked walking, there was a time to walk and a time to stop walking, and this was it. Cool summer mountain air, green fresh grass, the concrete fountain made as if it had been made by a fourteen-year-old, whatever that meant. The mountain and the fountain were pals at this point, and perhaps nothing else gave Franco a sense of wellbeing than that. It made the idea of what lie ahead for him at Davos suddenly relaxed, exciting and attractive, all at the same time. ‘We have to do it. Don’t you see?,’ Franco thought. The friendly concrete, solid and stable, mixed happily with the water and the metal, the metal rusting in a gesture of humility and generosity that so filled Franco with pride and hope that he could barely contain the feeling within him. ‘Yes, Davos, do you understand now?,’ Franco asked of no one in particular, of everyone in general, and most of all in his own mind.

Enrollment Denied

As I was watering my dymondia yesterday, it occurred to me how little my engagement with them is enhanced by their name. While I like the word dymondia, and especially the full name of the plant, dymondia margaretae, it is not really present in my mind as I look at them, water them and weed around them. It is this refusal to become enrolled in human culture, at least in some respects, that lies at the heart of plant charm. A plant will not come when you call its name. It will never be your pet.

Yes, we pot plants, and perhaps even name them, although I think the practice is rare, but they are never fully domesticated. Ontologically, they are just too strange to become complacent participants in our pathetic dramas. It is their cool distance, their seeming indifference, that makes them so appealing.

Yi Fu Tuan observed how humans make pets even out of inanimate entities; water, for instance, by training it to leap in a fountain. And Michael Pollan gave us the remarkable image of plants as, not pets exactly, but as exploiters, seducing us to do their bidding in the evolutionary game of reproduction, by intoxicating us or nurturing us in exchange for aiding their proliferation and distribution.

Those arguments not withstanding, I suppose my thesis here connects to my thinking about the poverty of ideation. When I look at a poppy, my experience is far richer if I forget, momentarily, that in English the name of that flower is 'poppy'. It is this pre- or ex-lingual state of relations that I value because it renders the engagement with a thing, any thing, much more complex and whole than it would otherwise be as mediated through language. Words, as the saying goes, just get in the way.

This post has been difficult to write. Usually I just tap them out and then go back a day or two later to clean up the typos, misspellings and grammatical errors. I see this as a hopeful sign because it signals to me that I am writing from wordless experience, and so I struggle to find the words that fit. Far too often I am far too glib, with one word creating another, immersed as I am in a wordy world.

But what I am finding is that the wordless world is much more appealing, and that I must develop this ability to represent the world, without using words. But that too might have its own traps.

EXCERPT: Davos (9)

The camp at the end of the tube always left Franco stunned by beauty. Why was being here so important, and why did the water from the fountain not taste as good as the water from the tube? Surely it must taste better at the source, or at least it should. Franco thought that the problem was in the should; that is, the problem was not ontological but epistemological. ‘Might as well throw myself back into the word game,’ Franco thought, the scene at Davos clearly in his mind. It was a scene that was marked, for the most part, by that thin veneer of adhesive on the back of the adherent name tags that everyone was expected to wear. He despaired over what happened to the wool fibers of his jacket when they became coated by it. Arriving at every check-in table, he always tried to find a way to tuck the tag into his breast pocket so that he would not have to peel of the backing to expose the noxious adhesive. He flipped through a book on origami to see if one of the folded forms would help him, maybe by causing a hook to pop out the back so that he could just hang the tag on his pocket. Sometimes the tags were plastic sleeves with metal safety pins on the back that could be opened and threaded through the material of his coat, but even that method, although much better than the chemical warfare promised by the adhesive, caused worry. Would the metal pin separate two fibers who had clung to each other through all that was required to make the jacket, through the shearing and carding and threading and weaving and dying and cutting and sewing and shaping and ironing? What if it actually pierced one of them? 

Getting to Know You

After spending several days of stooped labor doing earthwork, again often on my hands and knees when necessary or simply more comfortable, it was a pleasure to do the same in service to my dymondia, who were badly in need of weeding. Ever since I planted them, they have suffered from a weed infestation, often from something called purslane, other times by simple grasses, that had a tendency to entwine themselves, root and stem, inside of the dymondia's tightly clustered leaves, making weeding a painstaking task. Because the work was so tedious and demanding, and because I have hundreds of these little mounds to tend to, I never did a proper job of it, until today.

Making the difference was my previous tenure with the soil in the back. Barefoot and on hands and knees, I finally found it possible to give each plant the attention it deserved, and to my shame, this was the first time that I actually considered, and approached, each dymondia plant as a separate being, and it has changed my relation with them.

Now, my regarding each of them as a separate being is problematic, because in fact each 'plant' is probably two, three or even more separate plants that just happen to be clustered together to make a plantable unit.

An experiment with pine trees comes to mind. In one case, seeds from a single tree were planted next to each other. They extended their roots only so far as to not infringe on their siblings territory, into their brother or sister's root system, that is. In the second case, the planting was repeated, but with seeds taken from several trees, meaning that the seedlings did not have a sibling relationship. In contrast to the first group, these plants did not respect each other's boundaries, and fought with each other for soil, water and nutrients. I wonder if nurseries are attentive to this dynamic, if in fact it is a wide spread phenomenon, and compose their little six pack cells in such a way as to promote harmonious and symbiotic relations among the seedlings.

In any case, it felt good, and easy, to spend an hour or two on my hands and knees, shifting slowly from one plant to another, cleaning each one of competing plants and dressing the soil around each one. I have to say that I had some mixed feelings about what I did to the weeds, especially because purslane can be quite pretty, and I feel somewhat stupid for killing the plants that grow so well, at least much more quickly than the dymondia, punishing them for their success.

But the ontology of plants being so vigorous, and so different from animal ontology, it seems only intelligent and prudent to respect the difference. I do hold plants to be persons, but they are certainly not humans and I must attend to that distinction. Still, it felt good to take care of each little plant, and I am glad I finally took the time to do it.

There has always been something very affecting to me about the prostration of Catholic priests during certain ceremonies, and a little research reveals that the assumption of this posture is found in many religions. I have to say that it lent a special intimacy to my tending, and I have often thought that the world would be a kinder place if everyone went barefoot more often.

Here is Gerard Manley Hopkins on the matter:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and share's man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod

The Problem With Ideas

Amidst the swirl of issues that inhabit, condition and constitute my daily world: national and local politics, controversies within the tech sphere, choosing floor coverings for my cottage, and tending to my plants, I have become aware that there are a lot of problems with ideas, something I have already posted on a bit.

This is not a new insight, of course. Most present to me is an observation put forth by Michel Serres, who complains that we pay more attention to the label on the bottle of wine than we do to its contents. In the age of ideas in which we live, we have lost the ability to use our senses effectively, relying too much or even solely on ideas to help us navigate the mind-boggling and neurosis-producing embarrassment of choices that our economy produces. Curiously, this condition does not afflict our politics, at least in the US, which remains meagre in its offerings, a dysfunction that is different from systems that are sclerotic with choices and parties that support them, those of Italy for example, and of other European countries, but more on that later.

No, the problem is our brains, Serres again, have developed smooth neural pathways that channel the infinitely complex barrage of stimuli that we experience daily into a few manageable boxes, categories to which we apply words, containing more words that constitute ideas. How dull.

Do I like this wine? Well, I like this or that, and so what does it say on the label, is this or that listed? Great, then I will like this wine. In fact, I like it already. Does the label tell a good story that really have nothing to do with the taste of the wine itself? Great, then I know I will like the taste, because I will like what the taste represents.

This idea came to me while watering my backyard, (a break from the dymondia in the front, which all of us appreciate, I am sure), which I am preparing for clover, which will be less demanding of time and water than the California Native Bent Grass.

As I sprayed down the dirt to settle it and prepare it for sowing, I noticed that the persimmon tree was looking a little haggard. I began to enumerate the features that indicated this to me: curled leaves, pale leaves, drooping branches . . . ) and then I thought better. The word game was working its reductive magic on my mind, so I decided to exit that route and merely observe the tree as best as I could without using language.

Was this pre-lingual approach more comprehensive than a worded and reasoned one? I am not sure. Since I did not need to communicate the signs of plant dehydration to anyone, the worded approach seemed at least superfluous, is not also restricting. So I gave the persimmon a good drink and hope it will look better soon.

About my carpets and mats, the floor coverings I mentioned at the opening of this piece. Again, boggled by choice, I tried to apply reason in making my selection, but reason as a tool, much like the scientific method, is often too sharp to be of use in these situations. Should I pick this door mat because it is made of natural fibers? That is a good reason, but I just did not like the mat as a thing and it did not mix well with the other items in the room. Should I pick this other one because it matches the color and texture of the walls? Again, a sound reason, but not one that led to a good selection. I know, I will just pick the mat that I like the best, ignoring other qualities and contexts, so that even if it does not fit into the ecology of the room, at least I will like it of and for itself. Yet again, a failed strategy.

Serres again: Forget reason. One can only sample, sample, sample. Want to buy a house? Scroll through the thousands of listings available on any good online real estate site, forget the filters. Want to find a wine you like? Taste, taste. taste! One after the other, until you find one that makes you go: hmmm!

Serres loves lists, making them, thinking through them, traveling along them. The items in lists are not ideas, they are items, not irreducible things, or things without representations or which are not representations themselves, but they are first and foremost things nonetheless.

And one should choose the thing over the idea.

La Terra Bruna

If I ever adopt a (new) religion, it is going to be one based on earth.

I think there is an old Buddhist saying (are there any new Buddhist sayings?) that goes something along the lines of the worshiper of the mountain looking upon the worshiper of the trees as a newcomer.

What inspires this particular post, however, is the ecstasy that comes from hard labor on the earth, even though in this case my goal is far from noble: I am digging up my backyard to put in a *gasp* lawn. Well, it is California native bent grass, so it is okay.

While I may suffer daily humiliations at the hands (leaves? roots?) of my weeds in the front yard, I do not think that they can wear me body and soul in the same way that the earth can. Weeds may be spry and stealthy, tiny but overwhelming in number, nimble and tenacious, but the earth can just take whatever you throw at it and barely show a scratch. And when you think you might have gotten the better of it, all you have to do is remind yourself that there is a virtually limitless supply of it lying just inches below your feet. So, who is fooling who?

And it is so fascinating. One of the few times I was utterly captivated by a lecture was when my Geography 101 professor talked about soil. What it is and how it is made still fascinates me. And to stand on top of it, and in it - think of Francisco Goya's Duel with Cudgels here and Michel Serres' use of it in introducing his idea of the natural contract - is to love it, admire it, and be humbled by it.

Della Solitudine

E godo la terra
Bruna e l'indistruttibile
Certezza delle sue cose

And I love the brown earth
And the indestructible
Certainty of its things

Carlo Betocchi (1899-1986)

There is also a beautiful ode by Sappho, obviously much more ancient, that speaks of 'la terra bruna', 'the brown earth', and even though it does so incidentally, I find the phrase to be the most beautiful in the poem.

The Beauty of the Wind

I am currently (re)reading Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, one of the most stimulating and engaging pieces of intellectual thought I have ever encountered. It is definitely a product of its age, but for every time the essay rubs against current thinking, the benefits of man conquering nature and similar comments (although if one thinks of it, who are we to pretend that our environmental ethos is anything more than talk; Freud and his contemporaries were much more ecological than we are, if only for structural reasons), it offers multiple insights that have not only stood the test of time, but have become such fundamental parts of our daily understanding of life and the world that they have become invisible. So I enjoy being reminded of them by picking the book up and slowly reading through it every few years.

It so happened that I was reading a paragraph on beauty just now, and then got up from my chair to glance out the glass doors of my cottage. The rapid juxtaposition is fitting because it produced in me that nice feeling when the thing that one is reading combines with one's surroundings to create an all encompassing experience. Fittingly, the passage comes just after a section in which Freud notes that happiness occurs only in brief flits here and there, and is not something that can be sustained, because by its very nature it is strongest when it comes suddenly after a period of repressed desire, which of course was one of the key insights of his work. This could be as simple as the rush of relief one feels upon drinking a glass of water after working for many hours in the sun, but of course Freud, a biologist of the mind as Louis Menand refers to him, saw this dynamic at work in registers beyond the biological: cultural, social, political and others.

In the passage on beauty, Freud says that it, or rather our appreciation of it, does not do much to protect us from suffering, but it does a great deal to alleviate its symptoms. And what I saw when I looked out the window was a very common phenomenon of late afternoons in the Bay Area, and I am sure in many other places, the arrival of a cooling breeze off of the water. And what struck me most about this occurrence is how the wind is made visible and sensible, encased as I was behind glass doors, only by its effect on things in the environment, foremost among them the many trees and shrubs and grass and other plants that proliferate on my little street.

I think there is nothing more beautiful than the gentle swaying, swinging and fluttering that the wind causes when it rushes by and through the plants, the movement it produces as well as its unique sound, and I am always struck by it no matter how many times I have experienced it in the past. This makes me think that this, too, taps into an essential aspect of being human, perhaps of being an animal, or an entity of any kind (why of all instances would I leave plants out of the mix now?), just as the stooped engagement with the earth, or being down on hands and knees, produces a similar connection to the world, between habitant and habitat, only with earth rather than with wind.

What is so humbling is that to experience the wind rushing through the trees seems to make everything all right, and it costs nothing, except a little time and attention, and the insight to appreciate what a gift it is.

I will have to amend my thinking on the wind, having called it inanimate in the past, because what could be more in possession of an anima than the wind, which more than any other feature in the landscape, embodies the very spirit of the word and idea itself?

Metaphor

One of my favorite investigative methods into metaphor involves etymology and one of my favorite etymologies is that for the word 'precipice' from the Latin 'praeciptium', meaning 'abrupt descent'. Apparently, the original referent, the proto-event, in this case, was not geographical but biological, the 'abrupt descent' being that of a baby from the birth canal. Basically, the word is 'prae' (pre-) plus 'caput' (head), with one meaning being a headlong fall, for example down a steep hill. In any case, the idea of the vulnerability of the head, being a large and relatively heavy and delicate part of the body is used to express a landscape feature in which such a vulnerability would most likely be an issue. The fact that this vulnerability is at its most pronounced during birth, when it must be noted the head is disproportionately large and soft, created such a strong impression that it stood as the ur-impression from which other meanings were made, even in registers other than the biological. I think it is no accident that 'caput' has been the root of so many words whose meanings extend far beyond that of the most important part of a body; eg: capitol, captain, but perhaps also principal (from princips), in which we see the same shift from 'cap' to 'cip' that we see in 'precipice'.

'Stamen' and 'pistil', parts of a flower, come from weaving and culinary, or perhaps apothecary, practices, respectively. It is fun to imagine an ur-place in which one might see all of the basic elements and activities of daily life from which the basis of language came, if I am not making some kind of grave error in thinking of language this way. My mind goes there, however, because I spent another morning of heavy labor tilling soil, getting the undeniable feeling that there is something essentially human about working the earth. And again, it is that crouched stance, on two feet and with implement in hand, that seems so fundamentally human, so fundamentally homo habilis. No doubt I would feel similarly at the root of things if I were (as I often have been) on all fours, digging with my hands to get at some rock or root, or simply to scoop mud out of a trench where a tool simply will not fit, or which is a poor instrument for the task. But then I might feel that I am more in touch with my essential animality (nonhuman) rather than with my essential humanity.

What a gift the recent trend in books has been, in which authors put themselves in the place of animals to experience life as they do (the one by Thomas Thwaites, as does the more recent one by Charles Foster, comes to mind).

Could such a book be written, and researched, from a plant perspective? Or is that one ontological divide which is just too distant ever to be crossed? We have gotten it so wrong about plants all of these years (centuries). It is time we at least try to see things their way. Surely some new metaphors would come out of the experience, or at least more accurate ones.

Ideation and Representation

I was watching a recording of a panel discussion with Rupert Sheldrake and others yesterday in which they spoke of the use of metaphor in science. One of the points made is that scientists have no choice but to use language to represent their observations and findings, and in doing so, they are forced to use metaphors. So, for example, one of the instances of this that was discussed was the practice of saying that the heart is a pump. While this is true, it simplifies the idea of a heart, which is much more than a mechanistic pump in the complexity of its composition and activity.

Missing from the discussion is the idea that to say a heart is a heart is also simplifying, because no representation of a thing can ever match that thing completely; it is always simplifying and reductive.

I liked this conversation, however, because it dovetails nicely with my previous posts that discuss, and then try, not a non-representation of a thing, but at least perhaps a less ideational or conceptual one. So for those of you who were so kind as to click on my post from yesterday, I apologize for what you found, which was my poor attempt to represent a plant, in this case my hoped-for field of dymondia margaretae, which remain healthy but more or less the same size as when I planted them, despite my seemingly constant efforts at watering, weeding and feeding. Well, not constant, but certainly diligent.

I have to admit that it was inspired, or at least was later found to be consonant with, a memory I had of an image found in the 18th century novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne (1759). As you can see in the image above, Sterne chose to represent the twirl of a cane not with a narrative description but with a graphic depiction. While I am thinking that this addition certainly began with an idea, it was not as controlled in its execution as it might have been using the more precise and bounded instrument of language. At various points in the drawing, which we might compare to a phrase, a sentence or maybe even a paragraph, this or that curve must have emerged from an accidental or random slip of the hand or an impulse driven by visual or haptic stimuli rather than by a controlled implementation of an abstract model. The texture of the paper, the nature of the pen, or any other number of material or other conditions must have influenced the final outcome.

I found this to be true when drawing my field of dymondia. In fact, the idea was simply to start drawing, something that was vaguely a plant. As you can see the composition is made of a series of quick scribbles that each have the basic contour of a plant, say a small bunch of grass, which is generally what I was thinking about when I began. But I had no intention of filling the entire page with these to produce what became in the end a representation of a field of dymondia, conforming I must say to the straight boundaries of the piece I paper I chose to draw it on.

No, as I drew one, and then another, finding the previous drawings insufficient, I fell into a bit of a trance, no longer thinking at all about what I was doing. At several instances in the few minutes that it took me to do this, I really think I had achieved the kind of empty mind that is the goal of meditation. In other instances, I was moved not by an idea of a plant, but more by the raw requirements of the composition itself, filling in a blank spot where I saw a blank spot. Eventually this sensation gave way to an idea: fill the entire paper to make a field of dymondia. But the idea of a field of dymondia, let alone the idea of a single dymondia plant, was not in my mind at the beginning.

I suppose all creative activities, if I can use this word for my simple scribble, follow this or a similar trajectory, although I understand that there is a story that relates how Beethoven composed an entire symphony in his head while walking and had to run back to the house to write it down before it escaped from him.

I want to say more about metaphor, and I will do so in a future post.

More-than-idea?

Being 'post-idea' has value as an approach to artistic expression. Scholarship has been slower to embrace the technique because ideas are its stock in trade. This is unfortunate because concepts, especially when deployed in the practice of explanation, get in the way of understanding. And even understanding, as a goal of expression and representation, is limiting. I wonder to what extent, and how, engagement with phenomena and their representations enters human sensing and perception, before or absent any acts of interpretation or ideation, as modes of explanation, occur.

Of course, I am using a few ideas to make my point in the paragraph above, and throughout this post, so I do not want to adopt a post-idea approach to my engagement with plants, but I do want to foster and develop a more-than-idea technique. What would that be?

I think a good place to start would be to use modes of expression that do not use words. Words are to ideation as . . . chlorophyll is to photosynthesis? As I write this I realize that I am hopelessly trapped in the process of forming concepts, of producing ideas. Even William Faulkner and James Joyce, and other abstract and stream-of-consciousness writers, used words to produce concepts, at least as a part of their practice and product.

Abandoning writing for music, one could compose a kind of tone poem that draws its inspiration or input from a plant (not plants, which I think is key, because generalization is a kind of ideation, but then such an assertion raises doubts about the existence of a unitary organism, or the validity of such an idea . . . ). I suppose the phenomenon of plants exists as well as that of plant, although I think anyone would be hard pressed to give a satisfying, let alone comprehensive or exhaustive, description, or make more than an elementary distinction between the single and the plural forms of the phenomenon.

And there you have it, in all of its obnoxious and monopolizing power, an example of the tyranny of the idea via the word. I think at times I have managed to escape this trap in short passages of my Fasiolo novel, but I do not think that one can use words for any length and avoid ideas - and more importantly, indeation - completely.

What would this blog, or what would a post, look like without ideation, without words? Let me see if I can produce something that is more-than-idea, or maybe even post-idea, about plants, and post it here to this blog.

Digging Soil

Yesterday was a day of heavy labor digging soil; that night I dreamed deeply about smashing monuments.

I am digging a trench for a French drains that will line three sides of my cottage. The job is simple yet far from mindless. It does not require the precision of thought nor the creative energy of carpentry, but it does call for some mind in addition to heavy labor. Soil, at least the soil around my cottage, is far from the soft loam or sand that one would hope for. It is clay that is typical of the area and full of rocks, and the roots from the bay laurel that lies lurking beneath my patch of land. My sense that I was digging into a former sea bed is confirmed by a quick study of soil types. Either that, or I am digging in soil that was deposited here after being washed down a mountain side. The mark of water is evident even now, in the middle of summer, when the ground is dry.

The work is far from monotonous. Sometimes I have to scrape the heavy pick in the trench to loosen the soil a bit. If I hit a rock, I have to get the pick under it to pry it out. If I hit a root, I have to swing the pick higher to chop it out, maybe dramatically so, lifting it so high that the handle and my extended arms are vertical and perpendicular, or nearly so, to the earth on which I stand. With practice I have become pretty accurate with my swing, even when coming down with full force. Once the obstructing piece of matter is extracted, sometimes a half-hour enterprise, I can continue with my stooped scraping and, finally, my scooping, as I move the loosened soil out of the trench and off to the side. The work is exhausting but well rewarded by a glance at the trench that lengthens and deepens with gratifying regularity.

My neighbor lent me a handful of tools, saying that they would make the job easier, but I find that my pick is the best and only tool for the job.

Something that I find a bit disturbing is the realization that my zeal for digging in the earth overwhelms my concern for any plants, always in the form of roots, since I am digging in soil that was previously covered in concrete (dare I write about that process also?). The trench is the privileged object, and any roots that get in the way are ripped out with satisfaction. How odd it is, in the afternoons, because there is no way that I can dig a trench all day, when I tend to my dymondia in the front garden, weeding for a seemingly endless session, stooped again, similarly removing plants I deem unwanted and offensive.

The difference is that the trench digging involves a form of geologic engineering that seems to hit the same, or related, essential quality of being a human, that is offered also by hoeing, which is the same thing only shallower and less laborious. A history of human earthwork, either in service to agriculture or not, would be fascinating to read, or write. Considering vegetal approaches to the same activity, or other nonhuman agents, would enrich the work even further. Worms and roots have the same shape for a reason.

EXCERPT: Davos (8)

Franco would sleep at the other end of the tube, but it was still a ways away. He wished in a way that he could follow it, but not even a bird could do that, a squirrel maybe. Franco sometimes took shortcuts and always regretted it. How frightened he became when he left the trail, forced to reconcile himself to the oblique hillsides that made him fall to all fours, straining muscles he did not even know he had, as he struggled against gravity, wet leaves and confusion. Up and down were no longer clear on these hillsides, which seemed to slope both up and down at the same time, sending one foot in one direction and the other foot in another direction, straining knees and groin in a way that instilled an existential panic that not even thirst or hunger ever provoked. Is this what it was like to be an animal? Living a roadless life like this? The terror of this rumination, cows again, followed by the realization that his two feet were on level ground, filled Franco with elation. Safe on the ground, sunlight, food and water inside him where they should be, and Franco was human again. But he thought of his tree and the feeling he had when he laid his hand on its bark, and he thought about it, and thought about it, and thought about it.

Feeling Local Affection for Plants

One finding of global development studies is that any effort to save the life of baby is overwhelmingly accepted. Other development efforts might meet with resistance, but not this one. And what might be considered strange is that this continues to be the case despite the drumbeat resistance to increasing the world's population. How does one reconcile these two apparently opposite stances?

This problem came to mind as I watered my newly planted dymondia margaretae this morning. Yesterday, during a minor heatwave we are having, my next door neighbor told me that I was losing my plants. They did look a little wilted, despite what I thought were my thorough waterings. I thought maybe I was watering them too much, and yet the soil always seemed so dry every morning. I was not watering thoroughly enough, just wetting the surface, a rookie gardener's mistake.

You can imagine how alarming I found the prospect of losing all of my dymondia, hundreds of seedlings that I had planted by hand in my front garden. The alarm did not arise over thoughts of all of that hard work and money going to waste, although those were certainly concerns, but rather over my concern for the the plants themselves, rooted in my affection for them.

So, I am watering in both the morning and evening now, a process I find wonderfully meditative, not only because the plants are there in front of me, but also because of the mesmerizing quality of running water. I suspect human beings, and probably other animals, evolved this positive if highly abstracted cognitive mode of engagement with water because it is such an essential component of life. I fortified these waterings with fish emulsion and B1 supplements to fertilize the plants and stimulate the growth of their roots.

And here of course is the local/global problem. Undoubtedly, this fish emulsion came from the demise of some fish, and yet they do not enter into my affective world. So too the water is precious in and of itself, but also as a component in other projects. California might be, after so many years, finally out of its drought, but I think everyone expects this to be just a temporary condition. And while nothing practical can be done to save this water or send it somewhere else in the world where it would do more good, as a general principle it seems ill-advised to pour it on my little plants.

And yet, these concerns did not matter. I was aware of them, rationally, but all of my emotional energy was focused exclusively on my little plants in front of me. Shifting from the local/present register to the global/future register requires a different kind of thinking. I think this insight is well established and has been discussed at length: humans are not evolved to be concerned about conditions that will or may exist far into the future or far off in some other place.

I think when Wendell Berry advises to 'think locally and act locally', that he is recognizing this key feature of human nature. His advice seems to be to have every locality act in a healthy, equitable and sustainable way so that the globe, as a whole, will maintain its integrity, in an accumulative or agglomerative way. Or, as my grandmother used to say: 'Watch your pennies and your dollars will take care of themselves'.

Root Vegetables Revisited

I wonder is Jains have a visceral distaste for root vegetables? I ask this because I have developed one for eggs, and I might be moving in that direction with cheese. I consoled myself with the self-adjudication that, while I may be a thief (that is, happy to eat eggs and milk taken from the chicken and cow, respectively), I am no murderer. But eggs are now starting to seem to be too fleshy for me these days, and so I find myself avoiding them during my daily shopping trips (yes, I know, I have the greatest luxury of all, that of ample time). I gave up fresh milk long ago, and now only cheese remains in the stolen items category.

But what of bread made from wheat and even cauliflower? They are not root vegetables, but in the modern industrial mode of their cultivation and harvest, are not the entire plants destroyed? I hazard to guess that even the tomatoes and cucumbers I just ate came from a similarly destructive process. One of Hugh Grant's potential dates in the film, Notting Hill, a typically effete and overeducated Londoner, describes herself in some eccentric way, I cannot remember what she says exactly, explaining that she eats only apples that have fallen from the tree of their own accord.

But I wonder, going back to my opening sentence, if I will eventually develop a sensitivity to, for example, carrots, but not, plums, the harvest of the first requiring the destruction of the entire plant while that of the second does not.

Given that I have developed an almost Buddhist view of life, at least as it regards plants, as being more a force that enters and leaves bodies but never disappears or is destroyed, much like the scientific understanding of energy, rather than as a discrete quality that inhabits an organism at that organism's inception until its death, (I mean, come on now, who is winning, me or the weeds?), I am not sure that I will ever develop a visceral appreciation for a carrot as a living thing, in the same way that I have generated such a feeling for a chicken. This is a concern I addressed in a previous post.

What vegetables do I avoid, and why? Artichokes - simply too much trouble (well played, artie). Potatoes, generally, but not because they are rooters. I actually never buy or consumer carrots, but not because the idea of eating them seems distasteful in the same way that meat and now eggs and even dairy seem distasteful. I wonder if our prehistoric gatherer forebears were as likely to dig tubers as to pick fruit. Maybe there is something about picking a piece of fruit off of a tree, (Book of Genesis, noted), that is essentially human, more so than digging for potatoes. Our nimble digits seem to be more adept at the former mode of harvest than the latter, which would seem to call for claws and paws more than hands.

And yet, there is something perceptibly odd about the piled root vegetables in the market, mounded like a heap of fish hauled up from the sea, taken as they were from underground rather than from underwater, rather than snatched from the air: pomme de terre, as the French say so evocatively on this point: apple of (the) earth. Like they say about the oyster: It must have taken a brave person to be the first to try it.

Dig it

I have to say that I am really enjoying digging in the dirt, independent of any direct engagement with plants, except to clear away the dried husks of what remains of this winter's weeds. Undoubtedly dirt, or more properly and evocatively, soil, has microscopic plants in it, and how foolhardy we are to ignore the microscopic agents of the world in our cultural and political conceptualization of society (has germ theory, let alone the rest of microbiology, taught us nothing about human social formatiion?), but it is really dirt as non-plant, as the substrate for plants, that interests me here.

It has its own composition and texture, its own strange warmth and absorbent qualities. And its relation to water is absolutely fascinating. How springy and cushioning it becomes once it has absorbed a fair share, so different from its dried state. To say that earth, the earth, is a sponge, is to say something essential about soil, about dirt.

The birds, in their aggressive pecking of my new dymondia seedlings (how they descend so opportunistically on the freshly dug and watered soil, picking off insects and, I imagine, the occasional worm or two that are left wiggling on the surface), give me occasion to stick my fingers into the soil on these cool foggy mornings to replant the uprooted plantlets, and what a strange sensation it is to feel the warm - and dry! - soil when I do so. My understanding is that clay soil does not drain well, but mine is not dry as a bone but still quite dry in the morning, a mere twenty four hours after the good soaking that I give it at the start of each day.

Apropos of my earlier comment about worms, have you noticed how quickly snails rearrange themselves? I heartlessly uprooted a whole cluster of them that had glued themselves to a long finned iron spike that I put in the ground to hold a post for a railing. They must have found an ideal place in terms of shelter, moisture and darkness. After my rude upheaving, some tumbled off, while those that stayed stuck roused themselves, and in no time, contrary to popular understanding, slithered somewhere out of sight, impossible for me to find, at least by cursory glances.

My baroque soul is delighted by these worlds within worlds that exist in a patch of earth. No wonder our planet is named for it.