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. 

Pinocchio

I just finished reading Pinocchio in Italian with what is considered to be the best English translation on the verso, that by Nicolas Perella, an Italian professor at UC Berkeley who just passed away in 2015. If you have never read the real story, either in the original Italian or in a faithful translation; that is, not one that has been edited for children (although those versions have their merit also), I highly recommend that you do so this summer. It is a quick read, easily done in a few sittings.

Of course, what I want to focus on in this post is the fact that Pinocchio was made of wood. It was a piece of wood with particular qualities, however, being especially hard and, more oddly, still having the capacity to grow. This is the reason, implied but not stated explicitly, that a) Pinocchio's nose continues to grow no matter how many times it is trimmed down and, b) that he is able to transform from a puppet to a real boy, although of course this dramatic change is attributed not so much to material conditions but to some kind of magic realism: he becomes a real boy because he has demonstrated real-boy virtues and not those of a puppet, who is (again it is only implied) controlled by others. The development of a self, and an attendant conscience and discipline, are essential to this transformation, although it must be said that even without these fine qualities, Pinocchio is able to run around and talk more than any other marionette made of wood; thus the special nature of the wood is important to the story and is evident from its very beginning.

Allora. Could Pinocchio have been made of stone or metal? I don't see why not, although a different material would call for a somewhat different narrative. It is fair enough to say that wood was the most obvious and common choice for the story's author, Carlo Collodi, being the dominant material of the late 19th century, at least for puppet making, but even today wood, the product of a plant, retains a special quality among products used in building and manufacturing. How often I see ads for furniture made out of 'solid wood', a material that will probably become rarer and more precious as we move into and through the Antrhopocene. What lies on the other side is anyone's guess.

The remarkable qualities of wood figure prominently in the story at multiple junctures. When Pinocchio is forced to swim to escape a ferocious dog, his woodenness allows him to float marvelously. When he is being eaten by a school of ravenous fish, the solidity of his wooden manufacture prevents him from being consumed entirely. True, his wooden feet burn easily in the fire early on in the story, but Geppetto is able to make new ones for him easily because wood, while valuable, is still readily available and perhaps more importantly, easily worked. Imagine if Geppetto had to chisel new feet for Pinocchio out of stone, or if he had to make them, as well as his entire body, out of clay, the material of choice in similar stories from earlier epochs, particularly creation myths. No, the use of wood marks Pinocchio as a denizen of a particular stage in civilization, one that stands mezza strada between ancient clay work and industrial manufacturing.

As such, the tree is never far off or forgotten in the story. To begin, Geppetto picks up not a nicely milled piece of lumber, but a log, complete with bark, which he must shave off with a plane, which strangely causes Pinocchio to giggle rather than to scream in pain, as might have also been the case (such is the beauty of fiction, and even more so of folk and fairy tales, or magic realism). Second, as mentioned previously, the wood remains alive. In fact, Pinocchio is sometimes depicted with not only a nose that continues to grow, like a twig from a branch, but to even sprout a single (and always only one) leaf. This myth continues even today, as a university professor from Texas once explained to me, in the form of very green 4x4s, unseasoned lumber, sprouting when sunk into the ground as fence posts. This professor, who had a delightful cowboy-like quality to him, believed this to be true, having heard about it as a child, but I have yet to confirm an instance of it through my admittedly casual internet searches.

Leather might have some of these qualities. Stone also, although stone presents certain challenges to human beings when it comes to forming person-like relations. Metal, on the other hand, has to go though too much of a transformation for it to retain any kind of 'personality'. I tap this post out now in a room whose interior I have constructed entirely out of pine siding, the knots and grain still plainly evident to me, indicating the tree that it once was, but at the same time not really evoking the tree itself, as is still the case with the benches I wrote about previously.

For a while there was a big boom in publishing the histories of common objects: the history of salt, for example. I don't know if there is one on the history of pine, which obviously is the material that is referenced by the name 'Pinocchio' (which may mean 'pine eye, or 'pine nut' or simply 'made of pine'), but it might be time for someone to write one, and that someone might be me.

Sin, Evil and Soul

'Sin' is such an old fashioned and religious word that it seems hardly to have any place in a contemporary discussion of human and environment relations, or anything really, in a modern, scientific and secular context.

But that is a real shame (another word that gets little respect). Part of the problem is the fact that the word 'sin' is understood as a bad action, specifically one that requires a punishment be meted out to the committer of the sin. In this context, the commission of a sin is likened to the breaking of a law, with similar consequences.

I want to argue for another meaning of the word, one that is closer to its theological origins. A sin, understood in religious terms, is an action that involves not so much an alliance with evil as a distancing from goodness. The English language still preserves this meaning in the construction: 'It would be a sin to . . . '. 'It would be a sin to squander the opportunity'. 'It would be a sin to throw away that shirt'. 'It would be a sin not to see her'. Here the emphasis is not on causing someone or something harm, but on failing to engage and appreciate the goodness that someone or something offers.

This thought came to mind as I, hypocrite that I am, was tearing out one group of plants to replace them with another. To be honest, I must say that I held out as long as possible before I decimated the vegetal denizens of my front yard. Once the foxtails had gone to seed and shriveled to the dry beige color that indicated that all life had left their domain, I felt it was perfectly okay, even respectful and expected, to scrape them out of the hard clay soil (the months of rain we got this year has evaporated from the soil with just a few hot days, at least in the first few inches or so). Still, there were a few hardy plants who - who! - with their long tap roots were able to take advantage of the moisture that lay deep beneath the surface crust.

I loved seeing them each day, maybe a half a dozen scattered here and there across the terraced landscape. Typically they were closed early in the morning, which is sensible, there being little light to exploit for photosynthesis. When they did open, their bright yellow flowers displayed the plants' vigor in vivid detail. Then, strangely, while it was still bright out, I noticed that they were all closed up again. Why were they not still open in the sunlight? Was it a moisture saving strategy? My aesthetic appreciation moved to scientific curiosity. But I did nothing about it.

Still I waited, until one day I decided to tear out the lot and replant it with something new. And here is where I started to think about sin. How absurd, I thought, as I walked around the nursery, to be buying new plants to replace the old plants that I am tearing out. No, not absurd, this is not a question of intellectual rationality. How sinful it is to be doing this, to throw out the plants I have for some new plants that I see here before me. The fact that I have to buy them is irrelevant, albeit an aggravant to the main problem. (I realize I just made up the word 'aggravant', at least as a noun and in the context of English, but where else do we get new words except by having people invent them and use them liberally in their writings?)

I will give myself a pass on the foxtails. They had lived their lives and had no more to give except as biotic matter to the soil. But as I mentioned in a recent post, how wonderful soil is, and how wonderful it is to contemplate and appreciate its beauty in and of itself, rather than to consider it only as a supporting base to plant life. In any case, it too is alive, and it too has a soul. In fact, I cannot think of anything more soulful than soil.

I'll stop here and continue my thoughts in the next post.

EXCERPT: Davos (7)

Marcello Mastroianni in the woods. That is what was needed: the handsome romantic, who nevertheless chooses to play the fool, because he is so much better at it, because that is what is inside him. This is what the woods needed and this is what Davos needed. But this was not Franco. Or it was, a bit, the jokey woodsman, the glancing forester. With his thirst slaked, hunger fell upon him. The cheese in the sandwich that he fished out of his backpack repulsed him, reminding him of the herd of steer being led down a mountain path, unsure of why they were in the mountains to begin with, strangely out of place, it seemed, just as the lactating cows on the beach seemed not to belong, but why? Cows to pasture, cougars to the hills? Is that the way it was or was supposed to be? Mountain lions sneak into the cities looking for water now. Where were the cows supposed to be? Flatlanders always? What about horses, always the plains?

Etymological Fun

Thinking from my last post, I remembered that the noun 'plant' comes from the Latin verb plantare, so a plant is a thing that is planted. And what was that thing, a planta (a sprout, a seedling), before it was a plant? It was part of the vegetatio 'power of growth' from vegere 'to be active'. As, I believe and if I remember correctly, the prolific scholar, Michael Marder, and others, have pointed out the irony of the English verb 'to vegetate' meaning the exact opposite of its Latin source. It has preserved the distinction between vegetation and plants, however, the first being wild plants growing in abundance and considered as a group, and the second being single entities that have been pulled into human agricultural or horticultural systems. A similar relation seems to exist with regard to animals: a 'pet' is an animal that is petted, although the etymology of 'to pet' is less clear.

These engagements with nonhumans are similar in that they deliver a sense of tranquility via a form of connectedness that seems to be unavailable through interactions with human beings, fraught as they so often are by social and political concerns. They are also humbling in that so often the nonhuman entities get the better of you, by either their superior benevolence or resilience, or both. As I said in my previous post, I find tilling the earth (with hand implements) to be uniquely engaging and exhausting, and expiating. The feelings of guilt I have for killing this or that plant dissolve pretty quickly when I see that another has popped up in its place just a short time later, with the interval depending upon the plant, time of year, and other circumstances. True also of cobwebs, which seem to appear over night, and with astounding complexity.

A failing that came to light while I was hoeing, and there is still more to do, was my neglect of soil in my contemplation of plants. I remember a lecture by one of my geography professors on soil that left me absolutely fascinated, and to this day I really cannot say why. One of my earliest and happiest childhood memories has me digging in the side of a hillock that was next to our house, working with a screwdriver in a section of rock and dirt and then having the metal shaft of the screwdriver snap unexpectedly in my hands. There was something so satisfying and fascinating about interacting with the earth this way. The downward and inward orientation of it fits the baroque model of thinking that I find so engaging today, more so than the upward facing romantic perspective. Why is the imaginary of the Inferno so much more detailed than that of the Paradiso?

Arthur Clarke suggested that Earth should be renamed Ocean simply because the planet's composition leans more heavily toward the latter, but this observation ignores the human orientation toward earth, and its relative alienation from ocean, as a habitat. It makes us biased and negligent observers of home, for how often do we think of algae and other aquatic species when contemplating the vegetal world? Algae, from 'alga' for seaweed, is the ultimate vegetation and, for the most part, utterly un-plantable, although attempts to harness its prodigiousness are developing.

Zappa la terra!

Summer gardening in the Bay Area means two things: clay soil and foxtails. The foxtails are all dried out, so it seems like an ideal time, at least from their point of view, for me to come by and spread their seed by getting in amongst them and thrashing about in the summer heat (the resilience of plants to extremes in temperature has always impressed me).

Of course, my intention is not to spread the seeds of the foxtail plants, but to prepare the earth for the planting of some nice silvery green ground cover (and to think I am so critical of others doing the same!),

While I was on my front patch with rake, hoe, fork and pick, it struck me that nothing seems more human to me than tilling the earth. Yes, I can look at Otzi and relate; it would be quite exciting to have been a roaming Neolithic hunter/gatherer/herder/farmer. But nothing says human to me more than the steady labor of the settled agriculturalist, which in my case takes the form of minor puttering in the front yard.

Still, the puttering is quite hard. Clay soil is difficult to work, being very dense and hard and containing little organic matter that would keep it looser. The stationary stoop with implement grasped in both hands feels iconic to me; proto homo, or at least proto homo habilis, or proto homo agriculturalist. Otzi with bow and quiver seems a bit distant, but put a hoe in his hand and he becomes much more familiar, much closer to our time, even a contemporary.

Is industrial culture to blame?

I wonder if the appeal of artisanal activities within industrial economies lies partly in the human tendency to see spirits in objects. I don't think I would be as likely to see an industrially made table or bench as a person as I do in the case of my homemade benches and table. Their irregularities, and the intimacy with them that I developed while making them, accommodating myself to and appreciating their imperfections, caused me to form a bond with them. The surfaces of factory made goods are too slippery to allow such a ready purchase. I do think, however, that over time, one can develop this kind of attachment to an industrial product, it just takes more time for the bond to form. I recently put a dent in the fender of my previously dentless car; it is mine now in a way that it wasn't previously.

Given the easy way I ascribe personhood to nonhuman objects, I wonder if humans are not like baby ducks, ready to imprint onto whatever they see first. Maybe the desire to ascribe personhood to inanimate things (I use nonhuman and inanimate here indiscriminately to cast a wide and varying net) expresses itself to neurotic degrees in some people as a way to counteract the depersonalizing effects of industrial culture, a kind of allergic reaction to the alienating character of a society in which bonds of this kind have been stripped away, or are highly stressed by the demands of daily living in an economy and culture that does not privilege them. Or maybe it is merely adaptive, meaning that human beings have always included the nonhuman and inanimate into their social lives, and to do so is vital to human life. I can think of no better approach to one's environment than to relate to it intimately, and with mutuality and compassion, both for the welfare of the nonhuman and inanimate as well as for the sake of other humans. Adopting an animist or neo-animist approach to human-environmental relations could be the best prescription for healthy living in the future, first and foremost with respect to adapting to or mitigating the effects of climate change.

A Compositional Approach to Personhood?

I suppose where I am now is to think about personhood in compositional terms. By this I mean that personhood derives from an accretion of form, and maybe also complexity and function, to the point that is acquires an 'anima'. Anything can have an anima, or spirit, which I use in an Aristotelian rather than Christian sense, although the two versions of the concept are obviously similar and related. A stone can have an anima, and while the process that made it probably occurred long ago and at a great distance (deep underground, beneath the sea, in a river bed, on a mountain top, on a windswept plain . . . ), it must be perceived at least intuitively, if not seen directly and understood explicitly. But I think maybe an understanding of the composition of a thing is not necessary for an observer to imbue it with a spirit and thereby confer personhood upon it. Only an appreciation for its composition, and not necessarily the process by which a thing was composed, so therefore an appreciation for its form, is needed. And I am not sure that even discretion, in material terms, perhaps delineation is a better word, is required. After all, what is a sky god if not a person? And what could be less bounded than the sky? Or a god? Or, walking it back, a person?

How easy and obvious is the leap from here to the idea of the personhood of plants, then, with their opening and closing flowers, their creeping roots, and other manifestations of spirit, and agenda?

Inanimate Personhood

I recently made a table and two benches out of wood from some old planter boxes that I tore down. For the most part, the tops are made from fir 2x12s and the legs from either redwood 2x4s (in the case of the benches) or 4x4s (in the case of the table). It has given me a case study in the development of inanimate personhood, as over the few days that it took me to dismantle the boxes and clean, sand, cut and assemble the pieces, not to mention the physically idle time spent designing them in my head, I came to regard each one as a person. Not as a human being, of course, nor as an animal, nor as a plant, although of course the last would be the most likely candidate for ascription.

As I moved through the process, making the benches first and then the table, I made some changes so that the benches were not really long enough for the table, unless I were to disassemble them and cut them down so that they could be used on the shorter ends of the table rather than on its longer sides.

Of course, that is now unthinkable. It would cause me real pain to unscrew the legs and cut the bench top to the proper size. I would be killing the old benches and by now they are really a part of the family.

Did I feel a similar twinge of reluctance when dismantling the planter boxes? No, not really, and I am not sure why. Maybe it is a matter of dimension, although I think by now my house is a person to me. Neither could it be the fact that the boxes were made of mixed material, the wood but also of course the soil, not to mention the plants that were growing in them. Maybe it is the fact that they never formed a consolidated whole, being somehow too distended in their dimensions as well as being too integrated into surrounding structures, a fence on one side and a cottage on the other.

Maybe it is just because benches and tables have legs, and being made a misura d'uomo, their candidature to personhood, via the human model, is all but predestined.

There is something about the designing and building process, however, especially the final sanding, that resembles gestation and birth. Think of Geppetto and Pinocchio. I think it is only after the eyes are carved that the little puppet came to life. There is definitely a magical coming together that happens in that final stage, as minor as it is in the overall labor of a project. Countless times I can think of remodeling work that all of a sudden acquires its desired state of beauty only when the last finishing touches are done, when all marks in a wall have been painted over and the final piece of trim is put in place, even if in material terms those little events are barely consequential, hardly substantive.

Drawing on a piece I wrote recently on plant personhood, I introduce here the topic of ships. Ships, as well as other large scale craft, but especially and originally sea-going vessels, are christened when they are completed, including a ritual whereby they are released from the dock onto the water, this particular aspect of the ritual clearly drawing on Christian tradition. At this time, they are given their names as a bottle of champagne (at least in one version of the act) is broken over their bow, clearly a take on the anointing of the forehead of a newborn, only in an inanimate register. The significance of this ritual is not merely symbolic; maritime law of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries records serious court cases over the liability that christened vessels carry while on the water; that is, it is not the actions of the owner, the captain or the crew that were being tried in court, but those of the ship itself.

Although made of wood, these benches and table are no longer trees, although their ontological origins are made clear by their material appearance, their woody nature evident in the deep rings that the thick slabs reveal. I wonder why that is. Why do I not see a plant when I look at those benches and that table. Why do I not necessarily see even wood. But a bench. And a table? I will have to take this up in a future post.

In Response to Pete Wells' Review in the New York Times

Here's my quibble with restaurant reviews, as a genre, so no offense to Mr Wells, who I think is a sparkling writer who has found his metier. In cultures where the local food ways have become more or less set, all of the chatter about them has stopped. Mealtimes are spent discussing other things besides what is on the plate in front of you. In this way, food takes its unique place at the table, uniting everyone through channels other than speaking and hearing, and never through writing. Of course, dining in restaurants is also alien to the people and places I have in mind; if one goes to one, it is often done so begrudgingly, so perhaps it is the restaurant, and not the restaurant review, that is my true target. My point, however, that people who appreciate food do not really talk about it all that much, especially while eating it, stands.

In support of my rather questionable claim that to speak about plants is to speak about anything and vice versa, I here submit my most recent comment on a piece in the New York Times, a restaurant review by Pete Wells, who always a delight to read.

What makes me think that I can use it to talk about plants is that it resonates so well with an earlier post I made on fetishization through language. In my comment above, I complain that something as essential to life as a meal is made precious by too much talk about it. This kind of excessive chatter, a tavola, as an Italian might say, can be annoying at best and offensive at its worst. Need I say that it is often a plant that is on the plate?

So, of course, my simple admiration of a flower (might I one day drop even that simple nomen?) is degraded, not enhanced, by applying the elaborate popular and scientific naming conventions and systems. So, I avoid it.

Following the model of Michel Serres, I will stop here, and let others work out the connections as they see fit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/dining/king-restaurant-review-soho.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&moduleDetail=inside-nyt-region-2&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region

How nice not to know

I have always felt like somewhat of a hypocrite for not knowing the names of plants. I have reconciled this lapse with my interest in plants, however, by understanding that my reluctance to learn plant names lies in my reluctance to enroll them in human culture. How nice it is, for example, to see the straggly yellow flowers that bloom at the base of the post of my right railing. Equally nice they are in their closed state on dark and gloomy mornings.

American Indians, of course, lived this to the full. They knew Bear, not a bear. Muskrat, not a muskrat. Just as I know a bunch of yellow flowers rather than whatever their name is, common or scientific or, Yellow Flowers, I suppose.

Enrollment. It is the death of the . . . not person, because that depends on some kind of social context that, arguably, is a form of enrollment . . . id, maybe, being? Beingness?

In any case, enrollment demands a level of tractability that works against the simplest expression of the being, and the beauty of the plant, in my opinion, lies in this free and spontaneous expression. True, my simple gaze produces a kind of enrollment, and for this I am sorrowful (how sensible then the protective veil), but I suppose my saving feature, my gift, my expiation, my atonement . . . is my ignorance, my refusal and inability to name the plant that lives before me.

I suppose this perspective lies at the root of the dismay conveyed in some of my earlier posts. Why this plant rather than that one? Why put this plant here and not there? Why not just like the plants and the earth to which they belong as they are, as they seek to arrange themselves?

Plants Who Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (?)

Inspired by Rupert Sheldrake's study of the phenomenon of dogs being able to tell, well in advance, when their owners will be arriving home, independent of any cues such as familiar scents or sounds (footsteps, engine noises), I am trying to devise an experiment that is identical in every way but with plants substituting for dogs. If I remember correctly, even cats and birds exhibit similar abilities and behaviors but perhaps not with the same reliability of dogs given their different natures, with the stereotype of cats being comparatively indifferent to human behavior holding true also in this case as one might expect, and birds of course inhabiting that strange avian world that has never quite been contained by the human one, at least not to the extent for which that of dogs, and to a lesser extent, of cats, have been.

Of course, dogs are ideal for such a study not only because they are so loyal and attentive, but because they are so demonstrative. Sheldrake conducted his study by observing when dogs ran to the window and waited, a clear sign that they knew that their owner (an awful idea by the way, maybe custodian or even parent is better) was on his or her way. How to observe this in plants presents a bit of a puzzle.

I will have to reread Mancuso and Viola, as well as Gagliano, to see if I can pick up ideas on how to monitor plants for changes in behavior. I am somewhat skeptical that I will achieve any positive results since Sheldrake has stated that so far the quality that is noticeable in mammals and birds has not been seen in reptiles. Since I place beings on a continuum of of interactive awareness, ranging from humans and other primates to dolphins to dogs to parrots to lizards to hydrangeas, I am not so confident that I will be able to skip a register by observing something in plants that not even reptiles exhibit. But who knows, I could be wrong, and this is what experiments are for. I suppose I am most interested in figuring out how to monitor social reactivity in plants. If anything good comes out of such a study, it surely will be this first and foremost. I think that whatever Gagliano did to detect the use of sound by plants is what I need, or is at least a place to start.

You can learn more about Sheldrake's dog study here.