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.