Plants, Entropy, Art, and Arthritis
Or: Growing, Dying, Living, Aging
Hello friends,
I am reading too many books right now. I am told there is no such thing, and in truth, there probably isn’t. But the reason it feels like too many is because even though these books are about very different things, and belong in different genre categories, they are beginning to speak to each other, spookily. Tis the season I guess.
The books I am reading1, in the order of importance to this current newsletter, are:
Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (which I’m reviewing)
Gentrifier by Anne Elizabeth Moore (I was still reading it when I started writing this newsletter but I finished it a few days ago)
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (which I also finished since beginning to write this newsletter)
Neuromancer by William Gibson (listening to it with my partner, who has never read it)
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (which I’m listening to partially for background research and partially just for my own edification)
The Complete Peanuts: Vol. 3 by Charles Schulz (a comic I have been obsessed with for years and want to write reams about)
Winnie the Pooh and House at Pooh Corner (which I listen to on rotation, the version read by Alan Bennett, when I can’t fall asleep but I’m trying to)
I am thinking about the first two books in particular right now, and their relationship to one another, which is purely accidental, for their styles, topics, and tones are extremely different, even if they are books of nonfiction by prolific writers who happen to be women.
When I finished Gentrifier, I wept. Predictable. I weep at the endings of most good books these days. Something about catharsis, most likely, that climactic moment of resolution working its way through me. I am only about halfway through Orwell’s Roses, but have already teared up several times. My tears, however, have very little to do with what I’m trying to write about. I mention them only because I am compelled, when intellectualizing, to make it clear that thinking is a very emotional process. I am always trying to push against the mind/body, intellect/emotion split.
Solnit's book, as its title suggests, is at least in part about George Orwell, that famously political author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, among others. Specifically, Solnit is interested in a side of him that is less well known: Orwell the gardener, tender of the earth.
I like that the word “tender” can mean, as an adjective, showing gentleness and concern or sympathy but also, as a noun, one who cares for or looks after.
Orwell kept a tiny country cottage where he raised goats and chickens and grew all manner of edible plants. He also had rosebushes. Roses, Solnit points out, are not a food staple for humans anywhere (although their petals and fruit have been used in cuisine as well as in perfumery) and yet they've also been bred and into thousands of variations. Humans have developed a relationship with roses, one that is aesthetic and emotional rather than one steeped in the survival of our species. Although, I suppose that’s arguable; isn’t one of the things that human beings pride ourselves on is our immense need for aesthetic pleasure, for beauty, and for the emotions they call up in us? (Solnit agrees with this latter point only a couple chapters later.)
Moore's book is a memoir about the author's time in Detroit, where she was “given” a house from what I can only assume is Write-A-House (she does not name it as such but any writer who was online and paying attention in the mid-teens has probably heard of the extremely Room of One's Own program, although they may not have heard that it was already "winding down" as of 2019). She spent many hours working on a garden in the backyard of this house which was only sort of given to her—the ins and outs of that particular complexity, whether the house was or was not hers and what that means, is the main subject of the book, and she tells the story better than I could do it justice here, so I won’t try. You should read the book, though.
Anyway, for my purposes here, the house isn’t the point. It’s the garden. More precisely, it’s the gardening.
Both authors write about gardening and its labor with a kind of love that I recognize. I recognize it not because it is something I have experienced, but precisely because it is something I have not. It is possible, I have found, to recognize an experience in others that one has only ever witnessed in others. It’s like recognizing crow calls: I don’t need to be a crow to recognize the sound of one cawing.
Solnit writes that pursuits like gardening
can bring you back to earth from the ether and the abstractions. They could be imagined as the opposite of writing. Writing is a murky business: you are never entirely sure what you are doing or when it will be finished and whether you got it right and how it will be received months or years or decades after you finish. [...] A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It's vivid to all the senses, it's a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect. [...] To spend time frequently with these direct experiences is clarifying, a way of stepping out of the whirlpools of words and the confusion they can whip up. In an age of lies and illusions, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology, and biology, and the realms of the senses. (Solnit, 43-44)
One of my friends in Nebraska, Jess Poli, is a poet who is also a farmer, by which I mean she has worked on farms and will likely continue to work on farms for as long as she is able to. Her poetry is rich in the imagery of growing things and, also, of dying things. Because to farm or garden is not only to give life but also to kill, to choose what plants must die so that others may thrive, or which animals cannot be saved, or should be euthanized due to illness, or will be slaughtered for food.
As someone who anthropomorphizes objects with googly eyes stuck on them, who is terrified of watching The Brave Little Toaster because it might be too heartbreaking, I am in awe of farmers’ and gardeners’ ability to make such life and death choices.
The same day I read Solnit’s words above, or possibly the following day, I read in Moore's book about the work it took to clear away the mulberry bushes in her backyard. Even though it takes her a full year to get rid of the stumps of these bushes—which grow back alarmingly fast—Moore writes that
"performing the work feels enjoyable, meditative. As I do it I think at first that I might compose an essay on digging out stumps and ponder the language I could use to describe my methods, but it soon becomes clear that most of the metaphors available to describe similarly frustrating endeavors are literal descriptions of removing stumps—digging deep, growing like a weed, pulling something out by the root, feeling stumped.
Because the practice I am engaged in daily is so widely understood to be filled with frustration that descriptions of it act as metaphors for other, less taxing undertakings, I do not write about it. I even stop talking about it. (Moore, 69)
Solnit again:
The kind of metaphoric, evocative, image-rich speech that Nineteen Eight-Four's Newspeak is trying to root out is grounded in the natural, rural, and agrarian world: the language of plowing ahead, having a hard row to hoe, reaping what you sow, making a beeline, going out on a limb, not seeing the forest for the trees, rooting out itself, and all the rest; Orwell in going rural was, among other things, returning to the source of metaphor, aphorism, and simile. (Solnit, 45)
It is not so surprising, really, that two writers, both women, both essayists (among other forms), think and write about language and gardening and writing. It becomes meaningful only because I am reading these books at roughly the same time and taking note of this moment of similarity and connection.
It is meaningful, also, because the authors describe beautifully, sincerely, activities that have taken on, in the age of social media, a kind of superficial aesthetic that has nothing to do with the dirty, sweaty reality of earthly earthy pursuits; some might call it cottegecore. Only a few days after I start writing this newsletter, a publication I like, Dirt, publishes this essay by Alex Marraccini in which she writes about the aesthetic, which
promises not just a countryside look, but also an Arcadia; one in which all labour is fulfilling and ultimately self-sustaining, where the soul is nurtured by nature rather than tormented by urbanity, and where the side-hustle is replaced by a slower timescale governed by a shepherd’s calendar.
This aesthetic mainly lives on social media, or is performed for social media. For Instagram, for TikTok. Healthy slim mostly white people showing off their bounty and baking bread and cultivating a seemingly independent-from-the-mundanities-of-late-stage-capitalism life, except that, of course, they are documenting it on social media, spaces deeply rooted in capitalist structures.
That both Solnit’s Orwell and Moore legitimately find the work fulfilling doesn’t matter. That my friend the poet finds her work fulfilling doesn’t matter. Even the aesthetic’s practitioners may often be entirely sincere. I know this. And still—my brain, cynical online creature that it is, has already been imbued with a deep suspicion that implied within the aesthetic, if not the reality, is that this way of life is better, purer, cleaner, and maybe worst of all, morally superior.
I want to be clear. Neither Solnit nor Moore imply that . My poet friend has never implied it. This is no longer about them. It is about the rot that lives rent free (as the kids say) in my brain.
People who know me know that I don’t eat anything. By which I mean, I eat a very small variety of things. Most of them are what we might call processed foods.
I realize I don’t actually know the definition of “processed foods”, but the Mayo Clinic clears things up for me:
According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), processed food is defined as any raw agricultural commodity that has been subject to washing, cleaning, milling, cutting, chopping, heating, pasteurizing, blanching, cooking, canning, freezing, drying, dehydrating, mixing, packaging or other procedures that alter the food from its natural state. […] So, by definition, most times we engage in food preparation and cook, we are in fact processing foods. (Emphasis added)
There are, in other words, more and less processed foods. Most of what I eat is probably what the Mayo Clinic calls “Foods with ingredients added for flavor and texture,” “Ready-to-eat foods,” and “The most heavily processed foods [which] often are frozen or pre-made meals.”
No, I do not have scurvy. Leave me alone.
There is very little I could grow in a garden that I could eat. Maybe potatoes, beans, wheat, oats, barley, rice. I’m 90% sure that you cannot grow all of those in the same garden, under the same conditions. I am also pretty sure it’s not possible to grow some of these things and turn them into the things edible to me without a variety of tools and extremely specified knowledge that takes time and skill to acquire.
Listing them out this way, I realize that these are all staple foods in various places in the world. In this way I am, apparently, a basic bitch.
When I think about all of the things that I don’t like about my life, the issues boil down to a few key problems that are very clearly my own: I feel a responsibility to accommodate every single person I have ever met, to be as giving as I can be, to be a kind of cupboard from which anyone can grab at any time something nourishing and good that they need. I try to be a pantry, full of rich and nurturing words and gestures and actions. I also try to be a Meals on Wheels of sorts, actively bringing words, gestures, and actions to those who need them.
I realize that an empty pantry cannot feed anyone. I am told this quite often, in one way or another. But I keep finding little cans of preserves way in the back, or stocking up for a couple days and emptying again. I am not sure how to change this, although I am trying.
I might never garden. I might never be a person who is good with plants. Why this makes me feel like a failure is, I think, mostly the fault of the aesthetic that’s been cultivated around such activities. Or, rather, my reaction to said aesthetic.
But even when I strip that away, I feel a loss. I, too, wish to experience the kind of pleasurable and fulfilling work that Moore and Solnit’s Orwell describe. I, too, want to be like my good friend, Jean Lee, an incredible reporter whose windowsill I’ve seen accumulate plants over the last month or two as she makes a home for herself in the apartment she moved into. Or like my friend the poet who farms. Or even like my mother, who has quite a few plants and whose relationship to them is very laissez-faire, but who seems to have an instinct that keeps most of them alive for many years.
Instead, I have three pots right now: one holds a small dead cutting that failed to grow; a second holds another cutting that is, I hope, putting down roots in its new pot but which has tiny little brown spots at the corners of its leaves that look like something’s been taking bites out of it, though I can’t imagine what; and the third is a snake plant that is doing well, I think, but is also the victim of that small voracious thing. (I’ve seen a teensy weensy spider on these plants twice now, and both times I removed it. Are there spiders that eat the edges of plant? Maybe I’m just overwatering.)
When I think about how I might never garden, I think about all the other things I might never do and my heart breaks. I wrote about my attempts to reframe this for Suleika Jaoud’s project, The Isolation Journals, in an email that by chance went out just yesterday. But that reframing is difficult, and needs to be intentional. I try. Most often, I spiral into panic and grief and a particular kind of self-judgment over the things I should be doing and am not.
But when I think about how I should garden, I am also resentful, because I fear that the desire comes more from the aesthetic and how I associate it with a kind of purity and holier-than-thouness than from any real, personal, internal desire to do so.
How to find the way out of this trap? This either/or-ness? This judgement? That appears to be the work of a lifetime.
In her book Dark Tourist (my review of which will be coming out in BOMB Magazine’s next issue), Hasanthika Sirisena sees storytelling as a form of anti-entropy. Even in the midst of my self-judgement I try to remind myself that my desire to grow things might arise not only out of my desire to appear (or to be) pure or moral or good—the aesthetic concerns—but also, perhaps, because I think of plants growing as a force of anti-entropy as well. At least, anti-entropy in comparison to humans: many plants are capable of living so much longer than us.
My osteoarthritis has been flaring up badly the last week or two. I am witnessing and living with my own entropy. My face may not yet be visibly lined. I haven’t yet found any gray hairs. I am only 31, after all. Many consider this to be quite young. But my body is reminding me of its age, the entropic forces at work, on a daily, painful basis.
Some people, like Moore (or the narrator that Moore puts on the page) and Solnit’s Orwell, who are and were chronically ill as well, deal, at least sometimes, with that sense of entropy by growing things.
I am still searching for my version of that. Sometimes I think that it’s my emotional pantry, that place from which I try to give—to family, friends, and lovers, to strangers whom I’ll never meet but to whose lives or causes I can contribute in one way or another, monetarily or with my actions or both. But this pantry is complicated, little resentment and exhaustion goblins invading at times due to my own continued sense of burnout which I am still trying to resolve.
Sometimes I think it’s being a caretaker to three cats.
And sometimes I think that, despite the murkiness Solnit points to, despite the difficulty and the anxieties that come with it, my writing is the only thing I have to grow. My art. Which makes the presence of arthritis in my hands especially devastating.
Because if one day I won’t be able to write… what then?
Maybe that’s when I’ll decide to finally grow a garden.
When I realize this, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. Maybe both. But I do neither. I just stare at the screen, a migraine pulsing behind my left eye reminding me that I cannot know the future, that all I can contend with is the here and now, pain included.
Thank you, as always, for being here, friends. If you made it through this whole thing, I salute and appreciate you. I could probably use an editor, but that’s not the kind of newsletter this is.
I hope you’re able to care for yourselves and your loved ones today. I hope you find your moments of anti-entropy.
Yours, &c.,
Ilana
I made a Bookshop store for all the books I mention in this SubStack, just in case anyone would like to keep track or find something quickly from there. In future, I might start linking the books in directly, again, just incase anyone is interested. I think I’d earn a teensy tiny commission if people bought from the shop? But I’m not sure and that’s not really the point—it’s more to keep things organized, as much for myself as for any interested readers.