About ten days ago I decided, on a whim, to plant my very first vegetable and herb garden in my yard. I am not at all sure what motivated me to do this. The desire seemed to erupt out of nowhere. Perhaps it had to do with all the biology I’ve been reading lately. As a result of Toscano’s fascinating analysis of developmental systems theory or interactive constructivism in the magnificent Theatre of Production, I recently reread Susan Oyama’s Ontogeny of Information and have been working my way through the outstanding articles collected in Cycles of Contingency. More generally I’ve found myself filled with an overwhelming hunger for scientific knowledge, such that I find myself inhabited by a deep aversion to anything that vaguely smacks of cultural studies (with the exception of ethnography), and am unable to get enough in the way of nature shows, books on physics and astronomy, texts in biology, etc. I suppose, with all this material about ontogeny and interactive constructivism, I wanted to see the process of ontongeny or development in action, how plants construct themselves, but also how my body might be constructed differently as a result of this inhuman encounter, how I might become other, like Tournier’s Robinson, as a result of this encounter with the soil. But maybe, above all, I wanted to do something other than think– at least philosophically –but to surrender myself to soil and grass and plants, completely absorbing myself in what I was doing. In this connection I often find myself wondering whether our bodies, our organisms, do not need a minimal degree of tension, otherness, materiality, in order to find happiness. Through placing my hands in the soil, through mixing myself in this alien stuff, I hoped to find this otherness that might relieve me of some of the malaise that accompanies a lethargic, overly intellectual, passive, consummerist lifestyle.
So the idea was conceived on day and the next day I found myself gardening. I’ve never gardened before so I had no idea just how big this project was. I plotted an area of my lawn that was roughly fifteen by eleven feet or 165 square feet. This struck me as a small area, but for a body such as my own, unaccustomed to manual labor, removing the grass and turning over the soil armed with nothing more than a mattock and a spade, this turned out to be a grueling, monumental undertaking. In two days, overeager and overambitious as I always am once I start something, I pulled up the grass in this area, turned the soil over, hauled in five hundred assorted pounds of topsoil, manure, and special planting sand, and planted a variety of different herbs and vegetables. I planted sage, rosemary, Italian oregano, English thyme, basil, chives, lavender, green onion, six different varieties of sweet and hot peppers, cucumber, variety romaine, and spinach (these decisions were dictated by the North Texas climate). The herbs were all pre-planted and were simply a matter of digging a hole and dropping them into the ground. Yet the romaine, cucumbers, spinach, and many of the peppers were planted directly by seed simply thrown into the ground. After these grueling two days, two days where I seemed unable to stop working once I started in the morning, where my mind was entirely clear and empty as I lacked consciousness and had simply become a digging mechanism, my body ached intensely for the following week, shaking at first, bringing wishes that I could somehow detach my groaning arms and legs from my torso for relief. I suspect this overexertion is part of the reason I fell ill last week.
Nonetheless, much to my delight this afternoon I saw, with jaw dropping wonder (why should I have been so surprised), the leaves of spinach, romaine, and cucumbers tentatively beginning to poke up from the earth as if by magic. How is such a thing possible? Why does it fill me with so much surprise? Why do I feel the bizarre desire to now sit beside the garden and watch as these tender young plants grow? As if I could actually see their cells “popping”– pop, pop, pop –as they divide and organize themselves, undergoing their miraculous adventure of emergence and self-organization. The garden does not look like much yet, I know. In weeks to come I hope to surround it with flat, irregularly shaped rocks. I fear that I will never get all of the hardy Texas grass out of it. Nonetheless, this is a strange and simple form of satisfaction. How delightful to deal with something real, with something that isn’t a theory, signifier, or a concept. How wonderful to escape into the dirt and muck and watch life come into being.
Larval Subjects . 
March 31, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Sounds great! Good luck keeping it clear of the grass and weeds. My wife and I have also recently planted a garden, and I am constantly out in it pulling weeds (especially clover)as we attempt to make it as organic as possible. Have fun and as the old saying goes, enjoy the fruits of your labor.
March 31, 2009 at 11:53 pm
I learned to love gardening beside my grandfather.. who had grown up on a farm. Still one of the most deeply satisfying expenditures of time and energy I know. I wish you such pleasure in your venture that you will follow this the rest of your days.
For me, even more than the satisfaction of harvest (tomatoes picked from the vine, warm from the sun–a burst of flavors, so sweet, so full of ambient and transient associations–like a good wine, you squeeze your eyes shut with the pure bodily joy of it… but even more than that, it’s the daily, or twice daily, or thrice daily walks from the days of the first planting… watching the progress, watching over it, nurturing, tending… that pleasure is such that toward the end of the season when you gather baskets of tomatoes and zuchinni, the daily harvest of beans… almost a letdown. The growing is past. Again…it aint the pay that pays… its the doing and dreaming and anticipating and cultivating and loving the sight of your labor spring out of the earth.
A garden is the greatest metaphor I know for what we are at our best together… gardeners… not farmers, gardeners, making a world over as our common garden.
April 1, 2009 at 12:00 am
… no garden is complete without compost. Never again with your vegie scraps and skins and eggshells and coffee grounds and rinds and husks (everything but starches and meat… which would attract rats)… never again will that go to waste. Summer and winter… there is always the compost bin to keep you rooted in your garden. What a miracle… garbage at the top… wonderful rich black loam at the bottom. Re-read Whitman’s poem–Compost!
April 1, 2009 at 1:00 am
Oh great Jacob, go and get me all excited about the prospect of composting… One more thing! Seriously though, here at Larval Subjects I’ve continuously drawn metaphors from meteorology, chemistry, and cooking as ways of thinking the nature of being as these processes strike me as much more adequate to thinking the nature of being and individuation that concepts of structure and system by virtue of their aleatory nature and the way in which substances coalesce as mixtures in these processes, generative of new qualities and forms of being that differ in kind from their elements. Composting would be an excellent example of such a line of thought. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read any Whitman, at least not since High School. Looks like I’ll have to dive into him.
April 1, 2009 at 1:49 am
In two days, overeager and overambitious as I always am once I start something,
what an obsessive cat you really are
April 1, 2009 at 2:08 am
i’m surprised the plants, being as they are Objects, didn’t yet turn your garden into the Day of the Triffids, though.
April 1, 2009 at 4:55 am
Not to poke fun or undermine your hard work, but maybe you should enjoy it simply as hard work? I couldn’t help but think of Levin in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina when I read about your ‘conscious emptying’ experiences. Of course Levin is a noble whose fetishization of the peasant is one of his outstanding traits in the book. Tilling in the field with them, he is struck with sublime profundity at the ease with which they work the soil, their sunburnt backs, as he struggles to maintain pace. He is exhausted, but feels like giving himself a sort of socio-economic pat on the back.
It might be useful for me to echo something I’m sure you’re aware of – although sorry to sound sardonic or overemphasize the ‘cynical’ Marxist theories of our ‘overdetermination’ by capital or the tone of ‘melancholy’ of the Frankfurts – but the background against which your encounter with the ‘otherness’ of soil is rendered ‘possible’ is that of capitalism, the commodification of labour, the history of primitive accumulation and the breaking up of agricultural life to generate that reserve labour pool. Not to mention the conditions under which that soil was originally bagged, the tools built, and the rent relation your garden is objectively imbricated with?
Not to be a sour sport, but at the heart of this I think is my concern that there is some ideology of ecology reflected here? That we need to take a break from our hard routines and get ‘back in touch’ with nature? Of course, like in your last post, you decry biological essentialism, but what about on a more general scale, ‘nature’ in general? Somewhere in your post, I lose the sense that nature is something that doesn’t exist, that nature today is the result of contingency and sometimes cataclysm (as well as happy symbiosis).
Perhaps I’m being biased here in that I prefer to emphasize that radical self-relating negativity, the ontological parallax, to bergson’s notion of homo faber as the ‘differentia specifica’ of human.
April 1, 2009 at 5:42 am
Hi Rob,
I think your criticisms here are fair enough and I’m certainly guilty of many of them, though I don’t think this post was geared towards making any radical anti-capitalist claim or any claim about ecology. Rather, I was trying to gropingly articulate those moments when I find myself happiest or most content. In this respect, I generally find myself most content when I’m most engaged in something other than reflection. Indeed, I often wonder whether reflection isn’t a sort of sickness. After all, when does reflection, phenomenologically, primarily occur? It occurs, if Heidegger– and even Nietzsche –is to be believed at those moments when things break down or cease to work. We, for example, become aware that we are driving when another car starts to swerve into us or when weather conditions change. By contrast, there’s a sense in which our self-reflexivity, our awareness, disappears when we’re deeply engaged. It doesn’t matter whether this awareness is something like gardening, writing, intensely reading a novel. The world disappears and we become, as it were, the object with which we’re engaged. In these moments we no longer experience the sickly relation of self-reflexivity where there is a gap between our being, our doing, and the meaning of what we’re doing. The action generates its own telos without remainder. This sort of intense involvement without gap can certain function as an ideological hook for neo-liberal capitalism, but I wonder if that isn’t beside the point. The issue here, in this post, isn’t one of valorizing some romanticized version of nature, nor of idealizing those who have to work in this way to live at all– it’s grueling work –but simply about how there’s something in such hands on engagement that provides a fulfillment that seems absent in the self-reflexive activity where we’re perpetually striving to mirror what we’re doing. I could have just as easily written such a post on teaching, having nothing to do with nature at all. In a nod to accusations of biological determinism, I will forthrightly admit that I wonder if there isn’t something about the self-relfexive intellectual work that people such as myself engage in that doesn’t generate a sort of depressive stance. There’s a great wisdom in Spinoza’s grinding of lenses as a counter-balance to the apollinean beauty of his philosophizing. Likewise, there is a great wisdom in Freud or Lacan’s critical balance over against their metapsychology theorizing. I sometimes wonder whether philosophy or theory should have been professionalized at all or whether it isn’t at its best as a parasitic formation attached to a specific practice whether that practice be technological, political, scientific or otherwise. Then again, my philosophical heroes tend to be outside the academy.
April 1, 2009 at 7:12 am
Great response dude.
I almost agree with everything here 100%. There is a sort of depressive position generated by critical intellectual work and I suppose I’m having issues with that myself. I am a musician, and although I have been playing for a while without much formal training, I am quite adept at what I do. More importantly, I play sort of ‘avant-guard’ punk/noise music, which sort of rejects the premise of any ‘classical skill’ in favor of a more primal, stripped down, in principle accessible to anyone that can make a strumming motion but sonically and commercially inaccessible. In order to write this kind of music, the last thing I need to do is think. Rather I must ‘feel’ what I am doing. That gap is closed in a sense and I am ‘becoming instrument’ or whatever.
But, is this phenomenology even correct? The moments in which we are most happy, in our respective examples, do they really constitute a ‘telos without remainder?’ And on top of that, what about social happiness? Do you find it possible to enjoy conversations that are strictly non-philosophical, non-speculative, non-critical, with particular individuals with whom you precisely cannot fall back on with more ‘critical’ conversation once the banalities of small talk are exhausted? In other words, is it possible for you to have a pleasurable conversation with a ‘layman?’And if you answer Yes to some degree, then what does this entail outside of a mere discussion about ‘boring things about yourself?’ Because I don’t find it boring at all, I’m just wondering how these everyday insights in a general sense (for all of us reading) can be folded back into philosophical, theoretical and political concerns or vice versa. Isn’t ideology the spontaneity of our expressions of ‘happiness’, no matter how much we justify, with at least a modicum of our theoretical tools, the immediacy of this thoughtless joy? How can we live what we think, without having this disjunct between thinking and doing? Perhaps Marx is relevant here? Or perhaps even more Zizek’s reversal of Marx’s final thesis on Feuerbach?
So anyways, what I suppose what I was aiming at wasn’t whether or not you intended to do such things, but whether or not you did it anyway, in the sort of sense that we can ‘historicize’ (or rather concretize in the Hegelian sense) your statements in a way that wouldn’t be possible on the same level as your more critico-theoretical posts, like symptomatically reading a memoir or ‘everyday’ speech or political treatise, poetry, any writing not purposefully ‘dialectical’ etc.?
April 1, 2009 at 7:17 am
Sorry, real quick, I just want to make it clear that I know this isn’t an explicitly theoretical post or essay, I know it’s just some personal reflection, and I’m most certainly not trying to ‘attack’ you or reveal your first world biases, etc. and make you feel guilty. I’m making more general questions about the narrativizing of our ‘everyday’ experiences of happiness, both in the sense of being under the hegemony of late capitalism, as well as in more ‘ontological’ and psychoanalytic terms.
April 1, 2009 at 7:12 pm
I forget where I read about it online, but Martin Freud’s memoir _Sigmund Freud: Man and Father_, describes how he used to take his clan on mushroom-hunting expeditions.. Ah, yes, in MAPS (journal of the Multidiscipline Association of Psychedelic Studies ;)
April 1, 2009 at 9:44 pm
The world disappears and we become, as it were, the object with which we’re engaged.
Dr Sinthome, I don’t know what the Egyptian temptress’s done to you, but I sure do hope you won’t end up turning into a cauliflower. Becoming ”one with the object” can only be a metaphor – of human language – as any artist will testify that even in the throes of sublime passion, driven by incomprehensible forces, it is still the artist who makes the drawing and not his pencil, and even if the object has a life all its own, it has to go through the artist as a vessel in order to become art.
April 1, 2009 at 11:45 pm
This Compost
http://www.bartleby.com/142/159.html
April 21, 2010 at 6:44 pm
[…] narrative concerns depression and a cure (not a talking cure) as well as, it seems, gardening. In “Gardening”, LS mixes soil, happiness (the author’s, at watching spinach, romaine, and cucumbers […]