From Word To Word

The Dinner and a Doc group met on Saturday night to watch The Real Dirt on Famer John, which is directed by Taggart Siegel.  We accompanied it with homemade mushroom soup, with a beautiful sourdough bread that I bought from a new vendor at the market, with apple cider from a farmer for whom I used to work, and with some desserts that people brought despite my explicit instructions that they bring nothing at all.

This was the first time I have screened a film that I have never seen before.  I chose it because it connects well with the discussion group that my wife will be running in a few weeks, because it has been recommended to me by many people, and because I wanted to see it myself.  I had intended to preview it so that I would have some idea of what I was going to inflict on people, but, as is usually the case, other things were more pressing.  So, as we sat down to watch, I was truly in the position of a viewer, as I very seldom am any more, and enjoyed the experience very much.

Among other things, I began to realize the amount of knowledge that has been lost, not only the general population’s loss of knowledge about working the earth in any way, but the farm community’s loss of knowledge about how to work the earth apart from the chemical and industrial techniques that are gradually destroying the earth itself.  Though he was a farmer all of his life, John had to relearn almost everything in order to begin farming organically.  So completely had the previous generations accepted the superiority of chemical farming that they had not modeled any other approach to working the earth, leaving their descendants almost completely ignorant of the farming practices that had been universal only several generations before them.

It seems to me that this same loss of knowledge is a fundamental problem facing many of those who would seek to live differently in their homes and their communities.  It is not only a matter of identifying the areas where we would like to live differently, and it is not only a matter of finding the will and the resources to make real changes in these areas, but it is also a matter of recovering knowledge that would have been commonplace to our great-grandparents but that is almost completely lost to us now.  I have not the least idea of how to grow an organic backyard vegetable garden, for example.  I am beyond my expertise at every step, relying on books, on friends, on google, and often, when these things fail, on my own experimentation.  This knowledge is no longer commonplace, and there is much else that has similarly passed from the common knowledge of our communities, to their detriment.

The second idea that I appreciated in the film was its insistence on the role of the dirt, of the land, of the earth itself.  In the initial few scenes of the film, Farmer John takes a handful of dirt, eats a sizable mouthful, and declares, “The earth is good today.”  John is obviously playing to the camera, as he loves to do, but the gesture reminds me of my own impulse to do just that while planting my apple trees.  The words ‘good’ and ‘earth’ in such close conjunction also remind me of a book I have just read, Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, which represents the earth in ways that are often similar to the film.  This second connection was further reinforced by a later scene, where John’s elderly uncle approaches tears as he describes how the new housing developments have “poured concrete over all that good earth.”

It occurs to me, watching these moments in the context of my own recent experience and reading, that our culture has lost, and has long been losing, this almost spiritual sense of the earth.  Distanced as we are from working the soil, manic as we are about cleanliness, we are unable to conceive of soil as something living, as something that we might put into our mouths and eat, as something good and wholesome and even spiritual.  In The Good Earth, Buck several times depicts the earth as healing farmer Wang emotionally and psychologically.  Whether he is suffering from the lust for a woman or from the anxieties of his family, the remedy is always to walk barefoot behind his plow, to turn the earth in his hands, to lie along the freshly plowed furrows and sleep in the sun.  He is always cleansed by this connection with the land.

It is not, as the examples of both farmer Wang and farmer John show clearly, that this connection with the earth is easy, for working the land is always a great and never ending labour.  It is only that this labour is wholesome and good in a way that cannot be replicated in any other way.  There is no substitute for real dirt, for real labour in the earth.  Not that this precludes other sorts of labour, of course, but that the other labours need to reconnect themselves to the labour of the land.

I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, when he is staying with a tutor, preparing for his university entrance examinations.  Lewis relates how he would go to his tutor in the garden and how his tutor would take the book in his dirt covered hands and guide Lewis through whatever difficulty he was having.  Lewis is horrified at this disrespect of his books, buti I always saw something apt in this story.  The intellectual, at least in this instance and in my ideal, is not someone whose hands stay clean, literally or figuratively, but someone whose hands are as used to working with earth or with food or with wood as they are used to working with the word.  If our books are too clean, our hands are probably too clean also, and we have failed to make our thinking a real part of our living.

If I have in some of my posts given the impression that I am in any way an accomplished gardener, let this post serve to dispel it.  While I can recall our family having a vegetable garden when I was very young, gardening was not something that my family did.  When I moved out, I lived solely in apartments that had no dirt at all and then in a little bungalow that had a garden fairly well begun before I even I arrived.  It is only in the past year, since we moved into our new place, that I have had a substantial amount of space to garden and the growing desire to do something with it.  Though I do love to garden, though I do want to become a better gardener, I am, at the moment, almost completely incompetent.

For example, I wrote a month or so ago that I was trying to grow sancherry bushes from seed.  Having no idea how to go about this properly, I did what I usually do.  I made a completely uninformed attempt to do things on my own, planted the seeds immediately and without any preparation, waited impatiently for them to sprout, and was horribly disappointed when they did nothing of the sort.  I could have researched the process online, of course, and there are probably many books available at my local library just down the street, but I have a fundamental antipathy to the usual kind of approach to instructional material.  They are either impersonal and dull in the extreme, or they are personal and insipid in the extreme.  I have encountered only very few exceptions, and I treasure them very highly.

Fortuitously, I have just discovered a book is such an exception, one that serves both my purposes and my tastes entirely. My mother happened to leave it on the dining room table, a book called Growing Trees from Seed, by a man named Henry Kock, who was an Interpretive Horticulturalist at the University of Guelph’s Arboretum and the founder of the Elm Recovery Project.  My mother, who worked with him at the arboretum, describes him as probably the most amazing man she has ever met, and his book is equally remarkable.

Its appeal is not in the information it provides, though it covers its subject exhaustively.  Its appeal is in the way that he tells the story of growing trees from seed precisely as a story.  There are some writers who introduce anecdotes in order to make a text less dull, but often in ways that seem forced and unnatural.  Kock’s anecdotes are less an insertion into a broader textual structure than they are the structure itself.  He writes as if he is sitting with his reader in the garden, pointing out this or the other detail of a specimen, demonstrating a particular technique, or relating the story of when he first saw a certain variety of tree.  He does not lecture on the subject of trees.  He narrates a passion for them, a life of dedication to them.

This sense of being alongside Kock as he works in the nursery makes the book much more than a reference volume.  While it would certainly serve this purpose, it deserves to be read whole, quite apart from any immediate need for the information it conveys.  It deserves to be read with the spirit that it was written, with a passion for seeing native plants conserved and reintroduced in their former habitats, with a passion that never fails to see something mystical in a tree emerging from a seed, with a passion that understand planting native species as “a nearly sacred act.”  It is written by someone who knew how to honour the uniqueness of his immediate environment, and he inspires his readers to discover how to honour in this way also.

I was planting apple trees yesterday: a Redcort, an Empire, and a Honey Crisp.  The dirt smelled moist and mineral, like autumn, so rich and beautiful that I had a compelling urge to eat some.  Maybe, I thought, we have it wrong when we tell our kids not to eat dirt and sand.  Maybe it really tastes quite good.  Maybe we have all been missing out on something our whole lives, training away an appreciation for a taste that we could share with the trees.

I remembered suddenly a passage in C. S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair, where the moles are preparing dishes from different types of earth and feeding them to the dryads.  Lewis describes the confections made from loam and sand, some looking almost like chocolate.  I have always liked that part of the story, but being surrounded by the smell and feel of dirt for much of yesterday afternoon made me appreciate it a little differently.  I was not taken away by it so much as to actually taste the earth myself, but I could no longer see the dirt as anything but food, maybe not for me, but for something else, and I could not resist the strange sensation that I was digging in a kind of arboreal kitchen, a chef preparing a feast for my newly planted trees.

The Senior High class I teach at my church met at our local coffee shop this morning, and we got on the topic of found fruit, which is a term that is often applied to the fruit that can be found and harvested for free in urban areas.  For example, I have for years been harvesting apples and pears from behind one of the city community centres where there had been an orchard when the building was still a nurses’ residence for the local hospital.  I also pick serviceberries and elderberries from various housing developments around the city, and there are places where I can also find wild grapes, red currants, rose hips, and raspberries.  Then there are the various neighbours who have planted fruit trees but do not harvest them and let me pick grapes and cherries and whatever else.  All this saves me a not inconsiderable amount of money, and it also lets me use what already grows around me and would otherwise go to waste.

Picking found fruit in this way seems very natural to me.  My parents often took my brothers and me to collect windfall apples from the side of rural roads, apples that could not be eaten but were great for making applesauce.  We also picked the berries that grew in the housing developments where we lived over the years.  When I was first married, I discovered and began picking the wild grapes that grew near our apartment, and I was eventually joined by several of the other residents for the yearly harvest. Though I have moved from these places, I still return to them to gather fruit each year, and I am taking cuttings from some of these plants for my own garden.

Though this behaviour seems very normal to me, however, my students were clearly a little disconcerted with the idea.  They wanted to know whether I had to pay people, which I never do, or get their permission, which I always do unless the fruit is on public land.  They also wanted to know whether this kind of fruit might be more likely to carry bugs or diseases.  The whole thing seemed a little inapropriate to them, something like sneaking into a movie theatre or hacking a computer.  It might be possible, they seemed to imply, but surely there was something about it that was immoral if not actually illegal.

This response, now that I think about it, was a predictable one given our culture’s ideas about property.  We have so internalized the notion that everything is and should be owned and that everything does and should cost something, that we are immediately wary when something appears to be unowned and available to be used freely.  I have seen very similar responses to open source software, for example, or even to the neighbourly gesture to shovel a driveway.  We assume that these things can only be free to hide another kind of cost.  We assume that everything must have an owner, and that what is owned by one person would surely not be freely given to another except as a kind of advertisement or loss leader.  What is freely given or freely found, we believe, will be of worse quality and will obligate us in other ways.  We worry that the real owner of these things will appear and demand that we pay for them in one way or another.

We feel this way, unfortunately, because it is too often the case that what is free does indeed come at a hidden cost, but this should make it all the more necessary that we actively use those few things that are in fact freely found and freely given.  To pick and use found fruit, or to use open source software, or to lend tools freely between neighbours, these become ways, not only to save money, but to maintain economies that do not circulate around money at all, but around the local community and the local environment.  They become ways to value things apart from the dollar value that might be attached to them.  They become ways to understand value differently, to reevaluate, to value more highly what is given and discovered without any value at all.

Midway through canning tomato sauce yesterday, my children began to lose patience.  This is understandable.  Tomato sauce day is a long, hard day.  So we turned off the pots, gathered ourselves, and set off for the park.  We picked up a neighbourhood friend along the way, a girl of five years old, one of the few children I have met who is capable of matching my eldest for energy.  Our time in the park was a good respite for everyone concerned, and we left far more agreeably than we had come.

On the way home, I discovered a small shrub growing in a garden along the street.  It had leaves reminiscent of a rosebush and small, yellow fruit that looked much like a miniature apple or pear.  As I was trying to determine, with my rudimentary gardening knowledge, what exactly this plant was, our young friend decided to pick one of the fruit and bite it.  We stopped her before she swallowed anything, and there are very few fruit that will do any great damage in small quantities, but I thought it might be best if I could identify it as quickly as possible.  I could hear the owner of the house behind the back fence, so I leaned over and asked if she knew what species the plant was.  She had no idea that the little bush even grew fruit.  All she could tell me was that it had pretty flowers in the spring, which was rather less than helpful.

By the time we reached our young friend’s house, shed was still showing no ill effects, and her parents informed us that she had eaten almost every berry in the area once already in any case, but I was still interested to know what plant we had discovered.  A brief internet search revealed what many other people probably would have known from the beginning, that it was a flowering quince, or a chaenomeles japonica, which is not only harmless but often used in jams and jellies.  The flowers, which range from white through pink to red, are quite attractive, and I have decided to plant a few in my garden.

What intrigues me though, is that none of the books or the sites that I have read, and I have read more than a few, ever listed flowering quince among the edible plants that could be grown in our climate.  Of course, none of them listed may apples or paw paw trees either, and I am curious about why these lists are so limited.  Many even omit common edible berries like saskatoon berries and elderberries.  Is this simply because they are not a viable commercial crop?  If so, how did the commercial viability of a food crop come to be equivalent with its edibility, where lists of edible plants include only the small fraction of edibles that are grown on a commercial scale?

These questions interest me because I wonder whether this is another way in which gardening can become a guerilla activity.  I have already mentioned my one friend who plants flower gardens in unattractive public spaces, and my other friend who rescues interesting local specimens from areas that are about to be developed.  Various others, including myelf to some extent, do what might be called guerilla gardening by growing only those plants that are local or those that are edible.  Many of us, though I have had some difficult decisions in this regard, have made a similarly guerilla decision to garden organically.  Might there also be a necessity for an intervention with respect to the kinds of edible plants that are grown, not just in terms of growing noncommercial varietals of commonly grown commercial crops, which is certainly necessary, but in terms of growing plants that are not viable commercially at all?  Is there a need for the home garden to develop these plants precisely because commercial gardens will not?  Is this a place where home gardens might perform a useful intervention?

I am not sure to what degree these questions are significant, but I am discovering that much of what commercial agriculture has passed over is good and useful and viable in the home garden, and I will make it a part of my gardening practise to include these plants whenever I find them.  It may not ever be very effective as activism, but, if nothing else, it will make my own cooking and my own table more varied and more interesting, and this is no small thing in my estimation.

I had two experiences of sharing yesterday that, while seemingly different in many ways, taught me something about how it is possible to share or introduce a place, a subject that has been turning in my head since I returned from Manitoulin Island.

My friend Chris Land came by with his young daughter in the morning, and we had a chance to walk to a downtown used bookstore together in the afternoon.  Chris is not from Guelph and had never been to this particular bookseller, so I showed him around the shop a little, and we spent some time browsing, occasionally noting a book to one another or asking each other’s opinion on a title.  Chris bought Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which was a fairly revolutionary text for me when I read it in university.  I bought two collections of essays: George Orwell’s Inside the Whale and Other Essays, and William Styron’s The Quiet Dust and Other Writings, neither of which were known to me before I saw them on the shelves.  We both left the store well pleased with our purchases.

In the evening, I went to help my mother move a desk from the house of Bob Brown, a mutual friend.  While we were there, Bob took the opportunity to show me a little of his unique garden.  It was not the first time that I had seen it, since the Browns allow me to pick their grapes every fall, but I am almost always picking when Bob is at work, so I have never heard him explain how unique some of the plants in his garden really are.  He cultivates only those plants that are native to southern Ontario, and he tries to include as many uncommon species as he can.  Not wanting to take these plants from the wild, he notes where developers will be beginning a new project, and takes any valuable specimens from these areas before the bulldozers arrive.  From among his many interesting edible specimens, too many to mention, he was gracious enough to give me some mayapple plants (podophyllum peltatum) for immediate transplantation, and to promise me some pawpaw tree seedlings (asimina triloba) for transplantation later in the fall.  Of the two, mayapples can still be found wild in various places in Ontario, but pawpaws are almost never seen this far north any longer. Along with the sandcherry bushes (prunus pumila var. depressa) that I am trying to force grow from seeds, these new plants will make an interesting beginning to a garden of local and edible plants.

In each case, I would suggest that what was being introduced was, more than anything else, a space, a specifically local space, a locality.  In the first instance, I was the guide; in the second, I was the guided; in both, what was actually exchanged between us was a familiarity with a locality, a familiarity both with the space of a bookstore or of a garden, and, through this locality, an increased knowldge of the broader spaces of literature and of southern Ontario flora.  The sharing is not really of literature or flora, of course, not as a whole, not even as the whole of what might be shared.  It iis the sharing only of those aspects of literature and flora that appear within a particular locality, a locality where one is familiar and is will to familarize another.  In the same way, my opportunity last week was not to introduce the Humphreys to Manitoulin, or even to everything of Manitoulin that I know.  Rather, it was an opportunity to make them familiar with a place where I am familiar, in order to introduce them to the experience of Manitoulin that is particularly mine.  They may gain a broader knowledge of Manitoulin through this experience, but this is not primarily what is being shared.  What is being shared is my familiarity with the locality.

I would argue that this understanding of sharing has implications far beyond physical space, because I think that it characterizes, or at least should characterize, every instance of sharing that takes the form of an introduction.  In terms of pedagogy, for example, I think that it is far more useful to understand the teacher’s function to be sharing in this way.  Clearly, despite frequent pretense to the contrary, the teacher is never able to introduce students to the entirety of a subject.  The teacher is never able even to introduce students toa ll of the possible knowledge of a subject that the teacher has to sharet.  The teacher is really only able to introduce students to a locality within a subject, a locality with which the teacher is familiar, a locality which the teacher can make familar to the students also.  This kind of teaching does not pretend to somehow cover a subject entirely, but to familiarize a locality of the subject in such a way as to cast light on the whole, which will always remain beyond mastery of both teacher and student.

In this sense, I familarize Chris with the bookstore so that he can carry out of it something that was always larger than the bookstore in any case: the text.  Bob familarizes me with his garden so that I can carry out of it something that was always larger than the garden in any case: the plant.  Without these localities, and without a familiarity with them, taught and learned, there would be nowhere to begin discovering the things that we need to carry with us.

I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon in the garden with my eldest son. We were staking tomatos mostly. I was holding the twine for him; he was cutting. I was tying up the tomatos; he was clipping random plants. I was weeding; he was adding specimens to the snail house that he has constructed out of an old planter.

As we were working, a neighbour of ours, who used to play the piano at the church where I attended as I child, and who taught music lessons to my wife for several years, wandered by on his way to the library. He stopped to talk, and I noticed that he was holding several critical commentaries on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, including C. S. Lewis’ A Preface to Paradise Lost, which is often issued separately from the text that it is supposed to preface, and which is one of the very few works of criticism that I can say I actually enjoyed reading. We talked very briefly about the commentaries, most of which he disparaged, and about Milton’s poem itself, which he praised very highly.

When he had resumed his walk and I had resumed my gardening, I was left thinking about how strange a thing it was to find someone who was actually reading Paradise Lost, not to teach a class, not to complete an assignment, not to pass an exam, but just to read it. The same observation could be made of just about any canonical literary work more than a few decades old, of course. It would have been just as strange if my neighbour had been reading Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene or Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. What was disconcerting about this observation, however, was that it revealed how much I had myself begun to regard these texts as confined to the realm of the classroom. It was not only my cultural expectations that had been surprised by his reading practise but my personal expectations as well. I suddenly recalled how powerfully I had experienced Paradise Lost myself, and I was alarmed to see the extent to which I had allowed myself to confine it to an artificial role in an artificial curriculum. I had forgotten why I had read Paradise Lost in the first place, forgotten why I still believe that others should read it, but I have remembered now, so let the next few paragraphs stand as the beginning of a self-correction.

To read Paradise Lost is to experience words as force and as power. I am awed by its pompous, thunderous, resonant, grandiloquent voice with the same kind of awe that I have for Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung opera cycle, or James Joyce’s Ulysses, or William Blake’s illustrated mythopoetic creations. It is not necessary to like these works only to experience them. They hold something audacious and fearful. They do not hesitate to speak on behalf of gods and devils, to claim the place of the prophet and the seer. They place themselves apart, in the space between heaven and hell, earth and sky, good and evil. They speak a language that others fear to speak, a language of angels and demons and spirits and heros and immortals.

To write and speak and create and compose like this is presumptive in the last degree. It is to assume the role that all creators secretly desire and yet fear to hold. It is to be as like to God as God will allow. It is to invite adulation and ridicule. It is to be called a prophet and a heretic. It is to be consigned to the space between spaces that is opened up by their creations, to inhabit this space that is nowhere, to be considered a little lower than angels and a little higher than fiends.

When I read Paradise Lost, whatever its literary successes and failures, it is because it allows me to stand in this place too, even if only for a moment. It is because it can make me recall this place, years later, in the heat of the sun, standing among the tomato stakes of my garden. It is because Milton’s garden of poetry and myth makes my own garden somehow wilder and stranger, somehow truer and richer. It makes this garden of mine, for an instant, strain beyond itself toward the space that separates it from the divine.

I have had something of a rough week.  I am not complaining, only commenting.  I pride myself on not complaining about these things, and I was under the impression that I was coping fairly well, that is, until my wife took the spoon away from me in the middle of feeding my youngest child and told me to go pick strawberries.

Now, to clarify her reasoning, I should explain that picking strawberries is something like therapy for me.  It is not that I like to eat strawberries so much, though I do like a few now and again.  It is more what strawberries represent to me. They are the first fresh produce of the year, the first food that I can pick and eat from my garden after a whole winter of barrenness and a whole spring of growth.  They are also the first preserves of the year, the first jams and sauces, the first canning.  They mean the beginning of a whole summer and a whole autumn of harvesting, eating, cooking, preparing, and preserving.

So, I spent an hour picking strawberries, in the wetness left by this afternoon’s rain, and I realized exactly how stressed I had been at exactly the same moment as I realized how much less stressed I was rapidly becoming, and I ate a few, and I picked several baskets full, and my fingers were stained red, and I smelled summer.

I encountered a friend yesterday afternoon, a woman who would certainly prefer to remain anonymous here and probably everywhere else as well. She is a passionate gardener but has very little space to garden at her apartment, so she has for many years gardened small plots of dirt alongside city roadways and parks, wherever she feels that a few flowers would do most good. She is a practitioner of what I call guerrilla gardening.

During our conversation yesterday, I happened to mention that I had finished ripping out plant matter from my new garden and that I was looking forward to doing some planting, beginning with some trees and shrubs this fall. She asked me why I was not now planting any of the edibles that I would eventually like to grow in the garden. I responded to the effect that I would like to do things in order, to have the large plants and landscaping done before I begin introducing the perrenials and finally the annuals. She brushed off this explanation, informed me firmly that it is possible to do both things at once, and insisted that I take from her a selection of vegetable seedlings, arriving at my door a few hours later with seedlings for several varieties of tomatoes, brussel sprouts, chives, and some ornamentals.

The gift was not inconsiderable. This woman has little enough in the world to give, and she gave out of the plants that she had so patiently gathered and seeded for her own gardening. She gave out of the things that she loves most. I was moved, and the plants that she has given me seem a little different than those that I would purchase myself. To plant and tend these gifts becomes a response to them as gifts. They become more than plants because they represent something given and received between friends. The gift of friendship has transformed them, as it transforms everything.

My late father-in-law’s peonies bloomed this morning. They were his favourite flower. His front lawn was always centred by a tremendously large speciman that was famous in the neighbourhood. After he died and my mother-in-law came to live with us, she took two clumps of the legendary front lawn peony with her and planted them in my back yard. This was their first spring at our place, and we were warned that, though they transplant well, they do not often bloom for the first year or two in their new location. I was worried that they would not even survive, but very early on in the spring we saw shoots, and several days ago we saw some blossoms, and today there were blooms.

I am tempted to say something here about the work of mourning and of memorial, but everything seems a little inadequate. I will only say that we miss Willie, and we are glad for the reminder of him.