Every year, I end up getting to a point in the season where I just can’t hold back - I write a post called Green Thumb. I’m breaking the tradition in light of the more discursive tone I’ve been using lately - but the spirit of this post is in much the same vein.
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When man first crafted a blade, he used it for two things - killing animals and digging in the earth. There is something primal in both acts, and as civilization marched onward, most of its members lost touch with what it feels like to do either. I’ll save a discussion of the former practice for another time - this is all about the digging thing.

Throughout history, man has been fascinated with gardens. They are at the locus of various creation myths as well as the setting for certain afterlives - in Christianity, for example, “Paradise” refers both to the Garden of Eden and to Heaven. Elaborate gardens have for millenia represented the ultimate in architectural achievement, from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the gardens at Versailles and throughout Europe. Gardens always have been, and will always be, so much more than merely a sunny plot for sowing seeds.

Gardens represent man’s dominion over nature, but also more - a “garden paradise” is the synergy between man’s efforts and nature’s bounty. There’s a whole philosphy to gardening that goes way deeper than the simple acts of tilling and pruning. Planting something connects us to the earth in a direct, uniquely physical way. Tending to crops, herbs, or flowers tests our patience, our focus, and our commitment. Harvesting the fruits of our labor (or just enjoying a nice patio) gives us an immediate and lasting sense of satisfaction.

I guess you could say that gardening is “therapeutic,” but to me it’s so much more. A man’s garden is a microcosm of the state of nature. Man works to tame the wild, serves as steward over it, defends it against beasts (in my case, squirrels), and reaps the rewards. Even when the anthropologists say that we were a bunch of “hunter-gatherers,” they also acknowledge that agriculture didn’t start with rice paddies and diversion of the Nile - it started by “gathering” and planting seeds instead of just their fruit. And I have a sneaky suspicion the elder wives in those ancient tribes would dig up some petunias and put them in front of the huts each spring - it’s our nature.

Gardening therefore represents in a very real way the continuation of a long history of agriculture. As civilization wrapped itself in mantles of community, small gardens gave way to large fields and monocropping. The romans had enclosure, and medieval Europe had open fields, but the general consensus was that bigger is better. So even with the consolidation of ownership, driven by social factors in post-feudal Europe and by technological improvements post-WWII, agriculture as an industry employed more persons than any other industry until only recently (having been taken over by the “services” industry… thank you, Chipotle).

Keeping a garden is a throw-back to the Way Things Were - over the last 10,000 years, growing things has become infused in of human nature. Now that the so-called Green Revolution has put fresh food within reach of hundreds of millions of Americans (barring the occasional food desert), we don’t have to plant in order to eat; we can plant things just for the fun of it.

I do both. I don’t have any land to speak of (although I planted some hostas out front), I really just have a bunch of clay pots on my deck. But I grow tomatos, dill, basil, oregano, thyme, chives, mint, onion, ichiban eggplant, bell pepper, dianthus, cleomis, petunias, snap-dragons, vinca, and hoya. I have a few hanging baskets and, yes, a Topsy-Turvey. I have a few maple trees taken from a tree at my parents house, which was taken from a tree at my grandpa’s farm. We do things like that in Kansas. And I have a big spikey plant that I don’t know the name of, and bring inside during the winter. And my houseplants… don’t even get me started on my houseplants. They have names.

When I’m growing food-things, like tomatos and eggplants, I try to eat them. That’s the whole point. But everything else is for just for fun. Someday I might be able to feed myself, but self-sustenance isn’t exactly feasible with the space that I have available. I grow things because I enjoy it.

I’m not the only one. Across America, people are taking a serious interest in gardening. In a way, this interest always been there, but it’s been largely reserved for those people who had the time and money to frequent greenhouses and play around in the yard. When the economy took a nose-dive a couple years ago, it just so happened to overlap with an Internet-fueled cultural interest in “organic” and “whole” foods, access to heirloom seeds, and communities of interested amateurs willing to give their green thumbs a workout. For the first time in what I imagine to be at least 100 years, hardware stores ran out of seeds. People started gardening again.

This is the everyman’s Garden Revolution. The trend toward home-gardening and fresh - I mean, really fresh produce - is no longer the province of egalitarian new-age hippies and the pretentious “organic-only” foodies. It’s an honest-to-goodness appreciation of something made by the labor of one’s own hands.

It’s not the first time. Since at least 1917, Kansas City has recognized the value of putting vacant lots to use in urban agriculture. Following the First World War, Kansas City undertook a study concluding that there was enough open acreage within the city to become completely self-sufficient in growing produce for the city’s population. In the early 90s, the EPA introduced the term “brownfield,” used to refer to abandoned or disused industrial properties. It took 75 years for the nation to catch up to cities like Kansas City and Des Moines, to pay attention to abandoned sites like brownfields, many of which have now been cleaned up and converted for urban agriculture or community-supported agriculture. But the nation did catch up, and urban agriculture (often called community-supported agriculture when referring to cooperative farming on vacant lots), is totally in right now.

But Kansas City’s longstanding policy of allowing vacant lots to be farmed by city-folk is under attack. A recent article in the Kansas City Star notes that there is a “war” between the competing values of “having a nice tree-lined street with well-manicured lawns” and “I’d like to grow my own food, please.” The lawnies are convinced that Kansas City’s self-sufficiency is going to give way to cornfield-lined city streets as the Internet, the droopy economy, and a general interest in urban horticulture combine forces to destroy America. The foodies counter with predictable Libertarian gusto that they can do whatever the hell they’d like with their front yards, thank you very much.

The debate has been settled, at least for now - the Kansas City Council has introduced an ordinance that allows homeowners to sell excess bounty grown in their yards, a move designed to promote home gardening. I mean, who wants to plant tomatos - which tend to go all Audrey-the-maneating-plant in this climate - if it’s against the law to sell the extra? And although the centuries-old cultural staple of having a nice front yard is unlikely to be subsumed by an invasion of Third-Reich-inspired hoe-wielding zombie gardeners, the Council’s proposed ordinance attempts to satisfy the lawnies by prohibiting “row crops” like corn and soybeans from being planted in residential front yards within city limits.

It all makes sense to me. As I recently explained to a friend, who thought the ordinance was ridiculous, and who might just happen to fall into that “Libertarian gusto” category,

Easy, Lady Liberty.

My only thought is that they’re selling produce, not used clothes and nick-knacks like a garage sale. So the two implications are (a) the sale of food, which local/city governments have been “regulating” since the olden-timey days (i have no citation so don’t call me out on that!) and (b) once you start selling your home-grown wares it becomes more of a “business” than a hobby, and most cities have zoning ordinances that prohibit businesses in residential areas.

So it’s kind of a grey area in the absence of any positive legislation. This ordinance just solidifies the longstanding social policy of allowing urban gardening (micro-farming) in KC - it’s actually been cool to watch the yearly news stories in July and watch these vacant-lot gardens get bigger (and better) every year.

The point is, Ag is in vogue, and it’s a good thing for our bodies and for our communities!

As for my own “garden,” I’m left with a small shady patch better for hostas than anything else, and a few large pots on my deck that serve as a feasting-grounds for ninja/pirate/terrorist squirrels. But there’s the fun in the digging, and the sowing, and all that. And for my part, I’m left a little happier for having grown some things that I can eat, or some pretty things to brighten my deck, and for leaving the world (and my thumb) a little greener.

 
Steven Craig

Two weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass at the library’s book sale. If you don’t know, Walt Whitman is one of the most iconic American writers, and Leaves of Grass is his seminal work, which he edited and constantly added to throughout his life. My copy is a reprinting of the first edition, which the editor describes as the “truest” (read: “most true”) version, as yet unsubjected to Whitman’s perpetual metacritical revisions and additions. Even through the errors in typesetting (a process which Whitman performed himself, and which is so prone to error that we still use the word “typo” in our modern vernacular to describe a mistake), a certain clarity of thought and expression is revealed in every passage. Whitman answers questions he poses to himself with an earnestness and honesty only barely restrained by a sense of tact we modern men seem to lack. To those familiar with the history of writing, his explicit descriptions of what things feel like was almost revolutionary. In a word, the work is breathtaking.

I know that I’m waxing poetic over here, and I’m sorry. This wasn’t supposed to be a book review. I only meant to find a place to start.

In Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, I found the words of a man who is both inquisitive and self-posessed. He is confident, playful with his words and with his own convictions. I can recall a time when I wrote that way, flippant with syntax and sensuality, bold and bouyant and occasionally a little too dramatic. I don’t write that way anymore because I’m not that man anymore. But I remember that time fondly, and Leaves of Grass is a free - if temporary - ticket back to a time when I was the hottest thing around, and writing like it.

The “ticket” metaphor of is a useful one. When I met Nuruddin Farrah, author of several incredible novels set in war-ravaged Somalia, he introduced me to the concept of having a train station in your mind. It sounds silly, but for a writer who immerses himself and his stories in a world where there is no rule of law, where violence is meted out indiscriminately, and where death - sometimes met in horrible fashion - is a daily presence, having a physical separation between the world created and the world corporeal is an absolute necessity. Farrah “takes a train” to Somalia every day, where he can write what he knows, what he sees, what he feels - but it is an imaginary Somalia, where bullets cannot really strike him, where death cannot touch him.

It is not a unique metaphor - even Death Cab for Cutie has sung, “in my head, there’s a greyhound station / where I send my thoughts to far-off destinations.” But the song continues: “so they may have a chance of finding places / where they’re far more suited than here.” For Farrah, the train station allows him to get back to a country from which he has exiled himself since 1976. For Death Cab, the train station is a form of escape, a chance to send fragile dreams of a perfect love somewhere they can flourish.

For me, the train station is a means to reconnect with the past. When I read The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, I was transported back to a time when my world revolved around my very own Countess Olenska. Indeed, my life seemed utterly defined by the unrequited affections with which I showered (read: drowned) my crush. Of course, at the time, every song (favorite example? the line “the truth is, you could slit my throat and with my one last gasping breath I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt” from the song “You’re So Last Summer” by Taking Back Sunday), every movie (like the first 2/3 of Spider-Man), even quotes from comic strips (such as Charlie Brown’s infamous, “nothing spoils the taste of peanut butter quite like unrequited love”) seemed to relate to what I called my “perpetual condition.”

How dramatic.

Several years removed, on my Age of Innocence round-trip ticket, I stood by Newland Archer as he stood outside on a Parisian sidewalk; in a house above, Archer’s son was having dinner with a woman he knew only as his mother’s cousin. For Archer, the woman upstairs was “the one who got away,” and after countless years he’d finally learned to leave her there. So he stayed downstairs, and if memory serves he literally “walks off into the sunset,” with a newfound sense of peace. Closing the book, I finally found my own sense of closure. I didn’t need a definite Jacobian conclusion - I just needed some time, some space, and some perspective.

Contrast that, of course, with Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, a book which renewed my sense of hopeless romanticism and convinced me that the perfect thing to tell a woman in the deep dark hours of the night was, “eres tu mi Fermina Daza.”

Regardless. The point is, art imitates life. Unrequited love is one of those things that just happens, sometimes to the best (and least deserving) of us. When I read Age of Innocence or Love in the Time of Cholera, I’m reading what amounts to a shadow cast by the Platonic form: unrequited love. Remember reading The Cave in Western Civ? How a chair is never a chair, just a version of The Chair, mere Shadows cast on the wall of a cave by The Form? Novels are iterations of universal truths we’ve all experienced.

I use the train station in my mind to take short flights of fancy back to the past, to a version of me I might once have been, a version I know better than to try to refashion. Art, which imitates life, gives me the ticket I need to “travel back” safely - the brilliance of other authors gives my trip structure and frames my pursuits. Art, which imitates life, therefore grants me the opportunity for insight and perspective that my own recollections could never afford. The facts are never the same, and sometimes the feelings aren’t quite right, but it really is just “imitation,” after all.

Of course, the predicate logical premise is, Art imitates life. Which begs the question: does life not also imitate art?

Perhaps it was listening to Dashboard Confessional and Taking Back Sunday, watching romantic comedies and action movies where the hero gets the girl, and refusing to put myself in a position to “get over” my crush that really caused me to feel like I was trapped in a “perpetual condition.” In acknowledging that art imitates life, it seems hollow to somehow pretend that we do not sometimes let our lives imitate art.

To use more base examples, who had ever tried a Cosmo before Sex and the City? Who knew anything about the shadows surrounding the early Church and, centuries later, the Crusades, before The Davinci Code? And weren’t there hardly any goth chicks running around before The Craft?

I guess the point, and I didn’t really have one when I set out, is simply this: literature is a wonderful thing, which allows some to escape and others to remember, some to dream and others to discover. And maybe that adage about “all things in moderation” applies here, as well. Don’t fill your 6-disc CD changer with Dashboard Confessional albums in chronological order; don’t watch every Sandra Bullock movie in a weekend-long marathon.

And please, please, please don’t read all those stupid Twilight novels start-to-finish. Besides the fact that those books are hardly deserving of even penny-press status, let alone constituting anything resembling true “literature,” the last thing we need is a country full of Bellas chasing after a bunch of distant, brooding, aloof, shameless, trite, dramatic Edwards. If my days of endless, unrequited love are any indication, life unfortunately has a tendency to imitate the art that fills it.

And besides, I’m team Jacob.

 
Steven Craig

For those of you reading this as a cross-post note on Facebook, you can stop reading. Or you can keep reading, but know that what you are reading comes from www.justlistentome.com, a tiny little website that gets about 4 visitors per month. One of whom is usually me.

It just takes Facebook a while to import the page, and then a while for me to remember to delete it.

But I am thinking about using this forum a lot more often. Seeing as how I pay for it and everything. Actually, Shana is kind enough to provide free hosting, so that’s pretty awesome. But I do pay for the privilege of owning such an awesome domain name, so huzzah for me.

Also thinking about writing a lot more about politics and such. But that will have to wait until my externship is over. Federal judges don’t really like their legal interns being brazenly political, not that I support any particular party. Although if someone created a “Be smart and be nice” political party, I would quit my externship and run for office as the standard-bearer, poster child, and favorite son. Our mascot could be Lady Liberty wearing librarian glasses, and instead of a tablet she would be holding a book like “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill.

And she would definitely not be wearing sandles - hippies are not allowed in the “Be smart be nice” political party. We’re hypocrites like that. Every political party has to be hypocritical about something, I figure this is a pretty innocuous way for us to live up to the expectation. And actually, hippies can join as long as they wear shoes (or relatively clean flip-flips) and shower at least once every 36 hours and immediately after going to the gym.

Anyway, I cleaned up the header, set some posts to private (no need re-hashing the past or trying to re-open old wounds caused by crazy ex-roommates), and fixed some broken links. Although the header still looks funny in IE 8, and I’m not sure why.

Semi-distractedly,

 
Steven Craig
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PS - I just noticed that I said “flip-flips” instead of “flip-flops” . . . but I think I like it. In fact, I am going to start calling them flip-flips and see if it catches on. I mean, inasmuch as they are named as an onomatopoeia, most people (at least the symmetrical people) make the sound flip-flip and not flip-flop.

New mission in life: get everyone on Earth to call them flip-flips. Check.

It’s otter time, fool!

Hahahaha.

 
Steven Craig

Seriously, stop hating on Columbus Day. Lots of people have done stupid things in the last 500 years, and we don’t hate on all of them. Like, no more Thanksgiving, since the Puritans were pretty much jerks to the Indians. And no more St. Patrick’s day, since he tricked people into becoming Christian. And no more July 4, since those rascals at the Continental Congress were “terrorists.”

Are you catching the sarcasm? Plus, as a federal employee (and as a former employee of a market-dependent clearing house) I tend to enjoy my paid days off.

So seriously, stop hating on Columbus Day.

 
Steven Craig