“The gardener digs in another time, which has no past or future, beginning or end…
Jarman is one of the famous singers Olivia Laing profiles and celebrates on Humorous Weather: Art in an Emergency (public library) — his beautiful collection of meditations on art, activism, and our search for meaning, drawing from the lives of artists whose visions have changed the way we see the world, ourselves and others.
Laing's essay on Jarman, titled “Paradise,” begins with the question of whether the garden is a form of art and ends with the question of whether art is a form of resistance — a necessary tool for building the Garden of Eden we imagine a thriving society to be.
You write:
Gardening puts you in a different kind of time, as opposed to the moving present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes to hours; some actions do not bear fruit for decades. The gardener is not immune to decline and loss, but every day he is faced with the good news of continued fecundity. The peony is coming back, the pink outer shoots coming out of the bare soil. Fennel seeds; there is an abundance of the universe outside of space.
In order to close Laing's two questions, one must somehow combine these two models of time: linear time, which the Greek calls it. chronos and where we plot the progress vector, and cycle time, or kairoswhich is a time for gardens and, Laing intimates, a time for communities. We crave the reassurance of continuous progress, yet everything around us moves in cycles. How do cicadas know when to wake up from their seventeen-year slumber and wake up in billions to make a new life that will repeat the cycle? And migrating birds, “how do they know when it's time to go?,” as Nina Simone asked in her scene at the time—Nina Simone, who also chose to cover Pete Seeger's “Turn! Turn!
This is where it gets confusing – how do we resist when time is something we are made of, as Borges sees in infinity, and yet we live suspended between these two versions of the same time as we try to build paradise?
“Resistance” has always been a funny word for me – with no exact translation in my native Bulgarian, in this particular context of constructive social change. It includes something that is necessary but not enough – while it increases and empowers in its definition of despising evil, it limits its power by keeping to what needs to be eliminated, without showing what should be planted in your area and how. In this respect, the resistance mechanism of human nature (and the adaptive product of human nature that we call society) is similar to the mechanism of pesticide in nature.
“Resistance” is a word limited mainly by the basic fact that there are certain things that cannot be resisted, that cannot be overcome by our passions and protests – space-time, gravity, the basic laws that created our existence and will eventually return us to the star we were made of. Your face will sink and your spine will bend under the twin assaults of gravity and time, and so will mine, until our atoms disintegrate to become worm food and fertilizer for the mycelial wonderland where the bluebells will appear next spring.
None of this we can resist.
But maybe – and that is what saves and sanctifies our limited life and our limited power – in those limits, there is enough space and enough spirit to resist the toxic elements in the soil of ideas that we call culture and persist in planting, as long as we have to live and with as much generosity as we have to give, something good and beautiful. That we may never live to see it blossom may be right. Planting seeds is a satisfaction worth living for.
Staying in one place. A century and a half after Thoreau thought about the long cycle of social change and expansion after Zadie Smith reminded us that “progress will never last, it will always be threatened, it must be repeated, repeated and reimagined to survive,” wrote Laing after a pilgrimage to Derek Jarman's grave:
Is resistance to art? Can you plant a garden to stop the war? It depends on how you think about time. It depends on what you think the seed does, when it is thrown into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it's worth taking care of paradise, however you define it and wherever it comes from.
The universal arc of morals may not be so different from that of the bluebell-bent trunk that calls out its private reminder that change comes in cycles. Every arc is, after all, just part of a circle. What is needed is to draw our share with a firm hand as we try to “enlarge our circles of compassion” without the guarantee of immediate results – that is the question we each answer in our lives.
Poet and gardener Ross Gay comes closest to my answer in his life-tested belief that time spent gardening is “an exercise of supreme attentiveness.” As I roll in my palm six large seeds of sea kale – an overlooked flowering wonder I found in the pages of Derek Jarman's journal – and thumb them into the damp Brooklyn soil where they may or may not sprout, I find more and more that attention is a unit of time. Each moment of our full attention is an eternal atom. The quality of our attention measures the quality of our life – our only generator of resistance and persistence.
This I know to be true: All that will survive us are the shoreless seeds and the star.
Train with poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks on the healing power of gardens, and revisit Laing on life, loss, and the wisdom of rivers.
