You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
“this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him.” (ESM, Sea of Tranquility)
Roses for the Home, Farmers’ Bulletin 750, by United States Department of Agriculture (Home and Garden Bulletin 25, May 1953).
“To garden is to make whole” […] “even if it’s a windowsill geranium high above a city street, it can be significant in meaning.”
“Close attention itself can be a kind of sustenance.” [Part of a] “system[s] of renewal” (RS)
“They drove off into a violet so ultra it broke her heart.”
“exchanged that danger for the relative safety of brutal work”
“love is its desperate state when she saw it […] poorly veiled by his business ventures”
“after she spoke, the smile that followed made the sun look like a fool”
“And yours are like the beginning of the world”
“How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness” (Toni Morrison, Paradise)
The abolition of chattel slavery and the emergence of man, however laudable, long awaited, and cherished, did not yield such absolute distinctions; instead fleeting, disabled, and short-lived practices stand for freedom and its failure. Everyday practices, rather than traditional political activity like the abolition movement, black conventions, the struggle for suffrage, and electoral activities, are the focus of my examination because I believe that these pedestrian practices illuminate inchoate and utopian expressions of freedom that are not and perhaps cannot be actualized elsewhere. The desires and longings that exceed the frame of civil rights and political emancipation find expression in quotidian acts labeled “fanciful,” “exorbitant,” and “excessive” primarily because they express an understanding or imagination of freedom quite at odds with bourgeois expectations. Paul Gilroy, after Seyla Benhabib, refers to these utopian invocations and the incipient modes of friendship and solidarity they conjure up as “the politics of transfiguration.”21 He notes that, in contrast to the politics of fulfillment, which operate within the framework of bourgeois civil society and occidental rationality, “The politics of transfiguration strives in pursuit of the sublime, struggling to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable. Its rather different hermeneutic focus pushes towards the mimetic, dramatic and performative.” From this perspective, stealing away, the breakdown, moving about, pilfering, and other everyday practices that occur below the threshold of formal equality and rights gesture toward an unrealized freedom and emphasize the stranglehold of slavery and the limits of emancipation. In this and in other ways, these practices reveal much about the aspirations of the dominated and the contestations over the meaning of abolition and emancipation.
Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, 1993), 37; and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), 13, 41.
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America.
“The danger and its necessity focused them, made them calm.” (TM)
“Turn on the night!,” Adam Gopnik in New Yorker; article on light pollution. (An aside–“nature’s secret to survival is not one perfect plan but a little bit of this and a little bit of that.”)
“being on the side of the future”
“so a flower is also a promise”
“Happiness seems to require having a well-ordered life avoiding difficulty or discord, while joy can and does show up anywhere, often unexpectedly” (RS)
… we cultivate the spaces of contemplation, a garden of plants not necessary for physical survival. The awareness of that fact is what gives the garden its special, powerful place in our lives and our imaginations. The Tree of Knowledge holds the unknown, and therefore dangerous possibilities (JK)