Category: art

Which stories do fields, gardens, forests, and deserts tell? How are they articulated in—and between—the extensive and intensive senses of articulation? In what ways are they distributed between muthos and logos? There is no one all-embracing answer to these questions because the answers are indexed to various plant communities, distinct vegetal milieus, or modes of inhabiting the middle. Plant communities are tangles of stories about interactions among plants; the collaborations and collisions of plants with bacteria, fungi, and animals; agriculture and permaculture; diets and habitats; and, less and less so, the wilderness.

The deserts that grow worldwide as a result of deforestation are the environments that best correspond to the arid abstraction of globality, inherited from the rarefication and dematerialization
of reason. It did not have to come to this: spirit could have been receptive to matter, feeling at home in the forest, while culture could have meant care for and cultivation of life.

… assuming that the plant’s self is not separated from the place of its growth, whatever it tells about that place is already a phyto-biographic narrative and, vice versa, the story of a plant about itself is a slowly developing narrative about its surroundings.

… keepsakes of my memories, the mnemonic centers of gravity that evoke the events and even the atmosphere of my life at the time

Michael Marder, A Philosophy of Stories Plants