Jamaica Kincaid via newyorker, published in the print edition of the September 7, 2020, issue, with the headline “A Heap of Disturbance.”
And so there I was, a sickly child who could read but had no sense of consciousness, had no idea of how to understand and so make sense of the world into which she was born, a world that was always full of a yellow sun, green trees, a blue sea, and black people.
and brought it into her own garden and tended to it in a careless, everyday way,
For her, the wild and the cultivated were equal and yet separate, together and apart.
the Tree of Life is agriculture and the Tree of Knowledge is horticulture. We cultivate food, and when there is a surplus of it, producing wealth, 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 unknown, and therefore dangerous possibilities; the Tree of Life is eternally necessary, and the Tree of Knowledge is deeply and divinely dependent on it.
Ownership of ourselves and of the ground on which we walk, ownership of the other beings with whom we share this and see that it is good, and ownership of the vegetable kingdom are all uncertain, too. Nevertheless, in the garden, we perform the act of possessing. To name is to possess;
The garden makes managing an excess of feelings—good feelings, bad feelings—rewarding […]. The garden is a heap of disturbance
“[…] (where did the people in a Rembrandt painting get all that stuff they are piling on?)” :: Horticultural surplus!
[…] in thickets of words.
“where did plants, annual and perennial, pristinely set out in something called a border, and arranged sometimes according to color and sometimes according to height, come from?” :: Eden! (a notion of)
I had acquired (and read) so many books that it put a strain on my family’s budget. Resentment, a not unfamiliar feeling relating to the garden, set in.
“A new primrose is more special than meeting any conqueror.” :: True!!!
reading—learning to read and reading books, the words a form of food, a form of life, and then knowledge.
Related :
“carry it always / on my person, concealed.”
Roger Robinson, A Portable Paradise; Poetry Unbound.
