Death in the Garden

Tilling the archive (hello again)

Book plate, English, 20th century (likely based on Skeleton Contemplating a Skull, Andreas Vesalius, 1543)

Pitiful, rootless thing that I am, I now live in Texas. Characteristically, some time has passed since I sent anything here. (New readers, you stand upon a now-silent archive! Hello!) I would really like to use this space to more frequently send out brief, illustrated thoughts—rather than fling the odd, tortured longform essay at you from across an increasingly wider chasm. That’s what I always meant to do here, but the basic premise seemed somehow impossible or trivial, and thus more impossible until now (I hope).  

But first, I’d like to return to slightly longer form to acknowledge what has taken place here in all this time. (I am going to write one more big odd thing so that I can write smaller odd things! Perfect!)

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For nearly seven years, I lived in one of the tiniest rooms of an old brownstone built in the late 1800s over a land-smothered bay (yes, the “Bay” in Boston’s Back Bay was/is a real, reaching, yearning thing). The apartment, at six feet wide by sixteen feet long, neatly contained nearly seven years of my machinations and slumber, spirited naivety ground up by dull depression, the beginnings of my recovery, each tiny, delicate joy and every sorrow—but, alas, no kitchen. The apartment required, at one point, three jobs to pay for, but the rent never went up and the jobs became fewer and better-paying until they became one and sufficient. The apartment and its four walls became, at another point, my full-time place of (remote) employment, something neither I nor the scheming Victorian developers who filled in the Bay centuries ago could have ever imagined. There came a time when every tenant moved out besides myself and my next-door neighbor (pandemic-tossed students, I suspect). We haunted the vacant walls like Victorian ghosts, she and I, wailing and weeping and working night shift. (It was during this period that I allowed many of my beloved houseplants—rubber plants and three Easters’ African violets—to die.) And at night, or by day at times in those years, too, I dreamed of waves—reaching, yearning, crashing, vengeful—as if animated, if only in sleep, by the buried Bay and her righteous fury.

Proof of previous violet care

When at last I did not renew my lease, and the rental brokers came texting and knocking to please parade their poor young souls in and out for their dumbfounded consideration, a Google search of “cheapest studio in Boston” led to an AI-generated article about the apartment. Then one day, my dad and I picked up a rental van, packed it all up, and drove away.

I now sit at a dining table (what a concept) that collects many books and papers and objects unassociated with dining in a one-bedroom unit in Austin, built in 1968. And one evening, I opened the door to let in a small dog, now curled up on the very pillow I rest my head upon at night, who never left.

Most beloved creature

It’s March and I’ve been readying the garden already for a month now, a simple truth that in only its second spring taking root in my brain feels yet like lunacy, but in fact it’s really already too late, too hot, for the lettuce sprouting in the greenhouse. It is now close to two years since I was first paraded into this unit for my own dumbfounded consideration. I wanted to write here that this would be my first dispatch from Texas, but that isn’t true—because I actually sent out a totally unprompted, unceremonious missive about my beef with god, out of nowhere in a long silence, last January (which I have since archived but perhaps will RESURRECT again someday, ha ha HA).

I shrugged off the call to humble reflection, scribbling some acutely Midwestern attrition, like, “I told my friend she was being annoying, which wasn’t very nice,” and was met with a gentle rebuke. That’s not really the kind of sin we had in mind.

—Excerpt from since-archived (but ongoing) beef with god

I’ve archived most everything that was here before, actually, which, in a similar vein, happened to include a rambling essay about androids and pandemic anxiety, personal reviews-of-sorts of the years 2017-2020 (in varying forms and often sent months into the next year), other miscellanea, still more silence, and, apropos of nothing, more than 2,000 words on The Godfather.

The B plot of The Godfather is a powerful man turning into a harmless grandpa. You could almost miss it—Vito peering into a fish tank and tapping the glass while Clemenza and Michael talk business in his office. He also very abruptly begins wearing checkered shirts and cardigans.

—Excerpt from 2,227 archived words on The Godfather

Hello darkness, my old friend (Source: r/shittyaquariums, Reddit)

This archive had also survived a previous archiving, after I’d withdrawn my thoughts from TinyLetter and back-dated them here. Not everything survived. TinyLetter, as it turns out, has now shut down. And in reviewing that archive—containing, incredibly, 28 items written and sent out by a person who existed between 2016 and 2019—I was stunned and a little moved not to find its author to be intolerable or even all that annoying. 

I had more to say, apparently, into what we sometimes called and even then often felt like the void. But the void spoke back—was, in fact, a since bygone internet and web of social media platforms that were far chattier and more organically self-directed by interest and connection. There is no void more void, it turns out, than one governed by algorithmic suggestion and increasingly unmoderated of misinformation and hate speech. Or, necessarily, there is, and billionaires are writing laws and cutting budgets that ensure we’ll one day stare into its vacuous non-depths. Yet no matter how void the void, if you do not reach across it, nothing reaches back. (I have serious qualms about this platform, and yet it seems one of the few digital places actually connecting people who may enjoy one another’s work.)

(40% off? In this economy?)

I could compare my archival tilling to the death and new preparations that have taken place in my garden in the last year, could say that I am grinding up the previous castings of my brain to spread out like compost for new ramblings. (Yum!) But that would conveniently obscure the fact that there was really no productive reason for everything in that garden to have died as it did this brief winter. Alas, I was too busy preparing to lose power (shocked into action by last winter, during which I did for six consecutive days), too busy eating everything out of my freezer in the most economized order to make note of perennial frost tolerance/intolerance, too busy pulling up the roots of the autumn’s annual death at the neighborhood association’s sinisterly timed insistence to tend to the yet-living (a poem for the association’s president: “I HAVE REMOVED THE VISIBLE DEATH FROM THE GARDEN, [REDACTED] / DOES IT PLEASE YOU / DID IT FRIGHTEN YOU”). Or that there was really no reason for my having just nearly killed all the plants inside the house yet again. (That’s just depression, baby!)

Kate Winslet in Ammonite (2020), a grumpy lesbian without electricity (or, footage of me in February 2023)

There are certainly worse forms of inaction to practice than neglecting your garden. After all, the garden doesn’t really need you (as dogs and people do). Maybe it needs you in its uncanny little displaced environment to flower, to put out fruit, to achieve your specific designs—but it can still become something more important than you even in death by your neglect, by your human depression. It’s easy to justify maintaining only the necessary actions by foregoing a few others, then many others, letting them slough off your psychic body like so many wilted leaves. But, regrettably, I am not a plant. And not only am I not a plant, I find that I am far too unruly a beast to easily return to order once I have chosen the quiet destruction of self-erasure.

But the care must return.

Take that, god (via beloved Haley E.D. Houseman)

I am not really writing about posting here or anywhere anymore. But I am writing about writing, making art, living, stretching, growing, about reaching in or out to look, to say hello, to offer something.

Hello again. I’ll be back soon.

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Two posts have survived this controlled burn. Interestingly, they were both sent in 2019, from a pre-pandemic world. INTERESTING!

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