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flower that cascaded forth from Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin’s coarse-woven cloak on December 12, 1531,
legend relates that a radiant young woman had appeared to this indigenous man near what is now Mexico City, identified herself as the Virgin Mary, an...
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cloak with its image of a dark woman wrapped in a blue robe scattered with stars and standing atop a crescent moon still hangs in the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe at the foot of Tepeyac,
“when Mary commanded Juan Diego to gather flowers, she rooted the Christian gospel deep within the soil of Aztec culture, since for the Indians, flowers were both the equivalents of spiritual songs and by extension, symbols of divine life.”
women votin’ so’s everybody would have bread and flowers too.”
“go toward helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country,
no prisons, no scaffolds, no children in factories, no girls driven on the street to earn their bread, in the day when there shall be ‘Bread for all, and Roses too.’ ”
a fierce argument that more than survival and bodily well-being were needed and were being demanded as a right.
an argument against the idea that everything that human beings need can be reduced to quantifiable, tangible goods and conditions.
Roses in these declarations stood for the way that human beings are complex, desires are irreducible, that what sustai...
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the time to have an inner life and freedom to roam the outer world.
“The right to live, not simply exist.”
Even when the agenda is bread, what spills over is roses.
an argument against gulags—against
against the idea that humanity can be reinvented through brute force, and against rulers with outsize power.
the perfect is the enemy of the good or at least the joyous and the free.
where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism,
You might be fighting for your ideals but you might want toast as well as justice. And that craving might be something you had in common with those you disagreed with about more ideological issues. Sometimes even lovely slices of buttered toast are about more than bread alone.
‘I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.’ ”
happy introspective trance,
the 106-acre quaking aspen forest in Utah whose forty thousand or so trees share a common root system, are essentially clones of one another, and constitute a single organism larger than any other on Earth and about eighty thousand years old.
underground mycorrhizal networks sometimes called the wood wide web that connect trees to one another in forests, circulating nutrients and information that make some forests a communicating community of not-so-individual trees.
Thoreau once noted that all animals are beasts of burden, “made to carry some portion of our thoughts.” Plants too provide us with metaphors and meanings and images, with stems, offshoots, grafts, roots and branches, information trees, seeds of ideas, fruits of our labor, cross-pollinations, ripeness and greenness, and with the symbolic richness of the thing...
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He called that intra-species cooperation mutual aid, charted its roles in animal and human life, and emphasized that evolution and cooperation were often intertwined, not opposed, but his 1902 book, Mutual Aid, did not sway the arguments of the time. Contemporary evolutionary science has come closer to Kropotkin’s version. The natural world is looking more and more collaborative and interdependent and less and less competitively individualistic.
There was a broad and deep belief in the first two thirds of the twentieth century that everyone and everything could be reinvented, that the old ways could be swept away, the past forgotten, the future controlled, human nature reshaped, and it often was yoked to the idea that an elite—sometimes an elite of scientists, sometimes of politicians—could be trusted with these immense transformations.
one of the powers tyrants hold is to destroy and distort the truth and force others to submit to what they know is untrue.
a proxy war for empiricism and the freedom to pursue knowledge.
“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future,”
A garden is what you want (and can manage and afford), and what you want is who you are, and who you are is always a political and cultural question.
Enclosure was to its time what privatization was to the neoliberal era, a dispossession of the many for the benefit of the few and an assault on the idea of both literal commons and the common good.
All art is propaganda, Orwell noted, and nature is political. So are gardens. Flowers. Trees. Water. Air. Soil. Weather.
what role tree planting and forests will play in countering climate chaos is fiercely debated, as is the definition of a forest as, ideally, a complex ecosystem of many life forms of many ages, not a monocrop tree plantation.
cutting down of trees or the preservation and planting of them are political battles.
the desire to garden, to be in the country, to rusticate, is culturally determined and rooted in class, or at least the forms it takes are.
the yearning to be more rugged, more rustic, more rough, more scruffy, is often a white and a white-collar yearning, and that those who have only recently escaped agricultural work, maybe sharecropping or slavery or migrant labor, who have survived being treated as dirty or backward, are often glad to be polished and elegant. You have to feel securely high to want to go low, urban to yearn for the rural, smooth to desire roughness, anxious about artificiality to seek this version of authenticity. And if you see the countryside as a place of rest and respite you’re probably not a farmworker.
love of nature is no guarantor of virtue.
I don’t believe in ancestral guilt, but I do believe in inheritance,
The very traceability is about people who were entered into the record, who were recognized, official. They were in the picture.
tickets to a sort of complacent confidence that both allured and repulsed.
It is less that these things are authentically desirable than that our desires have been pruned and trained and cultivated so as to turn toward them the way a sunflower tilts to the sun, and the force of that desire is authentic even if its origin is manipulated.
Britain—the mythical place bathed in an afterglow of empire, not the conflicted contemporary actuality—seemed to be a place in which all of us, even me growing up in California, had received too much instruction, and also a collage of innumerable pieces of elsewhere. It was the person in the room you were supposed to pay attention to and know all about, the one who was supposed to define what mattered and how things should be.
Colonialism meant knowing too much about the colonizers and their place, too little about one’s own people and their places.
Cortez’s invasion and the cocoxochitl plant that came back to Europe and was named after a Mr. Dahl of Sweden and hybridized into innumerable showy varieties of dahlia, its origins forgotten.
In planting that garden in Wallington, in planting roses in the garden, Orwell was rooting himself in a particular soil, and also in ideas and traditions and lineages that whether he loathed them or not were his and were all around him.
A flower is a node on a network of botanical systems of interconnection and regeneration. The visible flower is a marker of these complex systems, and some of the beauty attributed to the flower as an autonomous object may really be about the flower as a part of a larger whole. I have often thought that much of the beauty that moves us in the natural world is not the static visual splendor that can be captured in a picture, but time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passage of days and seasons and years, the lunar cycle and the tides, birth and death. As harmony, organization,
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Incredible
Elaine Scarry notes that among the complaints about beauty is that contemplation of it is passive—“looking or hearing without any wish to change what one has seen or heard.”
The artist Zoe Leonard was bashful about making beautiful images during the AIDS crisis and said so to fellow artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, who replied, “Zoe, these are so beautiful, and that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go.” So beauty can be both what one does not wish to change and where one wishes to go, the compass or rather North Star for change.
You go through all of the fighting not because you want to fight, but because you want to get somewhere as a people. You want to help create a world where you can sit around and think about clouds. That should be our right as human beings.”
that genre often called Orwellian, which is to say they were ominous in their insincerity and unsettling in their contradictions and their imposition on workers who seemed unlikely to agree wholeheartedly with them or to be wearing them by choice.
idea of an immense airplane whose sole freight was roses burning its carbon and rushing high over the Caribbean to deliver its burden to people who would never know of all that lay behind the roses they picked up in the supermarket was maybe as perfect an emblem of alienation as you could find. Could roses be more uprooted?
