Gardening Day

We've been puttering off and on outside for a month, at least, but there comes a day when things really kick into gear. (Now there's an inappropriate metaphor!)

Any bona fine gardener who happens upon this blog will discern almost immediately that I'm not much of a gardener. But I would hope to make it clear that I have a profound affection for plants. And also for history. Call it "local history." The wild ginger, spotted trout lily, columbine, and wild geranium predate our arrival in this landscape thirty-five years ago. It's nice to see them return, sometimes year after year, at other times intermittently.

But I have an even greater affection for the plants we've been discovering, enjoying, and moving from place to place, year after year, as the light changes and other plants die off.

Most of the color we enjoy comes to us courtesy of various nurseries and the farmers market on the west side of downtown Minneapolis. Last weekend it was a madhouse. We drove by but didn't stop. Today there was almost no one there, neither vendors nor shoppers (see photo above).We picked up some herbs and some impatiens.

The real fun started later, when I discovered a three-foot  pagoda dogwood nestled within the lower branches of our spruce tree out front.  I dug it up moved it to a barren spot next to the yew hedge.

After a trip to Bachmans, Hilary planted some simple yellow marigolds in the back garden, along with some Victoria blue salvia, while I prepared the tomato beds alongside the driveway.

I was just digging up some mint that had wandered in when I saw my neighbor Sarah coming down the street.

"Hey Sarah," I shouted. "I've got something for you." I put some of the mint in a container. "Take a whiff," I said, handing her a leaf. (Then it occurred to me that phrase probably went out a style when I was in high school. More likely it was never in style.)

She had a few stalks of rhubarb in her hand.

"Lee and Joe make a great rhubarb margarita," she said. "I'm going to give this to my mother so she can make me a great dessert!"

"I bet Lee and Joe would like some of this mint for mojitos," I said. And I bedded some more in another plastic container and went down the street to give it to them. 

I wandered into the back yard, presuming they'd be out in their rhubarb patch. No one in sight. But I was struck by their white wooden tool shed, crooked door open to a shady interior. It wouldn't have been out of place in a painting by Pissarro.

The "garden" here alongside our garage is especially redolent of history. There are a few remnant raspberry bushes that were bearing fruit until recently. Another volunteer pagoda dogwood is doing fairly well nearby, and also a hydrangea that I moved from the back garden last year. Stalks of Solomon's seal are sprouting here and there—I don't know where they came from. And I also see a baby ash tree that I'll cut down when I get around to it.

Once I'd removed the mint I dumped a fifty-pound bag of compost onto the strip of exposed soil and worked it in with a shovel. It was ready for Hilary's newly purchased tomato plants anytime.

 I don't need to tell you about the little snips I took at the top of yew hedge, which is now filled with new growth, bright green. I felt a little like one of those short, balding, mustachioed men you see in England at Stourhead or Blenheim Palace, pruning away at a hedge paper-thin but thirty feet high—but not much.

Stepping around the garage to the back yard, I see a veritable field of Virginia waterleaf. It's widely considered to be a weed, but right now the airy blue-white blossoms looks nice. The plants aren't encroaching on anything important, and the bees seem to like it.

But I've failed, in this brief narrative, to touch on the most important elements of the day: the individual plants, and the harmonious way they naturally arrange themselves. I can spend a lot of time gazing at a clump of leaves, admiring its shape, its beauty, its history, its life and presence. This is Sartre's nausea, but in reverse: elation. Even the glare of the afternoon sun across the pathetic lawn, parts of which I've recently reseeded, highlights individual blades, all of which are shades of rich gorgeous green.

Hilary is meanwhile planting herbs or annuals, or up on a ladder cleaning out the gutters. We roam the yard, reconnecting from time to time, mutually lost in a heavenly spring day with plenty of things to do, but it no particular time or order.     

A Historic Evening with Norton

For many years our habit has been to take Norton out for dinner in the spring as a way of saying thanks for the opportunity of working so often and so closely with him on his books during the previous year. Some years we splurge—for example, Cafe Ena, Kâluna, Martina—in other years we take a shot at a wild and "fun" place such as the Beer Cave in Hopkins or the food truck outside Utipils brewery on Bassett Creek near Norton's house.

This year we settled on Maison Margaux in the warehouse district. Why? Because Norton wanted to go there. Why? Because a mutual friend's son works there, and besides, Norton's uncle used to own the place, back when it was better known as Ribneck Furs. He hadn't been inside since he was a kid.

Hilary and I also had good reason to enjoy the choice. We're Francophiles, of a sort. One of Hilary's ancestors was an early immigrant to Quebec, and we've spent at least four months over the decades touring the French provinces, though not recently, and Maison Marguax has established itself as a place to eat good old-fashioned provincial French cooking.

A glance at the menu confirms that it's true. Hilary and I ate aligot at a country inn in the Aubrac, a seldom visited region of south-central France. It consists of a gooey mass of mashed potatoes and gruyere cheese. I never thought I'd see that item on a menu here in the States.

I was more interested in the salade nicoise, which can be assembled in several ways. Most appealing of all, to my mind, was the cassoulet, a traditional dish of southwest France consisting of white beans, duck, sausage, herbs, and other unidentifiable elements. The residents of Carcassonne and Castelnaudary have had a centuries-old dispute as to where the dish originated and what the ingredients ought to be. Ford Madox Ford dilates at length on the issue in his book-length essay, Provence. Hil and I went to Castelnaudary years ago just to see how they made it.

One thing I can say about cassoulet is that it's always heavy, and oily, and tasty, and it gives you a stomach ache. I couldn't resist.

Norton went for the bouillabaisse, and Hilary ordered the cauliflower soufflé and the onion soup. I nursed a cocktail that seemed to be a combination of absinthe and grapefruit juice. It was good, but the cassoulet really called out for a robust red wine. I asked our personable waiter, Patrick, during one of his passes by our table, "I don't suppose you've got a rock-bottom glass of Chateaunuef du Pape on the wine list?" I was joking, and he knew it. He smiled and shook his head. "No. But I do have a cabernet franc that might be just the ticket."

As you may know, cabernet franc is most often a blending grape, dry and tending toward simplicity and harshness, but it turned out to be just the thing to cut through and complement the thick, oily, stew. Plouzeau Chinon.

It was a fine year at Nodin Press, with several stunning poetry collections and a top-flight memoir, but we didn't talk much about that. More  about a few upcoming projects, and how the tomato plants were coming along. 

It was a fabulous spring evening, there were lots of people out on the street and sitting on the terrace alongside the building. Big blue sky, and the passing years count for less than the passing minutes. 

   

What We Can Learn from Kant's Mistakes

Immanuel Kant was born on Earth Day, April 22, three-hundred years ago. The son of a saddle-maker, he eventually became one of Europe's most famous philosophers. A year-long string of conferences and celebrations have been scheduled in Germany to commemorate the event.
In the United States, not so much.

The director of the Einstein forum in Potsdam, German, Susan Neiman, recently wrote a piece for the New York Times about the abiding importance of Kant's thought. It carries the title "Why the World Still Needs Immanuel Kant."  Neiman is the author of a recent book called What We Can Learn from the Germans, so she ought to know what she's talking about.  But I could find very little in the article to convince me that Kant's ideas are worth examining in any great detail.

Her comments can be stated without much fuss: Kant "proved" that freedom, justice, and the world beyond our senses exist.  (Was there ever any doubt?)

"Kant [she writes] was driven by a question that still plagues us: Are ideas like freedom and justice utopian daydreams, or are they more substantial? Their reality can’t be proven like that of material objects, for those ideas make entirely different claims on us — and some people are completely impervious to their claims. Could philosophy show that acting morally, if not particularly common, is at least possible?"

A passage like this strikes me as borderline nonsense. Children begin to develop a notion of freedom the first time they're sent to their room for some foul deed, and they find that they've lost some of that freedom. The concept of justice follows soon after, as they begin to brood over the fact that their big sister "started it all" yet suffered no consequences. Acts of freedom and conscience are a commonplace in the lives of most adults.

In the eighteenth century the concepts of fellow-feeling and the "moral sense" developed in England, France, and elsewhere. Kant, to his discredit, rejected those concepts. He argued that a truly moral act could never be a pleasant one. If you helped an elderly man across the street and felt good about it, shame on you! In Kant's worldview, goodness was basically a synonym for duty. But who is to determine where our duty lies? And how can this devotion to duty be squared with the idea of personal freedom? And where does the genuinely moral element come in?  

But Kant is mostly known these days for his analyses of how the mind works.  Here, too, confusion reigns. Yet we can learn something from Kant's missteps. For example, the distinction he makes between analytic and synthetic judgments is worth looking into. In the former judgment, the predicate is contained in the subject. In the later, the predicate adds something to the subject. The distinction here is sound, but the words Kant uses to describe it are not. An analytic judgment isn't really a judgment at all, but simply an analysis. When we analyze something, we take it apart, separating and identifying its constituent parts. When we judge something, we assert that the thing, considered as a whole, has some sort of value.

Philosophers tend to love analysis yet are wary of judgment. Why? Because judgment is always personal. There is no way to "prove" that the Mona Lisa is beautiful (I don't care for it much myself) or that the Russian Revolution was a good thing. But the notion that 2 + 2 = 4 follows  of necessity once we've agreed to work in the decimal system of numbering. It's already part of the scheme. It's an "analytic judgment." However, it's equally "true" that 2 + 2 + 11 ... if you happen to be calculating in base three.

Kant went on the posit two realms of judgment, one of them "prior to" experience, the other following upon experience. He was eager to locate a domain of truths that weren't merely reiterations of  the presuppositions involved, but had transcended, somehow, the rough and tumble of experience. He referred to such truths as acts of a priori synthetic judgments, and many Kant enthusiasts today consider this transcendental realm as Kant's great gifr to the world.  

I find it amusing that neither of the examples of such thought given in the Encyclopedia Brittanica actually possess the required attributes of the form:

Synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject—i.e., synthetic—and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience—i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition “Some bodies are heavy” is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition “All husbands are male” is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband.

Some bodies are heavy? Well, a body would typically be described as something that has weight, so the remark is analytic. It doesn't meet the requirements.

All husbands are male? Here in the 21st century, we all know this to be factually untrue.

Kant himself considered mathematical processes as "synthetic," Heaven knows why.

 

The most glaring errors to be found in Kant's work are those that pertain to the differences between the world in which we live and our impressions of that world. It almost goes without saying that such impressions are always incomplete, provisional, and tinged with error. Kant make a great fuss about this fact, however, even going so far as to suggest that many elements of our experience derive not from the world we inhabit but from the architecture and tools supplied by our own brains.

The French intellectual and novelist Madame de Staël,  author of the first popular analysis of German culture to reach a wider Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, wrote:

The leading imperative forms of our understanding are space and time. Kant demonstrated that everything we per­ceive is subject to these two forms. He concludes that they are in ourselves and not in external objects, and that in this sense it is our understanding that imposes laws upon external nature rather than receiving them from it.

From this and other silly notions arose the idea that we can never actually form clear and adequate impressions of the things around us. The only things we can know "for sure" are the impressions themselves, locked within our heads. Kant referred to these impressions as "phenomena," and in the course of time a field of study has developed—phenomenology—devoted to exploring the ins and outs of these purely mental bits of data.

The entire field is illusionary.

Just a few years ago, MIT published a monograph titled Phenomenology in which we:

Sometimes there can be mere appearance; it looks like the turtle is dead but it turns out it was just playing dead ... But we are able to have mere appearance because experience is fundamen­tally reliable; we know the turtle is in fact alive, because we now see it swimming away, or we pick up what we think is a turtle only to discover the lifeless solidity of rock... Phenomenology does not study mere appearance; it studies the true appearance of things.

The author somehow fails to notice that "true" appearance differs here from "mere" appearance by further investigation, not of a phenomenological event inside our head, but of a real event out in a pond. We improve our understanding of the world by going out into it. 

The kernel of Kant's thought that needs to be explored and developed is the judgment, through which we assert the goodness, truth, or beauty of a thing. Or more strictly, of an event.

Value is of the essence of reality. We can defend our values, perhaps eloquently, but we can't "prove" them, because they apply to aspects of the world we share with others, rather than closed systems of our own devising. And others may react to the same things differently.

Kant describes his mission, near the start of his Critique of Pure Reason, as one of distinguishing a "pure" from an "empirical" cognition.  Underlying such an impulse is the desire for some sort of depth and transcendence, and these are things we can all aspire to. But such enlightenment cannot be gained through the pursuit of logical purity. Rather, the quest leads us through the muck of experience, guided by our conscience, taste, fellow feeling, curiosity, and judgment.

One of Kant's admirers wrote recently in the Times Literary Supplement that "it's easy to find Kant mystifying or off-putting unless you have the time, patience and sympathy to discover and properly reflect on his remarkably original work."

I have the time, patience, sympathy. I have reflected for years, on and off. Nothing good has come of it. I'm going birding.

Poetry Month Kaput

The French poet and thinker Paul Valery once described a poem as "a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words." That may be true, but I've found that in order to appreciate a poem it's often necessary to be in a poetic state of mind already. Otherwise, the concatenation of words never springs to life, but remains in an annoying state of pretentiousness, irrelevancy, and disarray.

That's the way I often feel as my eyes drift across the first few lines of a poem I meet up with in the pages of the New Yorker, for example. Most often I've never heard of the poet in question, and in any case, I'm really not in the mood. I'd rather read a movie review or flip through the pages looking for the cartoons.

Yet there are times when I make a point of drawing a book of poems from the shelf. I may not be in a fully "poetic" state of mind, but I want to get there. And this raises the question of what this state of mind  entails. Valery differentiates it from the more common state in which we use words merely to exchange information. In the "poetic universe" (Valery's phrase) a sequence of words goes beyond utilitarian effect. They command our attention, our respect. They reveal to us, along with a measure of pain and personal idiosyncrasy, perhaps, a vision of balance and harmony. We admire their form. We'd be happy to read them or hear them again.

Yes, but is the world being described really like that? The mission of poetry—a term that, properly conceived, includes all the arts—is to remind us that it is. There's a time for following the news, exchanging information, and getting things done. And there's a time for seeking out that poetic state of mind that offers a deeper, loftier, and more intimate perspective.

I didn't read much poetry during national Poetry Month. I brought home a nice edition of Philip Larkin's poems from the deacquisition cart in the lobby of the public library, but I found it dismal; I wasn't in the mood. I read a few poems from a book by Jenny Xie called Eye Level that I enjoyed somewhat, though they were spare, and soon began to sound like well edited journal extracts. I attended a poetry reading at Magers & Quinn at which three of Minnesota's premier poets, Norita Dittberner-Jax, Sharon Chmielarz, and Freya Manfred, read from recent works. It was a fine evening, though I especially enjoyed chatting with one of Freya's sons and with Norita's two daughters before the reading.

Earlier in the month I pulled a copy of Horace's Satires off the shelf, and had a high old time reacquainting myself with that genial master, as if we'd just met at a coffee shop to shoot the bull. At one point a remark by Vivian Gornick came to mind: "In the presence of shared temperament conversation almost never loses its free, unguarded flow." Yes, a poem is, or sometimes can be, a conversation.

Wandering the back yard on cool, sunny April mornings as the plants leaf out  also has a strong poetic dimension, albeit evanescent. Better yet: wandering the yard with Hilary, planning what to move where, and admiring the new growth. 

Might it be that the poetic state of mind has less to do with literary stimulation than personal disposition? It's possible. But we can also groom ourselves for easier access to that universe of harmony and balance and fellow-feeling, simply by stepping outside, or reading a poem. And sticking with it for a while.