I did not think I would care much for Stephen Harrod Buhner’s The Lost Language of Plants. I don’t really like plants. I mean they’re fine. I do like drugs. I like vegetables and shit. I like going for walks outside. My favorite color is green because I like looking at trees and shit. But when I say plants I’m thinking of houseplants. Like plants in terra cotta buckets that you have to water until you have to go on vacation and they die or the cat eats them and you chase away the cat and shit and for what. Fucking plant in your house. With dirt and shit and sometime the bugs get in there.

But this book is pretty awesome. My reaction to it reminds me of my reactions to Jonathan Nossiter’s Liquid Memory and Beryl Markham’s West With the Night. Not that the books have anything in common I guess. And I read a review that said Nossiter’s book was pompous and shit. But whatever fuck all that the reason that it reminded me of my reaction to those books is that I didn’t think I would care for them either. In the way of not that I thought they would be bad I just didn’t think I would be particularly drawn to them.

But those books are awesome. You should read them. I read them. So you should read them. Everything I do is right. So just do yourself a favor and follow along. Saves time.

First thing to notice about The Lost Language of Plants is this guy is constantly talking about smells. If I remember right, Liquid Memory is also always talking about smells and shit. It’s funny because my brother had Covid recently and lost the ability to smell. He told me he was depressed about it. I was like what for. I could give a shit I don’t hardly smell shit anyways. Besides shit maybe. And cinnamon. But here’s my brother walking around smelling the forest and the beach and shit. And apparently people do that and experience shit through their noses. Well this guy Stephen Harrod Buhner definitely experiences most things with his nose.

Another thing is he writes in a poetic way. Everything is a metaphor and is always sloshing around and shit. Like he puts his shoes on and as he bends down the shoes melt into the ground along with a sinking feeling of sinking into feelings and his world is imbued with the…I can’t even do it.

He starts right off with a note to the reader saying the book is supposed to be a book of feelings as well as thoughts, so I guess the metaphorical language checks off in that way. I’m like a little ways through it and he’s talking about how we over value thinking and not feeling. But I guess it is funny to write a book of thoughts when you have that premise. Or ironic. Or it’s not really because you’re not saying all thoughts are bad just that feelings are good, too. He seems to be mad at Descartes for rendering the universe lifeless for everyone in the West.

He says the way he arranges the text might evoke some feelings. I guess he’s referring to the way he inserts these half pages of quotes and shit in between his own writing. I was wondering why he was doing that. I guess he’s trying to evoke a mood or some shit.

The feelings that emerge as you read the book are important. I do not believe we can solve the environmental problems facing us unless we develop our capacity for feeling and our empathy for other life-forms to the same degree that we have developed our facility for thought.

Stephen Harrod Buhner

He talks about the “aesthetic unity that underlies the ecosystems of Earth.” That reminded me of Paul Graham’s essay How to Do Great Work where he talks about if there is beauty in a theory that’s a good sign. It also reminds me of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series where Johannes Kepler is trying to get the orbits of the planets in the solar system to align beautifully, but is frustrated because he doesn’t realize the orbits are elliptical. And I’ve been thinking a lot about beauty anyway. Beauty in anything draws us, but also judges us. Beauty as a pursuit seems almost frivolous when spoken aloud and yet always feels worthwhile once the pursuit has begun. Et cetera.

…this book delves into the meaning embedded within plant chemistry, the language of plants- a language human beings in the Western world lost knowledge of when we began to think so insistently with the analytical portions of our brains and quit thinking with other, more holistic parts of ourselves

Same dude as last time

So side note because this is Anyone’s Ghost mother fucker this is some dumb ass blog where I can talk about whatever the fuck I want in some dumb ass stream of consciousness ass way and 20 people a month will still click on this shit. You can take a picture with your phone, send it to your laptop, then copy and paste the text from the photo. What the fuck. Holy shit man I am going to be so productive now. That is going to solve the remainder of my problems that ChatGPT didn’t solve.

Anyways moving on I actually fucking hate when mother fuckers start talking about holistic shit and homeopathy and fucking astrology and shit what can I say man I don’t understand how twins can have different lives and shit. And I grew up an evangelical shopping center ass Christian so you know how we all hate that we got duped into believing Jesus was our friend once we realized the whole thing was a reaction to Satanistic daycare sex rituals that never happened and the economy. And probably Fauci I think he was in office at that time.

So yeah I got a whole reaction to the word holistic even though of course the meaning of holistic is like the whole-ist…what does holistic even mean? The whole thing right? Of or pertaining to.

“Holistic” is an adjective that describes an approach or perspective that considers something as a whole rather than as a collection of individual parts. It emphasizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of various elements within a system or entity. In a holistic approach, the focus is on understanding the entire picture and how different components or aspects relate to and influence each other, rather than analyzing or addressing them in isolation.

ChatGPT

So what the fuck even ChatGPT is going to use ‘whole’ when describing ‘holistic’? What kind of cheap trick homophone is this. And didn’t there used to be a different word for homophone? Homonym. But now homonym is a larger category for homophones (sounds same) and homographs (same spelling). Shit son my cat is having epilepsy over here.

Anyways when people say that shit I’m already ready to zone out. But here he’s talking about how we started relying too much on the analytical part of our brain. And just this morning I was telling my Covid brother that we analyze shit way too much and so whenever we try to do something to improve our situation we immediately realize that there is some simpler and more effective project we could do to improve shit than the one we’re about to do so we know we need to embark on a cataloguing of all the possible projects and then we need to evaluate them for level of effort and level of impact and then we need to choose the one that offers the most bang for the buck and of course we conduct that analysis for five or six years and eventually give up the enterprise since the heat death of the universe is sometime right after Christmas and everyone is busy around the holidays. So fuck analyzing shit man let’s be more holistic. Fuck it, I’m saying it.

In the book he also talks about this list of things that pre-industrial societies seem to believe and one of them is that plants proceeded humans and in fact gave life to humans and so we are children of the plants and furthermore as such if we ever need help plants will help us. I guess plants don’t have individual lives in the same way that we do? Or does crushing the yarrow plant to rub on a wound mean that we’re taking some yarrow’s kid and sacrificing it to ourselves and the yarrow plant is ok with that? Anyways the point is we’re children of the corn. Prehistoric corn. And other plants. Well and even Darwin says that I guess, that plant life preceded animal life and Carl Sagan said that the first fishy like organism was like a detached polyp or some shit. Like a coral grew out and then severed itself with mutations and shit and then went swimming around. Or I guess floating around more likely. Then developed some fins eventually. I just remember the animation from Cosmos, you know. But yeah so science says in that way that we are the children of the plants. So my potted plants in the bedroom are into incest porn I guess. Who isn’t into incest porn these days.

Well shit y’all I got to stop now I’m out of time. Maybe I will talk more about the book later. Or I’ll just die. Or other things. Also could happen.