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The Lost Language of Plants, Part 1 of Some

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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.

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Checklist for Existence

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I’ve tried to come up with, implement, and stick to a set of procedures in order to optimize my time and actions to achieve a perfect existence. I’ve looked back on my life and created a narrative. I’ve seen how the pieces fit, how each decision led me to the next decision, and how that single chain has led me to the present moment.

How disgusting are procedures when applied to the living of a life; how laughably insufficient is hindsight to explain even a single journey.

I’ve been searching for answers and hoping I could share them with others, but in this life, brief as autumn grass, no two paths are the same.

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Time Marches On / There’s More to Life Than Not Dying

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Thank God for the marching on of time. And I’m going to thank God here because you know what I don’t give a damn. Fuck it. I can thank whoever I want.

But let’s try to stay on topic, if you don’t mind.

Yeah man, I’m feeling way better today! Even though a few minutes ago I thought I was going to explode with frustration over this stupid computer error. And even though I’m not feeling like a million bucks. I feel better than yesterday, and what did I really do?

Nothing.

Time heals all wounds. Soon enough we’ll all be dead.

And that’s another thing. I like the quote about “death is not the province of the living” or something like that, but I started thinking a lot about this other thing where I say “there’s more to life than not dying.”

I’m pretty cautious I guess, always expecting some shit to go down. I guess I can keep expecting shit without getting all worried about it. I think that’s what happens when I get scared because I’m in that flow state and time is flying by. I’m scared that I’ll be dead soon, but you know what, fuck it there’s more to life than not dying.

Yep my wife and I are getting along famously. We’re about to go out for drinks right now. Then we’re going to come home and eat risotto. I even bought some beer for later, fuck it! And yesterday I was thinking, damn I shouldn’t drink so much. Mostly because I was feeling super guilty but also because I was embarrassed about how I was fawning over the singers at the concert. They were in the crowd and I was hunting them down being like, Damn! You are the greatest! All crazy like. Clearly drunk, I’m sure.

So I was embarrassed about that as I usually am when I black out. I guess I didn’t use to get embarrassed when I blacked out, back in 2010, but in that year I was blacking out every other night. So I’m drinking less now and sleeping less now and I guess that adds up to I have more time to judge my past actions and feel embarrassment about them. But you know, them singers probably didn’t give a fuck I was wasted, shit that’s what we’re there for. And I didn’t follow them home or anything, like I did that one time with that girl. Now that’s fucking embarrassing. And actually more than embarrassing. But that’s another story.

And so what if they did think I was an asshole? Is that ruining their lives right now? No! Fuck, and even if something I did did ruin their lives, is that really my fault? Aren’t we responsible for our own happiness?

Shit, maybe not! Maybe there are forces outside of our control directing our lives. Like the stars! Or reptiles. Anything to take the responsibility away. Make it stop! It burns!

It burns.

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The Winter of 2015

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I just finished reading three books (Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Ghostwriter by Philip Roth, and Better Than Sex by Hunter Thompson). I may have read The Ghostwriter too fast but I’m not in the mood for picking apart a tiny novel loaded with literary allusions and stylistic nuance. I don’t know why my book guy at work decided now was a good time for Philip Roth. Next on the list in that vein is Portnoy’s Complaint. Then Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I’m still a hundred pages out on Anxious Decades, the book about America from the 20s to the 40s. Tess was good but the ending was necessarily depressing.

I don’t remember a time when I was reading as often as I am now, except maybe elementary school. I think reading has gotten me out of my own head and that is always good for my mental well-being, although, like the famous writer character in The Ghostwriter, I’m loathe to do anything that might compromise my writing potential. What I’m learning is that state of boredom and depression doesn’t produce good writing, it just produces hours of time to think about writing something good.

Today I went to the gym and ran a mile in six minutes fifteen seconds. My best time ever was five minutes thirty eight seconds when I was on the track team in high school. I’m ten years older now, so I figure that’s pretty good. My goal is to go to the gym five times a month every month of this year. I am starting to feel more energetic as of a couple of days ago. People always told me that exercising makes you have more energy, but I would exercise and then go to sleep. I did that today, in fact. Yesterday I was thinking to myself, You know what I don’t do anymore? Fall asleep when I am trying to write. Sweet! and then today I came home and tried to finish reading a book and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. That used to happen to me all the time. I used to think I had narcolepsy or some shit. But anyway, yeah I never noticed an increase in energy after working out, but I think what they didn’t tell me or perhaps what I didn’t hear is that it comes on slowly and seems to be unrelated to when you actually work out. Or maybe these past few days I’ve been feeling more energetic because I am reading more. I don’t know. Today I didn’t feel as energetic as I did yesterday.

Still not dreading, which is good but weird and almost weird enough to make me start dreading the day when I will dread things again. It reminds me of this post by The Babe about not trusting a good mood. However, I’m out of the reach of those thoughts right now, somehow, so as I type this I don’t actually have those feelings of paranoia, but I do remember them enough to question why I don’t have them. It’s as if I’m living on a higher plane. Throughout this post I have tried to throw in a fuck or god damn but they haven’t been fitting in. Too emotional for the rarefied air here.

I haven’t been writing any fiction, but I have had some insights into a method that might work for me. I like to type fast and I don’t like to look at what I’ve written unless it’s a completed thing. I like editing, but then I usually don’t like what’s left after I cut up what I wrote. It’s like a tortured building. It was a drawing of a building, but then I built it and realized it wasn’t a good building, so I hammered on parts and added other parts on, and the added parts are all glittering and out of place, and then I gild that shit somehow and then sand the whole thing down. If I liked editing, I would go back and delete that whole weird metaphor. So anyway, I think a lot of my writing is thinking. Not the idle kind of thinking I do constantly, but focused thinking. Like sitting the fuck down and forcing myself to think of the same thing for me than five minutes. There, I got a fuck in at least.

The emotion is coming back now that I’ve had a beer, or half of one, which is as good as a whole one I guess since I haven’t had one since Sunday and even then it was only one. However I refuse to entertain the thought that my increase in energy and my decrease in dread is because I’m drinking less. No, it must be something more complicated.

Anyway, I’m going to Vermont for a week soon, and I intend to bring nothing to do there, save perhaps one good, long ass book, but I’m debating even that. I must have learned nothing if I think that I can go there and just write for the whole week. If I don’t bring a book I’ll just sit drooling on myself in an armchair until I decide to go to a movie. Oh I forgot to mention that my wife will be away at class for almost the whole time, so that’s why I will have plenty of time to drool on myself.

Someday these last few months will coalesce into one memory of a time when I woke up and made coffee and my wife was always worried about her school and I read a hundred books and I bided my time at work until I could ask for the good shifts. I hope I will remember this time fondly, but I hope I won’t remember it like I do the winter of 2013: fondly, but looking with pity at a young man on a course towards his own (temporary) ruin. Just so I’m not being annoyingly cryptic, I’m referencing here that time I quit my job, went back to it, and then drank enough to get fired.

Maybe I’ll look back on these days as the time when I wrestled emotions, doubts, depression, paranoia, narcissism and nihilism to the ground, shackled and chained them to a ramshackle sled made of raw will and rode that bitch to glory.

Existential Something or Other Zen Type Shit , 2 Comments

Better Than Happiness

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I remember when I used to dread and now those days seem as far from me as tomorrow, both receding in directions that would be opposite if opposites had any meaning in the midst of infinity. I don’t feel happy or sad or cold or hot; I’m not in the mood to write or to do things or to leave things undone. Moods and feelings seem far away, too, and I just thought that maybe the black hole of narcissism that a lot of us talk about isn’t what I am, but rather where I am. Maybe I was outside all along, writing that it seemed like a black hole of narcissism on some days, some days like a black hole of despair, dread, meaninglessness and other times like other black holes of other emotional materials, while in fact what it is, is a black hole, and all those things were my own projections. Now I have passed the event horizon and whatever that increasingly foreign version of myself believed it to be, it is not, because it…is nothing at all.

Philosophy , , , 2 Comments

Humanism…Could It Work? What the Hell Is It? No Answers Here.

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Yesterday I thought of my work as a meaningful way to survive in the world as we know it, instead of some kind of sick, twisted way to maintain the flow of consumable trash through my little container, itself one of many containers inside of a larger container for disaffected young humans, and it worked pretty good.

This morning I woke up and read this piece in the New York Times by Leon Wieseltier, a man of whom I had never heard. By the time I got done with the article I was like, this man is a god damned genius. I printed that shit out on a piece of paper.

I haven’t had time to really think about it yet because I spent most of the day going to doctors. I haven’t been to the doctors, any of them, in years, not since I was a kid, and that was some weird shit going on in them “offices.” And then I got home and went out to the grocery store. And now I have to work on this old man’s book. But I’m going to read that shit again later.

I been thinking over that shit I wrote a couple of days ago some more and I think it’s still true. But here I am already relying on the feeling of it to decide whether it’s true. And again, some of the shit I wrote was brilliantly contradicted in this Wieseltier essay, so I will have to consider that shit.

I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been reading a lot of fiction or what, but I am feeling pretty insightful. I am off tomorrow, too, so I will have time to write a post and try to figure out what the fuck.

In case you don’t feel like clicking that link and maybe changing your life, I’ll just give you a little summary of that paper, as far as I remember, which isn’t very far. Wieseltier was basically defending humanism, which is especially interesting to me because I haven’t really heard much about humanism since I read Man Without a Country, Vonnegut’s memoir-ish essays (which also profoundly changed the way I thought for at least a week after I read it). But anyway humanism is…well I don’t know what it is but it’s something to do with believing humans can lead a meaningful life through being nice to people and improving themselves through critical thinking and education. That’s at least sort of like a part of it, or something.

And anyway he was saying that now we are pursuing information like we used to pursue profits, or rather we are doing both at the same time. Whether or not things are considered good is directly related to whether or not they are deemed useful by the marketplace, or whether or not they achieve some positive result quickly. We are kind of flattening the human experience by quantifying shit. He quips that economists are the people telling us how to be happy. This many people found this one thing that made them happy on this day, and since we’re all the same, we will do that same shit. A bunch of other stuff but I have to get to work. If none of that shit interests you, don’t read the essay. If it does, get on that shit. Here’s the link again, you lazy ass.

It was really mind blowing for me to read because I often think in terms of materialism, or rather what I call materialism, which to me means that emotions are just chemicals and humans are just another kind of machine the behavior of which we could accurately predict if we know all of the variables. I also often think in terms of results, like ok cut the bullshit let’s get down to brass tacks, you did A B C and you got D, I will do that shit, too, considering of course that D is desirable. Hm well I am having trouble expressing what I mean by results-oriented thinking and how it could be a bad thing, but I will try to figure it out tomorrow. The upshot, to use a word I’ve never used, is that I am re-thinking dehumanization, or vulcanization, which I was talking about a couple days ago.

He also accuses journalists of needing to have words and not having time to wait for thoughts. I do that shit a lot on this blog. Just write the same old shit sometimes because I like typing shit.