How Do Plants Grow?

(:title How Do Plants Grow?:)

“How Do Plants Grow?”

What’s wrong with us? We used to look forward to summer. It used to be a land of endless promise, a time of literal and metaphoric sunshine. Toys and television in the morning, the woods and creek in the afternoon, and lightning bugs at dusk. It was a glorious freedom, a casting off of the burden of scholarship in order to revel in one’s own private compulsions and interests. There was no limit to the world of the moment and promises of beach trips and summer camps to come.

I just saw kids in bathing suits walk up the stairs of my apartment. Now, I know the only reason that they weren’t in our apartment complex’s pool is that it closes at 10pm. That’s how good summer is for little kids.

What happened to us?

¶ When I was a kid, my dad always dragged me out to work with him in the garden.

Man, I hated that. The sun, the dirt, the water. The mind numbing boredom.

The thing I never understood was the element of time. Somehow, these plants were growing, at a rate imperceptible to the human eye. It was something I yearned to see: look one hour and the plant is yea long, look an hour later, and see that it’s longer still. Yet, somehow, I never could see it. I’d go out there with my dad one weekend after another, but it all happened invisibly. The roots sunk in, the leaves spread out, the flowers bloomed, and the fruit ripened. Somehow, I missed it all.

¶ I distinctly remember being told as child that I was growing, if imperceptibly, and responding with a mixture of disbelief and wonder. Yes, maybe that is what science says, but who can trust science? As a kid, there just isn’t enough empirical evidence available to justify believing what your told. That’s why nature makes kids so gullible and teens so suspicious. It’s the only way to balance the need to keep kids from putting their hands in the fire with the risk of cultural stagnation that comes with blind acceptance of authority. Empiricism must be overridden by the preservation of the species. Maybe I’m growing, but who can tell?

If something happens slow enough, is it even happening?

It’s only now—after twenty one years of growing and getting bigger, of learning things and forgetting them, of going places and coming back—that I even feel qualified to guess that universe is maybe like what they say it is. It’s only after seeing Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, and Fuji that I imagine the pyramids might be real.

¶ We’d just go out and water things and dig stuff up and maybe plant something. I can’t even remember what it really involved anymore. I just remember how psychically painfully it was. I hated all that physical what-and-all with my entire puny 8-year-old body and mind. I liked riding my bike and tramping through the woods. Even if I went out with my brother, it was still, at heart, a solitary experience. It was just me and motion, me and climbing on stumps, me and my imaginary adventures. Puttering in the garden, that was an activity in which the existence of beings outside of self was an undeniable and bare fact. That is to say, the existence of my father as independent consciousness was made painfully real through his clashing perception of the world. Somehow, he acted like mowing the grass was fun. Sometimes, I would go out in the woods or hide in the house with the objective of remaining outside of his perception. “Let him entertain his own factical projects,” I would have said, had I known Heidegger. “This Dasein is uninterested.” My brother, I could make him play along in space invaders or karate or whatever, but my dad was a force of his own. Like the plants in the soil, he stood aloof to my entreaties, and nothing I did shook loose his secrets.

What joy is there in toil?

¶ The real problem is, we’re not kids anymore. Which is to say, we aren’t ourselves anymore. Being unable to recognize our present state as self of consciousness, we’re haunted by something ineffable. That’s why ‘graduating sucks,’ and no one really wants to take on post-collegiate responsibilities. Everyone wants to indefinitely defer killing our true self, our childhood self.

Or maybe ‘true’ is the wrong word.

Maybe the better word is first.

¶ The worst part about the garden was, there weren’t even many thing I wanted to eat in it. Sure, there were a couple watermelon, but for the most part it was tomatoes and squash, cucumbers and potatoes. Pumpkins were basically worthless as a fruit, but at least interesting to look at.

The mosquitoes were bad, and the tomato vines had something of a mythic quality in their inspiration of itchy fear, like pink insulation foam or ipecac. Just thinking about it makes me itch.

¶ I used to be such a picky eater. I hated tomatoes and eggs and beets and just about all vegetables. I can still remember the first time I ate a sub with lettuce on it and liked it. It was a bit of a turning point, though my host mother accused me of hating vegetables. I guess I’m not wholly new, either…

My dad, he’s always subtly pressuring me to eat sandwiches with a lot of vegetables on them. He knows I don’t really like all the pickles and peppers and whatnot from Subway, and he’ll make comments to the effect, in his understated way. Still, he gives me these sandwiches of his, almost as some sort of test, I think. And I eat them, letting the extra bits slop out the sides of the bread and onto the plate, and scrape the excess into the trash can when no one is paying attention.

So, the other day, he was helping me move into my new apartment, and he brought me this steak and cheese sub with a tomato and cooked in my toaster.

And I kind of liked it.

¶ See the thing is, if you killed your old self, your new self is in danger. If I start liking tomatoes, I might stop getting haircuts based on equinox and solstice. If I stop liking my stuffed animals, I might stop liking computers. And if I started liking girls…

Let’s face it, that’s the biggest betrayal there is, to go from hating girls to loving them, to go from loving a girl to hating her. Puberty was the forceful destruction of the person I thought I was. The biological underpinnings of my opinions were made unmistakably clear, and my old identity was made into a liar and fraud.

The whole change from love to hate can happen so fast, you might miss it if you’re not careful.

I have this joke theory that love and hate aren’t opposite ends of a continuum, but on perpendicular axes. So, it’s easy to see that even as the vector sum of intensity of feeling remains the same, the needle can easily rotate from charging ahead in love to barreling down in hate.

¶ What kind of responsibility to do I have to who I was? What do I owe all those dead kids? What do I owe all the unborns in front of me? None of those people are me, yet I have a deep sense of their mineness, which seems to compel me to act in deference to them. This feeling may be contingent. It is, however, quite forceful presently.

¶ Hiding in the basement, hoping my father won’t notice me watching TV, when there’s work to be done.

What could I possibly owe that kid?

¶ The Greeks after Socrates liked to divide things into essence and accident, in order to explain change. So, a seed contains the essence of its life, from germination to bloom. The only way such a change can be understood is to assume that no change is really taking place, just the same thing is manifesting differently. Science assumes the same thing and calls it genetics or biological laws. They have to assume the same laws of physics or whatever are controlling the seed from tiny acorn to mighty oak.

It’s the only way to make sense of it all.

¶ All those stuffed animals I said I’d keep loving, even after I got too old. All the times I said I’d never stop loving something or someone, only to be proven wrong.

Kids naturally trust what their told, even without experience to back them up. We get older and start questioning things, even after the world keeps being right. Empiricism is not practiced outside of the classroom.

¶ All those patterns add up to my own dissolution and replacement by someone almost wholly foreign to me. As a kid, I was so worried by the idea that time would move faster as I got older. First grade seemed to drag on forever, but I remember walking away that last day of class somewhat confused.

“So that’s it? It’s over. Boy, it sure was long, but… It’s over? For real?”

The following summer may never have ended, save for the fact that it.

Each school year’s end, I’d look back and think about how long it seemed to have been. It was clear. Time was speeding up. If it continued at its present rate, I concluded, high school and college would sail past without me even noticing.

What I hadn’t counted on was, after a certain point, you start sliding around so much that the person of the end of the year can’t even understand the actions of the kid from last semester, let alone the start of the year. It’s not time that’s coming and going fast; it’s selves.

¶ All this changing needn’t be so painful, of course. It should be possible to just accept that things come and go, and leave it at that. It’s just that, as Buddha says, we’re all desperate to grab on to, “one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshaken.” Oh wait, that was from Descartes’ “Meditations.” Whatever.

The point is, I’m desperate to hold on to something, before I become someone I can’t even understand. We’re all Hulking out forever, changed by forces we don’t understand into wholly different creatures, yet compelled to long for the self destroyed in the change. (Which I suppose is an apt description of the Fantastic Four’s Thing.)

Everything would be OK, if I just didn’t let those other me’s drag me down. The trouble is, I like them too much to not care. It’s the damn vector math. Even if I’m between love and hate with them, it still adds up.

My narcissism may be the one constant in an otherwise unsettled world.

¶ The substance, the unchanging essence of a human being, people call that a soul, but science and Buddha tell me there is no such thing. Maybe, maybe not, but for now, I have to pretend. Giving my loyalty and responsibility to the soul and not the self is the only way to balance the inconstancy of desire with the need for stability, socially and personally. I have to make a place in this world, and making that place for the soul is the only way hope I have that the place made will be suitable for whatever unborn me follows hereafter. There is no choice but to abstract the stable from the unstable and rely on it, however tentatively.

We’ll see how this works out…

¶ Once again, fireflies have started wafting about in the waning of the day. I see them, but fail to run out and catch them.

What happened to us?

How do plants grow?

Into what will I blossom or wither?

Much love,

XOXOXO,

the Earthbound kid