Fertile Grounds for Atta
I had a dream the other night. In it I met-up with an old lover. He still looked good and we started making out. As we undressed, he said something like, “you still look good, but not as good as I do.” Still though, he accepted my advances and we ended up having sex.
When I woke-up, I considered the dream more: Does his desire, or rather acquiescence to sleep with me, really prove what I want it to prove about me? I want to be sexy. I want, when I meet an old friend/lover, to seem the same. Or at least as well preserved as possible for my age. I want to use the state of my body to prove control over my life, over the world. But in the dream, I was lesser than my peer. We had sex, but it didn’t really make me feel the thrill of being affirmed, of being desired. The ex accepted my advances for his own reasons. I mean he wouldn’t be the first man to sleep with a naked woman because she was there and willing. Does it prove anything special about me?
I am still re-watching True Bloods. In it, so many characters are having sex. But there is a bit of a twist to the story: Drinking a vampire’s blood makes a human sexually attracted to them. Meanwhile the smell of a fairy, which the main character Sookie is a partial human/fairy hybrid, is a sensual pleasure to vampires. The characters, human/fairy/vampire are all deriving a sense of self worth by being the object of desire of others, of being loved by them, but is anyone in the story actually loved and desired for who they are or is it just chemical – the smell/taste of their blood – that gets their lovers hooked?
The more I thought on it, the more I started wondering if the things from which I derive my sense of self-worth, my sense of identity and pride, actually confirm anything about me. Or is it just that I am running around reading meaning into states of rupa, fooling myself into finding affirmation in things that aren’t about me at all?
I thought about my garden, it has been a huge boost to my ego how everyone in the neighborhood complements it. Still, as much work as I do on it, it is always changing, shifting, moving toward wildness. That is the nature of gardens, of plants, as is their receptiveness to being pruned, fertilized, responding to interventions that –temporarily –effect their shape and growth. But is this, the nature of plants, something I should take-on as a personal success, an affirmation of greatness? This is nonsense.
The signs of this being nonsense are everywhere: For start, come winter, no matter what care I give these plants, they will all go brown, shrivel and die. And, without any intervention from me, in spring, many of them will revive again and turn green. It was like this before I bought the house and it will be like this after I sell. This is the truth of gardens, the truth of the world. To take small, temporarily, alteration in the garden’s state as a point of pride is to miss the forest for the trees. It shows I will grasp at any small and insignificant thing – a few extra flowers on the hydrangea, a well-shaped peony, a carefully located rose bush – as a source of identity. All while the bigger story – arising, shifting, ceasing with the seasons – is as impersonal as stories get.
What’s more is that there is ample proof that this great gardener identity is totally arbitrary. When we first moved into the house, there was so much work to be done, I left the garden to grow wild. In fact, I thought, the garden is outside, it’s the inside that is important, that reflects me. Only after the inside was ordered in a way I liked did I extend the identity building quality of the house to the garden as well. Once I did, there was no end in the delight I would take in the shapes of plants. All the toil felt like play as I imagined the way I was shaping myself, the way the neighbors viewed me, through the garden.
This is all bullshit. A garden that takes one shape or another proves the circumstances necessary for plants to grow into certain shapes has been met. That I direct my efforts at crafting and curating those states proves the circumstances for my own desire to exert such effort have been met. Namely, the circumstance of starting to view the garden as the grounds to grow not just flowers, but identity was met, so suddenly I turned attention from inside the house to outside and started gardening. The plants, the effort, both are circumstantial, conditional. And what is conditional is, of course, not me.
With both the house and the garden I used arrangements, ornamentation, decoration, trivial details of difference to all other homes and gardens as affirmation of myself. When the states please me, I feel ego puffed, joyful, successful. But the joy, and the effort to try and arrange states, arise only from the mistaken belief that these things prove something about me. In truth, they prove only that I am deluded enough about the meaning I put into states of rupa, deluded by self-fabricated identity I build through ‘self-belongings’ , that I am willing to spend hours under the beating sun, knee deep in dirt, bloodied from thrones, trying to arrange the perfect flower bed.
