The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Halloween’s Lost Heroes: Michael Pollan on Radical Gardening and the Insurgent Botanical Origin of the Broomstick in Flying-Witch Legends

By Maria Popova

Halloween’s Lost Heroes: Michael Pollan on Radical Gardening and the Insurgent Botanical Origin of the Broomstick in Flying-Witch Legends

“Oh that beloved witch-hazel,” Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousins in 1876 as she tended to her famous garden, “one loved stalk as hearty as if just placed in the mail by the woods… witch and witching too, to my joyful mind” — her garden, across the hedge from which lived the love of her life, joylessly married to Emily’s brother, absent from Emily’s arms for a quarter century. That same year, she wrote in a poem:

Long Years apart — can make no
Breach a second cannot fill —
The absence of the Witch does not
Invalidate the spell —

As a gardener and a poet, ever since she pressed four hundred wildflowers into the teenage herbarium that became her first formal act of composition, Emily Dickinson had an uncommon grasp of how the life of plants and the life of feelings interleave — particularly the forbidden, the subversive, the countercultural.

In many ways, across epochs and cultures, gardens themselves — and not only the plants grown in them — have served as psychoactive agents profoundly transforming the human experience: gardening as resistance, gardening as growing through grief, gardening as finding the roots of happiness, gardening as “an exercise in supreme attentiveness.”

Gardening as witchcraft for the soul — defying the permissible, magnifying the possible.

Red poppy by Elizabeth Blackwell from A Curious Herbal — the world’s first illustrated encyclopedia of medicinal plants. (Available as a print and as a face mask, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

This defiant aspect of gardening, so foreign to the dominant modern model of the garden as a place of order walled within a lawn-mowed wilderness, is what Michael Pollan explores in a portion of his 2001 classic The Botany of Desire (public library).

He writes:

I sometimes think we’ve allowed our gardens to be bowdlerized, that the full range of their powers and possibilities has been sacrificed to a cult of plant prettiness that obscures more dubious truths about nature, our own included.

But for most of the history of our species, the relationship between nature and human nature has been one of conviviality rather than conquest and control. Only in the mere blink of evolutionary time called modern civilization did we begin viewing the rest of nature as a “parallel world.”

Pollan envisions a future that might view our present conception of the garden — a place for basic produce, household herbs, and pretty flowers — as “almost Victorian in its repressions and elisions,” which include the modern repression and elision of the garden’s radical past. He traces the subversive botanical roots of the mythic flying witch’s broomstick as one example:

For most of their history, after all, gardens have been more concerned with the power of plants than with their beauty — with the power, that is, to change us in various ways, for good and for ill.

In ancient times, people all over the world grew or gathered sacred plants (and fungi) with the power to inspire visions or conduct them on journeys to other worlds; some of these people, who are sometimes called shamans, returned with the kind of spiritual knowledge that underwrites whole religions. The medieval apothecary garden cared little for aesthetics, focusing instead on species that healed and intoxicated and occasionally poisoned. Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to “cast spells” — in our vocabulary, “psychoactive” plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladonna, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skins of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop from Down-Adown-Derry, 1922. (Available as a print.)

It was in one such epoch that Johannes Kepler took six years from decoding the laws of the universe to defend his herbalist-mother in a witchcraft trial, while elsewhere in Europe the world’s first prim and proper botanical gardens were sprouting up.

The Botany of Desire — which also gave us the story of how “broken tulips” shaped the modern world — is thoroughly satisfying in its totality. Complement this fragment with the little-known botanical-cultural story of why NYC is known as “the Big Apple” — a surprise even to most native New Yorkers — then revisit Pollan on how one particular plant magnified the bewitchment of Bach.

BP

Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World

By Maria Popova

Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World

The great myth is that truth is an emergent property of fact, that it bubbles up from the bottom of reality once the mind attains enough fathoms of factuality. But objective reality — all those things like gravity and light and the fossil of the Archaeopteryx that exist whether or not we believe in them — is pocked with myriad subjective realities, each lensed through the particular qualia of the perceiver, each a function not of the mind alone but of the entire organism and the whole of its lived experience, embodied and enacted by the total creature. What we call truth, and how we arrive at it, has more to do with that tessellated totality than with the mind’s rational analysis of reality.

Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) explores this with her characteristic rigor of thought and passion for language in a wonderful essay about the Ancient Greeks later included in The Common Reader (public library) — the classic collection that also gave us Woolf on how to hear your soul.

Virginia Woolf

With an eye to “the indomitable honesty, the courage, the love of truth” that made Socrates such a timeless fulcrum of wisdom (which, I suppose, is the ultimate use of the truth), and in fiery defiance of Descartes, she insists that we arrive at the truth — about the world, about ourselves, about the substance life is made of — with more than the mind:

What matters is not so much the end we reach as our manner of reaching it… Truth is various; truth comes to us in different disguises; it is not with the intellect alone that we perceive it… Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties. Are we to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the frivolities of friendship because we love truth? Will truth be quicker found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep instead of talking through the long winter’s night? It is not to the cloistered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude that we are to turn, but to the well-sunned nature, the man who practises the art of living to the best advantage, so that nothing is stunted but some things are permanently more valuable than others.

The great paradox is that truth — the truth — is at once multifarious and unitary, something Woolf captures in her altogether exquisite meditation on creativity as the antipode to the “non-being” that slips over reality like cotton wool, at the end of which she writes:

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… The whole world is a work of art [and] we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

BP

When Your Parents Are Dying: Some of the Simplest, Most Difficult and Redemptive Life-Advice You’ll Ever Receive

By Maria Popova

When Your Parents Are Dying: Some of the Simplest, Most Difficult and Redemptive Life-Advice You’ll Ever Receive

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself,” Kahlil Gibran wrote in his poignant verse on parenting. And yet we are, each of us, someone’s child — physiologically or psychologically or both — and they sing themselves through us as we sing ourselves into our longing for life, whether we like the melody or not.

Like a Zen koan, this fact becomes utterly discomposing when you begin thinking deeply about the fundamental, layered realities beneath the mundane, even banal factuality of the fact. Parents — the very notion of them. The notion that you — this immensely complex totality of sinew and selfhood, this portable universe shimmering with a million ideas and passions and little ways of being-in-the-world that make you you — began as a glimmer in someone else’s eye, a set of chemical reactions that became molecules that became cells in someone else’s body before they constellated into you. The notion that so many dimensions of your personhood, so many of the givens you take for granted in making sense of the world, were forged by someone other than yourself (and possibly other than the body that begot the cells that became you) — someone who occupies, in the cosmogony of you, this strange and staggering position of arbiter between the existence and nonexistence of the particular you that you are.

Kinship by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

The doubly discomposing experience of what happens when that arbiter crosses the threshold of their own nonexistence is what Mary Gaitskill addresses in her thoughtful, tender contribution to Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two (public library) — the wondrous 2002 anthology by artist and writer James L. Harmon, inspired by one of his own spiritual parents: Rilke and his timeless Letters to a Young Poet.

Gaitskill writes:

My advice here is very specific and practicable. It is advice I wish someone had given me as forcefully as I’m about to give it now: When your parents are dying, you should go be with them. You should spend as much time as you can. This may seem obvious; you would be surprised how difficult it can be. It is less difficult if you have a good relationship with the parent or, even if you don’t, if you’re old enough to have lost friends and to have seriously considered your own death. Even so, it may be more difficult than you think.

With the sensitive caveat that there exist people “to whom this general directive does not apply” and her advice is not meant as a rebuke to those people, Gaitskill addresses those of us raised by fallible parents who, in one way or another, failed dreadfully at the deepest task of parenting — unconditional love:

If you’re a young person who has had a bad relationship with your parent, it’s a nightmare of anger, confusion, and guilt. Even if you hate them, you may still not want to believe it’s happening… Even if your parents have been abusive, physically or emotionally, they are part of you in a way that goes beyond personality or even character. Maybe “beyond” isn’t the right word. They are part of you in a way that runs beneath the daily self. They have passed an essence to you. This essence may not be recognizable; your parents may have made its raw matter into something so different than what you have made of it that it seems you are nothing alike. That they have given you this essence may be no virtue of theirs — they may not even have chosen to do so. (It may not be biological either; all I say here I would say about adoptive as well as birth parents.)

Art by Ekua Holmes from The Stuff of Stars by Marion Dane Bauer.

Being with a dying parent, Gaitskill notes, is a way of honoring the fact — so basic yet so incomprehensible a fact — that they will soon be gone, and with them will go your experience of being their child in the way you have known, a fundamental way in which you have known yourself. At the heart of this dual recognition is “the hard truth that we know nothing about who we are or what our lives mean.” She writes:

Nothing makes this plainer than being in the presence of a dying person for any length of time. Death makes human beings seem like very small containers that are packed so densely we can only be aware of a fraction of what’s inside us from moment to moment. Being in the presence of death can break you open, disgorging feelings that are deeper and more powerful than anything you thought you knew. If you have had a loving, clear relationship with your parent, this experience probably won’t be quite as wrenching. There may in fact be moments of pure tenderness, even exaltation. But you might still have to watch your parent appear to break, mentally and physically, disintegrating into something you can no longer recognize. In some ways this is terrible — many people find it absolutely so. There is another side to it, though: In witnessing this seeming breakage, we are glimpsing the part of our parents that doesn’t translate in human terms, that which we know nothing about, and which the human container is too small to give shape to.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print.)

Because any emotional experience we have when facing another is always an emotional experience we have within, and about, ourselves — especially if that other gave rise to this self — facing this supraknowable quality is facing the limits of our own self-knowledge. Gaitskill writes:

Knowing your feelings is hard too because there’s so much emotion, it’s hard to tell which is truest. Part of you might want to leave right away; part of you might want to stay forever. That’s why I advised that you stay “for as long as you can.” What that means will vary with each person, with the needs of the parent and the other relations. A day might be enough, or it might take a whole month. If it’s a prolonged situation, it might be good to leave for a few days and come back. Those decisions are so personal they are beyond the scope of my advice — except my advice to pay close attention to yourself. If you feel, To hell with this, I’m getting out, don’t worry — there’s room for that. Maybe in fact you should leave. But before you do, be sure that voice is not shouting down a truer one. When your parents die, you will never see them again. You might think you understand that, but until it happens, you don’t.

Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

In a sentiment on the surface contradictory but in fact consonant with the deeper meaning of what artist Louise Bourgeois inscribed into her lifelong diary in her old age — “You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.” — Gaitskill concludes:

They say that you come into the world alone and that you leave alone too. But you aren’t born alone; your mother is with you, maybe your father too. Their presence may have been loving, it may have been demented, it may have been both. But they were with you. When they are dying, remember that. And go be with them.

Complement this fragment of Take My Advice — which also includes novelist Richard Powers on the most important attitude you can take toward your life and philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to honor your inner world — with Richard Dawkins on the luckiness of death, Marcus Aurelius on embracing mortality as the key to living fully, and Zen Hospice Project founder Frank Ostaseski on the five life-redeeming invitation to extend in facing death, then revisit this tender illustrated meditation on the cycle of life.

BP

What Is Your Refugium?

By Maria Popova

What Is Your Refugium?

For courage, says Bulgarian folk wisdom instructs, keep a horse chestnut in your pocket.

Even as a child, I was mistrustful of superstition. But every autumn, I would pick up dozens of them from the sidewalks of Sofia and fill my pockets — not as a spell against fear but as an ode to joy. Conkers, as the English call them, spun me up in delight — shiny as mahogany, smooth as river stones, tiny planets from some other universe, the wonder-smitten eyes of some prehistoric creature.

I didn’t know then that they are emblems of life’s irrepressible insistence on itself — miniature monuments to the stubborn creativity of survival.

Illustration from Die Baume und Straucher des Waldes by by Gustav Hempel and Karl Wilhelm, 1889.

Three million years ago, as the Ice Age was beginning to sink its cool blue fangs into the warm body of Earth, the widespread horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) began dying off, until only a small population remained, most of it sheltered in the gorges of Bulgaria’s mountains. There, in their sanctum of stone, the trees found themselves unable to attract pollinators during the slender three-week window of their flowering.

This is the story of life — innovate or die: The horse chestnut evolved enormous white flower spikes with pink tips and a chemical hack to block the oxidation of polyphenols in the petal, which turns each flower brown and sheds it after pollination. For three whole weeks, the horse chestnut remains a bride in a gown of amazement, its crown an aria of perfect white blossoms that no bee can resist, all because there was a safe place in which to experiment with the possible.

Illustration from American Medicinal Plants by Charles Frederick Millspaugh, 1887.

That place, I learn from my poet friend Hannah Fries’s absolutely wonderful book A Forest Language, is called refugium. Hannah writes:

When glaciers last crept down from the Arctic, 20,000 years ago, there were places where the icy fingers didn’t reach — mountaintops, hot springs, lowlands beyond the ice. There were pockets of green where things crawled and slithered and ate and mated, protected places where life went on, and from which life set forth again as the ice receded. Refugia.

[…]

The gift of a refugium is time. It holds in its small cup of safety a promise for a new world to come. And it lends out to the living all the years, centuries, millennia it might take to finally find that world.

Even in easier times, it is wise to tend the refuge. What is Earth, after all, but a momentary refugium in the inhospitable blackness of space? From a vantage point far beyond our grasping glows the blue-green dot, a brief and luminous memory in the mind of the universe.

It is the memory of a place where a simple cell had the ambition to harness the energy of a star, and from it, the green wonder of leaves, the trunks rising up, bursting and blooming into the sky — all of life in the sweet, cool shade below.

We too need them, these refugia that shelter us, that save us in the ice ages of life. Whatever your refugium may be — a place, a person, a practice, a poem — it is worth tending to with all the might and all the means you have.

BP

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