Carl Jung, Boy Plant Geek

In my ongoing quest to read more and watch TV less, I've been hitting a lot of bases simultaneously. I've already mentioned my first year with Henry Mitchell, but another tome I've been slowly working through for a while now is Carl Jung's 1961 semi-autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. It's a truly eccentric approach to memoir, with no false advertising in its title. Hard facts are downplayed in favor of dreams about divine turds and such.

At the very end of "School Years," the chapter on Jung's boyhood, I came across this intriguing and characteristically wacky passage as our hero is pondering his future academic studies:

Plants interested me too, but not in a scientific sense. I was attracted to them for a reason I could not understand, and with a strong feeling that they ought not to be pulled up and dried. They were living beings which had meaning only so long as they were growing and flowering--a hidden, secret meaning, one of God's thoughts. They were to be regarded with awe and contemplated with philosophical wonderment. What the biologist had to say about them was interesting, but it was not the essential thing. ... How were plants related to the Christian religion or to the negation of the Will, for example? ... They obviously partook of the divine state of innocence which it was better not to disturb. By way of contrast, insects were denatured plants--flowers and fruits which had presumed to crawl about on legs or stilts and to fly around with wings like the petals of blossoms, and busied themselves preying on plants. Because of this unlawful activity they were condemned to mass executions, June bugs and caterpillars being the especial targets of such punitive expeditions. My "sympathy with all creatures" was strictly limited to warm-blooded animals. The only exceptions among the cold-blooded vertebrates were frogs and toads, because of their resemblance to human beings.

Wild! There's a lot in that paragraph to mull over. I admit I have never thought much about the role of plants in regard to the negation of the Will, for one, nor I have ever considered insects as winged flowers. Then again, I'm not a late-19th century Swiss kid with a preacher dad. On the other hand, I think he's on to something with that business about the "hidden, secret meaning" of plants. Hard to pin down--but then that's what makes it secret.

Hail and Farewell

I thought sure I had taken pictures of this poor dear during the two-plus years it was thriving. Alas, this stark snapshot of its dismal end is all I can find:



May not look like much now, but behold its humble origin story: I am pretty sure it was an impatiens (what's the singular? impatien?), but whatever it was, it was an extra seedling that I had no room for in the yard. Rather than toss it out, I potted it up. Thinking it was an annual, I assumed if I was lucky it might stick around for the summer of 2008, maybe a bit of the fall, and then croak. But no! It just kept going and going, blooming now and then throughout the winter of 08/09 and then the summer of 09. I forgot it for weeks at a time (despite the fact that one thing I have learned in my gardening phase is that the smaller the container, the more often you have to water) and still it soldiered on. Looks like I finally ignored it a wee bit too long. It's bounced back from the edge of extinction more often than I care to admit, but something tells me it's finally time to say goodbye.

At the risk of revealing myself as the hippie flake I am apparently evolving into, a part of my garden, way in the back where visitors seldom venture, is designated as a kind of cemetery for favorite plants. (Most just land in one of the more conventional compost piles.) I make up a little 20-second ceremony on the spot, then drop them onto the ground where I know they'll eventually either break down or be eaten by some undiscriminating critter.

So goodbye, Little Impatiens (Or Whatever You Were) That Could. You will be missed.

Of doo-doo and Doo-Dah

I hope to be back in blogging shape again soon, but a family emergency has occupied most of my energy and time of late. Even so, I can't resist calling your attention to this wonderful reprint (repost?) of Daniel Chamberlin's profile from a 2007 Arthur of "Sodfather"/"California compost wizard" Tim Dundon. The main focus of the piece is a wild tale that, "like any good gardening story, encompasses Hollywood producers, fires, suicide, PCP injection, a nude Quaker iconoclast, standoffs with city officials and a violent pet coyote." But just as fascinating--to me, at least--is the way Chamberlin interweaves an entire scientific/socio-political history of organic farming/gardening dating back more to approximately 2400 BC. The prose is both witty and informative, as we see in this passage that explains what all those creepy crawling things are up in my compost pile:

The first stage of decomposition in composting is chemical: microscopic organisms flock to the dead thing and start to secrete enzymes that break it down on a cellular level. As bacteria, saprophytic mushrooms and other fungi eat and digest, they give off considerable heat, causing compost piles to steam and occasionally even catch fire from the trillions of tiny post-dinner bacterial farts. ...

... As the chemical decomposers make the dead organic matter a bit more malleable, the physical decomposers start to show up. Millipedes, sow bugs, springtails and snails are happy to chomp up the plants. Flies arrive bringing more bacteria to the buffet, leaving behind eggs and maggots for spiders, centipedes, mites and beetles to eat. Ants replenish the fungi, transport minerals from within and without of the pile and eat plants and insects. But the most accomplished of all the decomposers is without question the earthworm. ... These original slimy alchemists eat dirt and shit out the organic equivalent of gold: castings, also known as vermicompost. Castings enrich the soil with nitrogen, calcium, magnesium and other minerals, in addition to increasing its ability to retain water. And they attract more earthworms, too.

Speaking of alchemy, Chamberlin begins his piece elaborating a connection that has long been implicit and intuitive to me:

Alchemists were up to plenty of things, many of them having to do with relating to the natural world—and understanding its processes of transformation and transmutation—in philosophical and spiritual dimensions that transcended traditional religious thinking, both Christian and pagan, and preceded modern scientific thought. The whole “lead into gold” thing was but the most lucrative of the alchemical —or hermetic—practices in the eyes of the monarchs and rulers. Alchemy’s material prima as Peter Lamborn Wilson writes in the recent collection Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology, “can be found ‘on any dung hill.’ Hermeticism changes shit into gold.”

In short, the article suggests bridges between all kinds of things I'm interested in (see the tags/labels below), and makes a perfect capper to my reading of Amy Stewart's earthworm book, which I've been intending to write more about--and which I surely will write more about when the time is right.

"We are beautiful living mammals on a garden planet..."

Sadly, I missed this particular screening of Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within, a new documentary about a whole collection of interconnected subjects I'm interested in to varying degrees, described on the official site as "the re-emergence of archaic techniques of ecstacy in the modern world by weaving a synthesis of ecological and evolutionary awareness,electronic dance culture, and the current pharmacological re-evaluation of entheogenic compounds." The lineup of talking heads interviewed includes Ralph Metzner, Alex Grey, Terrence McKenna, and Daniel Pinchbeck, among others. I'm intrigued. Here's a trailer: