The Download: 10 Things in September
Trees, Anthropocene blessings, Degas, Romeo & Juliet, tidal pools, chamomile, mechanical art, and the gods.
Welcome! I’m Lex Orgera——poet, gardener, herbalist, editor—-and this is The Download, a list of 10 things I’ve been up to / reading / thinking about each month. Please share this newsletter with anyone interested in nature + culture!
Hi everyone! September just flew by! Wow. It’s been a frenetic month over here at the Yard Dragon ranch. Here are a few things I’ve been up to. Enjoy!
1. Limber
In “Temple” (my favorite so far) from the 2014 essay collection Limber, Angela Pelster begins, “I’ve read that there’s a proper way to eat a fig.” What you’re not supposed to do is “take it in hand, squeeze it and split it at the seam, because then it’s difficult not to notice when it opens red and bursting and wet that it looks like a vulva.” “Temple” features a mistaken memory involving figs and olives, the apostle Paul, Bible college, goddesses, vulvas, and more, expertly woven together. Here’s a passage that, for me, is the crux of this essay:
“I know the apostle Paul. I grew up going to a church that sat on a tall hill between the city and the country and that preached Paul from the pulpit nearly every Sunday. I loved church, even as a kid; I stayed upstairs to listen to the sermons instead of going down to Sunday school with its stupid paper crafts and songs we had to sing in a too hgih key. It seems like a miracle now, but all I remember learning in church was that God loved me and that God loved everyone the same. It took me a while, though, to wonder why none of the people telling me about this love from the pulpit had a vulva of their own.
The collection charts the author’s life and history through the lives of trees in a wholly original, inventive way. The essays aren’t so much about the trees——though they are that too——but as if the trees were blueprints or even frameworks for discovery.
2. Ecopoetics
I’m also reading a really good book of poems by Brittney Corrigan called Solastalgia from Jackleg Press. Solastalgia is an interesting term coined by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht that means the feeling of homesickness while you’re still at home and refers to the eco-anxiety of environmental change. So...you can guess what the book is about! Here is a poem from said book, one in a series of “Anthropocene Blessings.” I’m particularly taken by the thick, science-laden language of this poem. It sort of reminds me of Komunyakaa’s “Ode to the Maggot,” in the way it makes beauty from decomposition.
Anthropocene Blessing: Corpse Flower You who embarrass naturalists with your racy scientific name——your coy and skirted spathe unfolding in precocious maroon pleats about your massive spadix, phallic offering to the still-unscented air——how we tend and wait years for you to bloom inside our careful greenhouses, your wild kin dwindling as the forests fall. How we revel in your unapologetic stench, watch the carrion beetles swarm toward your tease of rotten meat and death. We hold our noses but still lean in to see the mania of insects do your bidding, smear their pollen along rings of tiny flowers at your base. May your corm be ever swollen. May your inflorescence be ever graced by flies. You who can warm your body to match the heat of our own, may your odor outlast us, we whose corpses feed the worms below the wilting petals on our stones.
3. Women in Windows
I’ve started working on a fun project. By working on, I mean that I’ve had the idea, and I’ve got an Instagram handle, Broody Women in Windows, wherein I will post only art depicting women gazing out of windows. You’d be surprised by the sheer volume of art out there depicting...women in windows. I’m sort of being tongue-in-cheek with the handle, but I’m calling attention to the ever-present male gaze and its depiction of women in art. Here’s my first post:
Degas’ Woman at the Window. I have long been a fan of this painting, ever since I saw it at the Courtauld Gallery in London where it lives. I’ve even written a poem about it, entering into a conversation with Jackie Kay’s poem by the same name and a short article in The Guardian by Francis Spalding about the painting. According to Spalding (and many others), Degas paid the woman in the portrait in raw meat. At that point in 1871 Paris was under siege, and people were starving. As the story goes, this model ate the meat raw, right there in the studio.
Here’s a little bit of my poem about the painting:
Degas painted the woman in half- life at a window, her head a smudged aspiration—— drawing breath she averts the painter’s gaze becomes a storm of particles in a Paris under siege. She eats a slab of raw meat right there in the studio——her payment for sitting & waiting for history to become. The study of art begins with the unseen, afternoon light a halo around her, just as the sky & the sky’s darkness exist in direct proportion to the depth of the cloud that houses them like a glass eye; in art time is framed;
4. Plantago & Shakespeare
Here I go again with genus Plantago. Shakespeare mentions plantain in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Two Noble Kinsmen. Here’s the bit from Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Benvolio are chatting about Romeo’s heartsickness over Juliet:
Benvolio:
Tut, man, one fire burns out another’s burning.
One pain is lessened by another’s anguish.
Turn dizzy, and be helped by backward turning.
One desperate grief cures with another’s languish.
Take thou some new infection to thine eye,
And the rank poison of the old will die.
Romeo:
Your plantain leaf is excellent for that.
Benvolio:
For what, I pray thee?
Romeo:
For your broken shin.
Romeo kicks Benvolio
Benvolio basically tells Romeo to find a new flame to preoccupy his heart, and he’ll forget the old hurt. Interestingly, Romeo tells Benvolio that plantain is “good for that,” and at first you think he means the eye infection (clarified plantain juice was often used as an eyewash during Shakespeare’s time), but then Romeo explains that plantain is good for “your broken shin.” Where does that come from? Well, I only saw the stage direction in one place, but it’s there: “Romeo kicks Benvolio,” right after “for your broken shin.” Another source says that shin is slang for heart...I’d have to do a Shakespeare deep dive to confirm either of these things, but I like the kick in the shin idea. I think there was a lot of physicality to those stage productions, and isn’t that just like two teenagers teasing each other??
5. High tides and tidal pools
Jesus Lord, I’m juggling a lot. My nighttime reading right now is The Highest Tide, a coming-of-age story about a small-for-his-age 13-year-old named Miles who has Rachel Carson memorized, is in love with his old babysitter and best friends with an elderly woman with Parkinson’s, and who knows the tidal flats of the Puget Sound like the back of his hand...and weird things are happening, starting with a giant squid that washes up where it shouldn’t be: “I heard it long before I saw it. It was an exhale, a release of sorts, and I instantly wondered if a whale was stranded again....I waited, but there were no more sounds. Still, I went toward what I thought I’d heard, avoiding stepping into the mud until I had to.”
I read this book twenty years ago...maybe more. I’ve always remembered that I loved it, but the only tangible thing I remembered were the lush descriptions of the tidal pools. Miles does with sea life what I’ve been discovering with plant life: he observes deeply and believes there’s magic in watching. Miles sees enough that some people think he has a special line to the divine...
6. Dog Anxiety
So, my Stella dog has VBA——very bad anxiety. It causes all sorts of havoc, both inside the house and outside. The other night, in sheer desperation, I made a strong infusion of chamomile tea from this year’s harvest, let it cool, and then shot it into Stella’s gullet with a syringe. It worked. She just settled right down. Even her face was calm. In fact, she has hardly even wanted to attack a cat since then. The next day I put her on an anxiety chew that also contains chamomile along with some other things like ashwagandha, L-theanine, valerian, and L-tryptophan. I’m still dosing her with straight chamomile too——it doesn’t make her groggy...just calm! Here she is eating a collagen snack:
When I was a kid, my nonna used to bring back jars of ground up chamomile flowers from Italy whenever she went back. I don’t know if chamomile was harder to get in the States in the eighties or what. But I grew up drinking chamomile for tummy issues. Often she’d try to give it to me for the nausea from migraine, which it doesn’t help, but chamomile IS great for digestion——it’s actually a digestive bitter, and you will experience that if you brew your tea for too long. It’s great for its nervine properties (calming to the nerves), and it’s wonderful to drink before bed if you have sleep issues. You want to use German chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla) rather than Roman chamomile, which is in a different genus, to get the medicinal bang for your buck.
7. Machine Dreams
I am so in love with the artist Aggie Zed. Here’s a screenshot of her website’s home page to give you a little taste:
I first came across her work in a gallery in Winston Salem, NC, but have since started following her on ye olde Insta. What a strange, wild, unforgettable world she creates, populated with mechanical angels and horse machines and dogs in ballet skirts with human legs and slouching ceramic figures wearing animal heads or holding animal puppets.
8. Vegetation Gods
I’m listening to an interesting episode of The Emerald podcast called “On Trauma and Vegetation Gods,” in which the host, Joshua Michael Schrei, explains that traditional cultures enacted rituals involving vegetation gods as a way to culturally work through the inevitable traumas of being alive. From the podcast description: “There is a profound link between the myths and rituals of the old vegetation gods and what we might now term trauma work——because the cycle of vegetative birth, growth, decay, and death mirrors our own cycle.” We——ie, modern western society——lack ritual cleansing and so trauma becomes god. That’s my take so far...
9. Masks
You know those moments when you realize that people see you very differently than you see yourself? I’ve had several people tell me recently that they are surprised that I’m writing about spirit, or finding spirit. In my internal experience, this is a topic I think about all the time, but apparently only I, and maybe Aaron, know this fact. I’m really careful, I think, with my more ethereal beliefs because I hate so much of pop spirituality——the self-made social media gurus, the empty witchery, performance masquerading as virtue...but I think as we get older, we inevitably begin to feel the need to integrate all the disparate parts of ourselves, to take off the masks we’ve constructed for protection. These discoveries are so important for initiation into the fullness of human experience. So, here I am, a spiritual being who has always believed in the unseen, who has always hovered between the seen and unseen.
10. A Reading
One of my poems, “Taking into Account the Gods” is in the new issue of Nimrod International Journal. You have to buy a physical copy of the book to read it, and it’s not yet available online, but here’s me reading it to you:
Hope you enjoyed this second installment of The Download. It’s nice for me to figure out how to filter all the things into ten bullet points ;)
Until next time,
Lex
"So, here I am, a spiritual being who has always believed in the unseen, who has always hovered between the seen and unseen."
Yeah, it's weird. I've now written about half a dozen articles for ParABnormal Magazine -- the latest on how psychedelics seem to consistently shift people's everyday beliefs towards New Agey things -- and I constantly have to ride that line between being scientifically responsible and dismissive of people's strange experiences (including my own).