Gardens, Theater and Social Justice after the Pandemic

“Let Us Cultivate Our Garden”

By Steven Leigh Morris

The Best of All Possible Worlds

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In the book’s conclusion, Candide lands at a farm having been mightily dispossessed of his mentor Pangloss’s anthem that they live in “the best of all possible worlds.”

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In Voltaire’s picaresque comedy Candide, the eponymous character is a young nobleman kicked out of his castle for kissing the baron’s daughter. In his exile, he travels the world, at times as a soldier, and in so doing, he suffers enslavement and starvation and gratuitous whippings so that his skin is flayed from his body. He witnesses the deaths (and mystifying resurrections) of lovers and friends, in addition to, as Hamlet describes the world’s torments:

    The whips and scorns of time,

    Th’opressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

    The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

    The insolence of office, and the spurns

    That patient merit of th’unworthy takes . . .

In the book’s conclusion, Candide lands at a farm having been mightily dispossessed of his mentor Pangloss’s anthem that they live in “the best of all possible worlds” (the French equivalent of American optimism and American exceptionalism) and that everything in this world has a purpose (we each have a nose which supports eyeglasses, hence the purpose of our nose is to support eyeglasses). The book closes with the following line.

“All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.”

Covid Gardens

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Horticulturally speaking, the key to survival is variety. Inclusion.

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With similar disillusion over the disconnect between cause and effect, between reason and policy, and like so many others, I’ve cultivated what could be called a Covid garden of fruits and vegetables and flowers: tulips, daffodils and hyacinths; calendulas, zinnias, marigolds, and towering sunflowers; apricot, apple, pear, peach, maple and pine trees all grown from seed; garlic and onions and tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant and squash; basil and dill and spearmint and parsley and cilantro, green beans, mustard, cucumbers, peppers, corn, watermelon, canteloupe and pumpkins. I think that about covers it. The truth is, I’ve planted gardens for years, but the pandemic has kept me on the mountain, in the garden, more obsessed and perhaps more observant.

A garden, like a play or a painting or a piece of music, holds a mirror onto the larger world, onto the way it sometimes thrives, and sometimes doesn’t. Yet the failures of a garden, like those of a play, offer lessons for improvement, for survival, which is the point – especially during a pandemic. Horticulturally speaking, the key to survival is variety. Inclusion. In the Darwinian world of horticulture, inclusion is a mark of health and beauty and sustenance – the variety of colors and shapes and textures. The bean plants provide the nitrogen for the corn that grows beside it.  Find a seed that’s just landed in your yard. Plant it. Whatever it is. What’s to lose? It might just grow. It may become something of value. It may be the only plant that survives.

The planet is aching. That ache can be felt in the garden and in the forest that contains it. Jeffrey pines suffer thirst before the bark beetles attack. Rattlesnakes now slither across trails above 9,000 feet up. Never before. Because it’s warmer up there than a decade ago. Cloud cover now forms lower. Snow clouds sometimes pack their wallop at 5,000 feet, in the village, while the top of Mt. San Jacinto pokes out above the mists and the ice. This is new.

In the garden and in the forest beyond, there is beauty, there is grace, there is birth and optimism, there is suffering and death, there is climate and climate change, there is the comedy of chipmunks, the music of babbling brooks, there are seasons. And there is that ache. A subtle illness. A slight, cosmic indigestion, so that the grandeur of the mountain vistas comes tinged with melancholy.

In the mountains, there’s no point planting anything directly into the ground. The gophers will decimate it. My entire garden lives in large and small plastic containers, mostly on a deck, but not entirely. People who don’t fence in their yards put wire around their trees to protect them from the gophers and squirrels and rabbits and deer, who keep a watchful eye out for hawks and bobcats and yelping coyotes and the occasional bear cub, who was once caught on video loping along Hill Street on the other side of our fence.

Darwin’s hierarchy still holds.

Outside my chicken coop the other day, I found a dead rabbit. It was late and I was exhausted. I’ll scoop it up tomorrow. No need. By the morning, a raven had airlifted it to its nest high up in a Ponderosa. The forest cleans itself.

It is in this forest environment, as hostile to a vegetable garden as 21^st  century American culture is to the theater, that one gleans the strategies and timing that provide food and color — sustenance for the soul. As all art should.

Up here, for example, the time to start onion seeds is October. I sprinkle them in long narrow plastic tubs that are transportable. By the time the winter freezes bear down in late November or early December, the seedlings have sprouted into waves of thin grass. The tubs must be brought inside during blizzards, or the snow and ice will send them into a kind of toxic shock.

By June, when the weather is warm and the days are long, small bulbs start to appear at their bases. This is the time to pluck all but five or six out, per tub, to dry them. And then to store them in the cellar as they harden into “sets” (mini-bulbs) that can be re-planted later. In the meantime, the remaining bulbs surge and swell, encouraged by the long days.

November is a good month to set out bulbs up here. They handle cold weather, providing the tubs are topped with dry pine needles and leaves or other forms of mulch that insulate the bulbs beneath the soil. It’s like finding the best stage for a play, and designing a set most protective of its larger purpose. These bulbs include the onion sets, whose foliage will poke through the mulch when the weather warms.  And it will warm. Every year is warmer.

July: Unlike the seeds planted the prior October, which will swell into harvestable onions in August, the sets mostly “bolt” or go to seed. This is magnificent spectacle. First arrives a spike topped with an onion dome – like on the Russian Orthodox churches.

Over time the dome swells almost into a ball. That’s when the paper skin tears, to make way for a cluster of dreidel-shaped buds that form a globe.

It’s like watching a fireworks display in slow motion. Soon after, each bud opens into a star-shaped blossom – the culmination of the display.

The changing climate and insecticides have rendered bees and other pollinators disturbingly scarce, provoking challenges for farmers, gardeners, and for plants to bear fruit or seeds. So when this year’s onions started blooming, it was discouraging to see those majestic blooms hanging in the air, alone, possibly to die on the stalk.

Then arrived one bee, who obviously got the word out. Swarms followed. To observe bees crawling around the blooms is an affirmation that for the time being at least, for one more season, life continues.

The bees are like arts funders. They catch a scent and gravitate to what their peers tell them will be a symbiotic match. Similarly essential to their ecosystem, arts funders are in ever-decreasing supply. Climate change.

Gender politics also reveals itself in the garden. The squash family (including pumpkins, melons and cucumbers) set out distinctively male and female flowers. They’re a cisgender family. The male flowers emerge first, often before any female flowers. Neither lasts long. Without the female, male flowers wither and die. And vice versa.  The object is for the pollinators to grab pollen from the anther of an open male flower and transport and spread it on the stigma of the female flower. In the absence of bees, this pollination is often performed by humans.

Not meaning to strain the allegory: If you want and believe in artistic fruit and there are no funders around, find a way to do it yourself.

Fruit trees are generally intersex creatures, with each flower containing male and female parts. These flowers still require a pollinator, but unlike the squash, fruit blossoms generally don’t traffic in co-dependence.

The Pandemic  

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The disproportionate effects of Covid-19 on people of color is not just nature, it’s a direct manifestation of policy, of mismanagement stirred into a kind of vicious political expedience . . .

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There’s a plank-bordered and enclosed patch of ground, away from the house, where a prior owner had a raised garden.  I chose to use that quadrant for the first time, this summer, with tubs of pumpkins, cantaloupes and watermelons that would have plenty of room to spill out of their tubs and spread.

Spring brings cool weather to these climes, so the melon and pumpkin seedlings took a while to develop. With the heat of June, they took off, developing sprawling leaves and thick stems that bore the promise of flowers and fruit soon to come. And then it happened. At first it was just one tub of watermelons. The leaves were stripped, stems broken, leaving barren stem spikes.

I blamed a local squirrel named Fred, whom the next door neighbor feeds peanuts. Squirrels are precocious, playful and destructive. Once I heard my next door neighbor yelling at Fred to get out of his living room, which he did, before scampering up a pine tree and chortling.

A week later, six tubs of watermelon and six tubs of cantaloupe had been stripped bare, despite the mesh guards which remained in place. Fred had been wrongly accused. This was the work of some virus-like insect. Only the pumpkins and four Mammoth sunflowers escaped the carnage.

Farmers know all about locusts. If the garden has diversity, all is not lost. And, maybe, send up a prayer that the plague will lift. Horticulture, like culture, is a blend of science and mysticism.

Plan for the following season, as our theaters are doing, suspend some operations. Call this year a wash. Mourn the losses, the heartbreaking loss of human life, curse the pointless suffering, then agitate for change. The disproportionate effects of Covid-19 on people of color is not just nature, it’s a direct manifestation of policy, of mismanagement stirred into a kind of vicious political expedience — a systemic extension of the police killings of mostly unarmed Black Americans, and the heightened racism that this awful season has wrought.

And, if the soul permits, give thanks for that which has been spared.

We Hold These Truths to be Self Evident

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The beauty of the garden lies in its creation and its inclusion.

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This July is the 244^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence for the United States, with its creed that should be immortal: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Were that actually the case, we would live in what Dr. Pangloss called the best of all possible worlds. Instead, knowing that we depend on a planet that’s slowly dying — because of us — we are also collectively, like Candide, reckoning with the gaping disparity between the idealism of equal opportunity and behaviors past and present on our own shores, such as genocide, slavery, bigotry, and avarice —  those are just the obvious and most vulgar impediments which keep spitting on the sacred idea of equal opportunity.  This disparity, and the pronounced awareness of it in this cultural moment, is now being distilled in the arts and in our theaters. Action is afoot to provide some remedy, whatever that may be.

If there’s any impulse left – and there probably is —  to continue striving for ideals of social justice, if we can come to any agreement on what social justice actually means, if we can avoid the medieval view that places human beings into camps of heroes and villains, if we can avoid that trap of moral absolutism articulated so maliciously by our president and his re-election campaign, if we can agree that anybody who claims to have been wronged is neither a villain nor a traitor, perhaps there’s hope for the American experiment, that the exhaustion and the rage that permeate our culture can lead to something better. That is, however, a tall order. And we have to live long enough.

When, in July, 2020, President Donald J. Trump worships brutal slaveowners as “American heroes” and defends the statues honoring them and their legacy of exclusion, this is the summoning of locusts.

(Unrepentant slaveowners deserve to be remembered on gravestones, not monuments.)

When, in the year 2020, people tear down a statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglas, as they did in Rochester, New York, also in July,  this is the summoning of locusts.

When in the year 2020, people tear down a statue of President Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco, as they did, also in July, this too is the summoning of locusts.

Grant married into a slave-owning family and briefly owned one slave named William Jones whom he set free before the Civil War.

Grant was flawed, even by his own standards, his character included both heroic and unprincipled aspects, like most people who are something less than paragons of virtue. Like most of us. Nor was he a villain. Perhaps we should try to wrap our heads around that contradiction, as good story-telling and theater invites, and ease off on the virtue-signaling which, as James Baldwin posits of “social indignation,” costs us nothing but our necessary “personal humility” and, unlike the actions of Grant — a general who marched upon a lethal battlefield in a war against slavery — carries no risk.

Among the battles in the year 2020 is the battle for a narrative, for an honest and authentic telling of history. We can choose to make our story reductive or complex. What we choose will define who we are and, later, who we were.

Fortified encampments of ideological purity do not an authentic story, nor a vigorous garden, make. The beauty of our American garden, an experiment, lies in its solemn, sometimes unbearably slow procession towards inclusion and diversity. We’ve been living through a plague of locusts and their shredding of those necessities. Given the demographics of this nation, however, if we’re capable of sustaining our democratic form of governance, inclusion and diversity are as inevitable as they are just. They will come through a thousand policy decisions, born of petitions and protests and legislation at all levels of government. Through the long, hot day, sunflowers twist and turn towards the light.

Well over half a century ago, James Baldwin captured the tensions of our current cultural moment in a 1956 review he wrote in The Nation

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

Indignation and goodwill are not enough to make the world better. Clarity is needed, as well as charity, however difficult this may be to imagine, much less sustain, toward the other side. Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about social indignation is that it so frequently leads to the death of personal humility. Once that has happened, one has ceased to live in that world of men which one is striving so mightily to make over.

“All that is very well,” answered Candide. “But let us cultivate our garden.”