The Why

I woke up this morning and thought, I'd really like to go for a run today, only it was pissing with rain, the streets slick and the eaves dripping. So I hunkered down in the study with several cups of lapsang souchong tea (there's nothing like drinking tea that smells of woodfire smoke in winter to make you feel the season in your bones) and got to work. Several hours later I was so absorbed in my work I was surprised to notice that the day has cleared entirely, the sky blue through the empty branches of the plum tree outside my window. No, I still haven't gone for my run.

I'm doing research, and in order to continue this post I'm going to have to admit once and for all something that I have a hard time saying aloud. Every time the words escape my lips I give a little schoolgirl giggle, blush furiously, and backtrack out of embarrasment. But, I'm writing a book (yes, a book, b-o-o-k and no, you do not need to tell me how unlikely literary success is in this age), and today I've been searching for information on the best way to pitch said book to literary agents.

The problem, of course, is that said book belongs to a genre that is nebulous at best. It's certainly not fiction, but it's also not a biography, an analysis of current events, a how-to book. Okay, so it must be something else? How about memoir, or narrative nonfiction. According to one site memoir is "the only nonfiction subject that must be treated as fiction," while "narrative nonfiction...is still nonfiction and you would submit a proposal." Which is fine, except that my book is not memoir, strictly speaking, and neither is it narrative nonfiction, strictly speaking, if I'm to believe what I read (narrative nonfiction: The Perfect Storm, Seabiscuit, et cetera). The only way I've ever been able to pinpoint what I'm writing is by comparing it to other things, kind of like a movie pitch. It's The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton meets Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer meets The Flaneur by Edmund White meets All Souls by Javiar Marias (which is a novel, confusingly) meets Isolarian by James Atlee--you get the point. And obviously, the more I think about it, the deeper I fall into the abyss of finding the genre.

So I'm stepping away from that for awhile. Something I read this morning advised the author to "look at the value your book offers to the reader," and that's something I can do much more easily. It makes me think of Roger Mudd asking Ted Kennedy in 1979: "Why do you want to be president?" and Ted Kennedy botching the answer, not knowing, not being able to compensate for never having thought about a question that sounds too basic to be problematic. It was one of the greatest lessons of my undergraduate degree: if you're going to run for president (or write a book, for that matter), you should sure as hell be able to answer the question "why."

Why? Because I'm too young to write a book; because there's no reason I can think of for someone to remain silent because of age or experience. Because while we may be entering an era of austerity, the election of Barack Obama indicates that we're finally, eight years late, exiting an era of intellectual shrinkage. We're becoming curious again*, and suddenly, the way in which we view the world--as individuals, as a generation, as the human race--is becomming important. Because sometimes a city is not just a dot on the map but a state of mind, and this affects us, whether we think about it or not. Because the art of experiencing place is a universal art; there is a backdrop to everything. Because the more we think about where we are--physically, geographically, generationally, emotionally, intellectually--the better we're able to understand where we're going. And because there's always something to be said for a few pretty words on a page. It's finer entertainment than anything else I can think of.



*Obama: "But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old."

Vegetables in Their Native Habitat

We went out into the garden on Sunday. I mean to say, we went into the garden properly on Sunday. Not as we do generally, with winter gloom all seeped into our pores, and a fog hovering on the horizon: rushing, in the last moments of daylight, to pour compost into the bin, to watch the finish of a brilliant sunset, to catch one more breath of fresh cold outside air before we retire inside, where it is warm, full of snuggles and food with the heater going and a glass of red wine in hand.

No—we actually went out into the garden for the sake of going out into the garden on Sunday.

There is a large part of both of us, I think, which wants desperately to be proficient in the wordless, yet timeless, language of gardening. Each of us would like to be able to coax things into being with nothing but soil and water and will; for there is a way, I suppose, in which gardening satisfies the ego, is a bit like playing God, whereby you can create, where once was merely dirt and emptiness, something that lives, and breathes; something which can get sick, can die, can reproduce, can flourish, and yet which can also satisfy basic human needs: the need for beauty, the need for sustenance. In this way we are merely arrogant in our desire to garden.

Also we are conscious of something: some pleasure felt when we know that the herbs we’ve used to spice our meal came not from some anonymous field thousands of miles and infinite worlds away, but from outside our very own back door, from a terrain we know (know well) and love. The only energy required to obtain these herbs, we can say, was the energy to take a few wavering steps into darkness with an electric torch, to bend and pluck from the earth itself a leaf; to straighten up, return inside, crush into food that sizzles with pleasure upon being seasoned.

When food loses its anonymity, it becomes something more than “food” in its most modern sense. MacDonald’s is food; Kentucky Fried Chicken is food. But what history have you with a Bic Mac? I know the world is a very large place; but there is a part of me which wants to say that we may not necessarily have the right to consume without contributing; at least, we certainly do not have the right to consume without understanding. There is a process to food: it is not born the way it is served.

So we went out into the garden. Neither of us properly knows what to do with a garden but we each know that we want to make one which will bear us vegetables, which will suck up time on the weekends and drink water when it rains and which will make our fingernails black with dirt and our knees sore from kneeling. And we figured we could start with the most basic sorts of things; it is only early February, after all, and we live in a northern climate, a cold place, a wet place, where winter means something beyond temperature and daylight hours.

So he plucked the weeds from the vegetable patch while I raked the leaves that had caked themselves onto the path. I swept along the sides of the wall and tidied the area that had been used until now as a catch-all: outside, but still part of the house, it had accrued all kinds of detritus--half of an old welcome mat, most of which had rotted away; banana peels and old sagging flowers, all dried out; old clothespins which had fallen from the line in summer, when all it took to dry the laundry was a bit of sun and a warm breeze. When he had wrestled all of the weeds from the patch, we switched jobs, and I raked over the mud searching for rogue roots while he darted from one corner of the garden to the other, mending things, moving things, bending close to things and examining them.

It reminded me of something we’d done in California close to Christmas, when my parents had wanted us to help them ready their own small vegetable patch for regrowth later in the year. So we spent a sunny afternoon removing dead tomato plants which had tied themselves to each other; plucking out old carrots which had become withered and shrunken in their abandonment; raking over the soil, smoothing it, soothing it, readying it for more, more, more growth. At the end of the day we wiped sweaty brows and went back up the house for a beer and some warm soup.

There is a curious kind of satisfaction in doing something like that: destruction for reconstruction’s sake, you could almost say. On Sunday we left the garden looking more barren than it has for months; yet infinitely more hopeful than it has since I can ever remember. Is that not utterly strange? We cleared things away; we put a human stamp on something that had begun to decay, to dishevel, to become a messy knot of inattention. The only sign, at the end of the day, of our interference, was that things looked even less likely to grow there: for what, you find yourself thinking, wants to grow where there are no sweaty piles of leaves on the path, no weeds sprouting, no clothespins lying like a broken promise of warmer weather?

And yet from the tidiness we created, we hope (we know)--green things will happen, in time, with care.