I water her every day

About this time last summer, my espresso machine clogged up. After several failed attempts to clean it, I gave up the double espresso filter basket for dead, and resorted to drinking singles. This week, out of the blue, as if I was waking from a stupor, it occurs to me that I might find a replacement basket online without having to replace the entire machine. Twenty-four hours and twelve dollars later, I resume double-espresso mornings. It's a productive and creative week, and also a happy week. I can't help but wonder if all my breakdowns and tirades, my crises of faith in myself and in others, my angers and resentments, and even the desperate explorations into myself — all my emotions — were simply the result of not enough coffee.

It turns out that my tomato plant is cherry tomatoes after all — pluck one, pop it in your mouth, and it's gone. I'd wanted something more substantial. After some initial disappointment, I find I am able to harvest a couple dozen at once after all. This balcony garden yields meagre offerings, though I am grateful for the herbs. I will plant more and better next year.

After 141 days of working from home, I return to the office to retrieve some personal effects. I had a scheduled entry time, with specific instructions about arriving with my own PPE, not arriving by public transportation. I walk the eight kilometres; I arrive early and wait. No one is there to verify my protective gear. No one is there to make me sign a waiver or to attest to being symptom free. No one is there except one of the porters, who looks mildly shell-shocked, like working in isolation has driven him slightly mad — the graveyard shift in broad daylight, with only the ghosts of employees to clean up after.

I recover two pairs of shoes from the cloakroom. I pick my Fluevogs out from amid several dozen sneakers, all neatly lined up expecting their owners to step into them at the start of every workday. The last time I went to the office I was still wearing winter boots.

There are no laptops on the desks, but there are monitors and wires, pens and notepads. Sweaters on the backs of chairs swiveled as if abandoned mid conversation. I am reminded of the pictures of Chernobyl schoolrooms, only this feels more invisible, less organic.

There is an uprooted plant on the floor of the cafeteria. The weeping tree in our studio looks as if it might crumble if I stroke its leaves — it's cried itself dry. Remarkably, my happy bean plant still looks happy — its arms are straining toward the window and it's thirsty, but I swear it twitched for joy as I approached, my every step sending tremors through the bones of the building.

I sit the bean in my bag atop the reference books I came for, padded out with my hoodie. I grab the office-issue headphones. I empty my drawer of instant soup packets and handcream — I may need those.

The rest of the day feels weirdly decadent: hanging out with my sister on her terrace, window shopping, lunching out at an open-air market. Is life normal again? How come I didn't get the memo? Ich will in die Zukunft reisen.

At home, one of the indoor plants continues to have the company of mushrooms. One sprouts and dies, another takes its place. 

Since lockdown, there are now four novels I have read that I have not (yet?) written about here. I continue to read essays by Didion and stories by Carrington ("A Man in Love"):

We went through a door at the back and reached a room where there was a bed in which lay a woman, motionless and probably dead. It seemed to me that she must have been there a long time, for the bed was overgrown with grass.

"I water her every day," the greengrocer said thoughtfully. "For forty years I've been quite unable to tell whether she is alive or dead. She hasn't moved or spoken or eaten during that time. But, and this is the strange thing, she remains warm."

We are overgrown — by masks and gloves and viral effluvia, by our metaphorical mushrooms — but somehow we remain warm.  

Perfect right here

Train travel is an exercise in suspension, of both time and space; the days blur, we are carried suspended across the land, just above it. After travelling four days by train, we arrived in Vancouver.

I wanted to visit the scholar's garden, The Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden.

Pond waters
mysteriously green,

Sky light
eternally enshrined

The garden was built just a few decades ago, but in honour of ancient principles. Somewhat surprisingly, plants are not the main element of a Chinese garden; they rank lower in importance than the foundational element of architecture, and the elements of rock (textured and weathered) and water (deliberately clouded, for better reflection).

It is less controlled than a Japanese garden, but no less careful. It is walled, contained. Vancouver skyscrapers are visible above the pagodas, in perfect balance; this garden belongs here.

There are couplets on the walls.

Courtyard ever green
all four seasons with
blossoming trees

Perfect right here
one fine volume
of poetic inspiration

Nature does not change

The One-Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka, is a "manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge" that challenges our views on agriculture and how it fits into our (modern) way of living.

Few are able to grasp correctly that natural farming arises from the unmoving and unchanging center of agricultural development.

To the extent that people separate themselves from nature, they spin out further and further from the center. At the same time, a centripetal effect asserts itself and the desire to return to nature arises. But if people merely become caught up in reacting, moving to the left or to the right, depending on conditions, the result is only more activity. The non-moving point of origin, which lies outside the realm of relativity, is passed over, unnoticed. I believe that even "returning-to-nature" and anti-pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the overdevelopment of the present age.

Nature does not change, although the way of viewing nature invariable changes from age to age. No matter the age, natural farming exists forever as the wellspring of agriculture.

And later,

There are always those who try to mix natural and scientific farming. But this way of thinking completely misses the point. The farmer who moves toward compromise can longer criticize science at the fundamental level.

Natural farming is gentle and easy and indicates a return to the source of farming. A single step away from the source can only lead one astray.

As if the point of our otherwise pointless lives is to aspire toward stillness.

I heard about this book when it was published as a New York Review Books classic a few years ago and it came up in relation to balcony gardening, which I was reading up on. Fukuoka's "do-nothing" philosophy has a great deal of appeal, although "do-nothing" is more work than it implies — more like "do no harm."

Fukuoka describes an epiphany he had that humanity knows nothing and that all our effort has no intrinsic value, is meaningless. I cannot help but relate this to my current readings on Socrates, Kierkegaard, and Hegel — having reached aporia, he intends to transmute it via negative action, not doing. Although nature does not change, Fukuoka states also that "nature is everywhere in perpetual motion"; he tries to achieve balance — a state (but, I think, not a process) of becoming.

I tend not to read much nonfiction but I am motivated because The One-Straw Revolution is a current book club selection. Come discuss it at Argo Bookshop tomorrow evening.

Larry Korn, a student of Fukuoka, and translator and editor of this book, has compiled several resources on Fukuoka and natural farming.

Galloping on a tomato

The man that cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.

— André Breton

I visualize everything galloping on tomatoes. I love tomatoes. I think they're beautiful.

I prefer the fiery orange ones over the pink-toned ones. I'll take juicy over meaty. At the grocery story, when possible, I choose the ones still on the vine. I love that smell! Breathe in.

I could eat them for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. And as snacks. I like them fried with my bacon and eggs. Sliced, in sandwiches. Souped hot, or gazpachoized cold. I like them salsified, with garlic, parsley, cilantro, onion, whatever. Juiced, with vodka.

Lately, they form the basis of my now famous Red Salad: a handful of tomatoes (sliced, quartered, diced, chunked, whatever), red pepper, red onion, and beets (from a can). If I'm feeling particularly feisty I'll throw in some radishes. Olive oil, lemon, salt, and pepper. (And sometimes sumac. I'm not sure I taste the difference sumac makes, but it makes everything redder.)

But a tomato is best eaten essentially naked, like an apple. Lick it, salt it, bite it. Repeat as necessary.

Three books about tomatoes

It's tomato season! That is, I'm daily plucking cherry tomatoes by the handful from my hanging basket plant. I love tomatoes!

Here are 3 books about tomatoes that look tempting:

1. Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, by Barry Estabrook.

I think the subtitle says it all. More about the book on NPR:

"As one large Florida farmer said, 'I don't get paid a single cent for flavor,' " says Estabrook. "He said, 'I get paid for weight. And I don't know of any supermarket shopper who tastes her tomatoes before she puts them in her shopping cart.' ... It's not worth commercial plant breeders' while to breed for taste because their customers — the large farmers — don't get paid for it."

Or read the article from which this book grew.

(And aren't the covers gorgeous?)

2. Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato, by Arthur Allen.

This book covers the tomato's history, how it's been popularized and modified. Consumer interest in heirloom tomatoes led the author to sample a wide variety of tomatoes from various regions and try to grow a few himself. Read an excerpt.

3. The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden, by William Alexander.

This memoir is about more than just tomatoes — there's a vast vegetable garden at stake. And again, the subtitle says it all. And still, I think it's relevant to me and I can relate, in the burdens of tending my paltry-by-comparison container garden on the balcony and the cost analysis I conduct on yield per materials and effort (I break about even). Read an excerpt.

What weekends are made of

Waking
Sleeping in on a weekend morning. I wake to find the girl perched at the foot of the bed painting my toenails. I don't know whether I'm more amused or disturbed.

Baking
I've devoted far too many hours to considering frosting. The girl's birthday is in a couple weeks, and we decided that it'd be nice to take cupcakes to school to celebrate with her friends. I've never made cupcakes. I found a simple recipe and we did a trial run. The cakes are delicious, but we all concur that the frosting (a pretty standard buttercream) is horrendous. (Yes, the butter was fresh!) The original batch got modified, then I tried something else. Three frosting failures so far. What are we going to do!!?!

Eating
I am really, really, really annoyed about the clementines! They have pits! Not just the occasional 1 or 2 per orange. Lots and lots of pits! I'm talking 4 or 5 per segment, every segment! It's taken all the joy out of clementines. And I love clementines! Just not like this! If this continues, I may have to stop eating them. Oh my god, what if I get scurvy!!?!

Gardening
The last of the balcony-garden tomatoes are finally harvested. The geraniums have been brought inside to winter.

Reading
Am I finally ready for Mann's Magic Mountain? No, I decided. I wanted something small and modern first, as a palate cleanser. So I started The Last Supper, by Paweł Huelle (pronounced "hyoo-la" I've finally learned, in an entirely un-Polish way). Coincidentally, Huelle wrote a kind of prequel to The Magic Mountain, but this novel isn't it. This one's all about Art and Religion — a couple of my favourite subjects — but we're off to a shaky start.

The first chapter is a dream sequence, I found out by accident (looking to see where the chapter break was), and I'm glad I did, and I'm doing you a service by telling you so, because it allowed the chapter to make some kind of sense finally. It's all very frenetic, maybe the more so for having just come off a couple books with intense emotional focus.

On some level I must be hoping to reconnect with my Polishness, or to learn something about Poland today. I still think that Polish literature of the early to mid 20th century is one of the world's best kept secrets. And I'm glad to get, for example, the Mrożek reference (he's like the Polish Ionesco). And I'm glad to have a first-hand recollection of the Gdańsk terrain, physical and cultural. But I don't feel like I'm connecting yet...

Watching
The Tudors! We'll finish with season 1 tonight. Somehow I never did get to watch a full episode while it was airing, so I borrowed it from the library. Full of sex and God and war and intrigue!

Tomato

Today Helena plucked one ripe little tomato off its vine — the first of the season — and popped it in her mouth. Her face radiated with exquisite ecstasies.

Here are two of our monstrous tomato plants pictured with the tall, silly 6-year-old in question for a reference point of size:



Our little balcony garden doesn't yield much — we have a basket of strawberries (which fruit is almost exhausted), a couple herbs (for sprinkling on salads), and six such tomato plants (haul to come!) — but it manages to provide one mouthful of pleasure (whether it's destined for her mouth or mine is a complicated matter, the politics of which I won't discuss here) on a near daily basis, and that's plenty.