I'd been an organic gardening instructor for several years. Other staff at the educational center I worked at had been encouraging me to write a book about gardening, and this had become one of my wintertime goals--but I couldn't help but be bored and vaguely uncomfortable with the idea. What could I write that hadn't already been written elsewhere? For someone in his mid-thirties with barely over a decade of gardening and farming experience to pretend to be more expert than the thousands of lifetime gardeners who have never written books seemed presumptuous at best. Short articles and newsletter contributions were more up my alley, not a book.
Over the years, especially since entering high school, I'd become very serious.
I grew up in a musical, artistic household, but, surrounded by creativity, I'd become first an academic and then an overserious ecologist. Beginning in high school, I'd started to question and then rebel against our "civilization," including its conceptions of art. As I became aware of the environmental impacts of our way of life, as well as the social injustices that accompanied it, I came to see "art" as something artificial, distracting and separating us from what nature truly is, taking time away from the serious business of saving the world, offering the leisure class and the overprivileged an escape through which to avoid facing the dire circumstances in which most of the natural and human world now live.
Most art, as I saw it, was not only nature-divorced and socially irresponsible but also an actual agent of oppression. It was a status symbol of the wealthy, propaganda for a human-centered, socially stratified, often elitist worldview--and a perfect example of the "out of sight, out of mind" mentality that makes one oblivious to the true effects of one's actions. From toxic art materials, to energy-guzzling art museums (and the toxic chemicals used to maintain the western sense of landscape aesthetics around them), to classical music stations sponsored by huge corporations, to popular music hijacked by those same corporations--all of it now dependent on environmentally-destructive high technology--art seemed to be the enemy of ecology.
Popular music in particular raised my hackles. An unfortunate run-in with too many decibels at a rock concert during high school had left me with temporarily impaired hearing in one ear, and I found I had to stop listening to recorded and amplified music entirely, for a number of years, in order for my hearing to recover. As a child and young teenager I had loved some popular music (much more than classical, which often seemed stuffy), but my descent into overseriousness, my ear injury, and my desire to tune in to the natural world and tune out western civilization converged to make me reject my music-loving past. I did embrace certain unamplified, indigenous music, but from my simplified ecologist's perspective, which viewed the world as a set of dichotomies, all other music was a waste of my time--either the self-indulgence of the wealthy or a consumer commodity and propaganda for mass culture. Once I left the Native American reservation I lived on immediately after college, the only music that I found acceptable was certain acoustic, homemade folk music, the music of the birds, the trees, and the rest of the natural world, and the music of my mind.
As I committed my life to gardening, ecological living, and teaching others, the only "art" that merited my time and energy became creative patterning of garden vegetables (even flowers seemed for a long time to be irresponsible frivolity). The only "dance" I engaged in took place in the aisles of the garden. "Drama" came periodically in staff meetings, where a whole bunch of people in various stages of the sickness of taking ourselves and our unholistic views of ecology too seriously battled against our reflections in one another. I lived as close to a "pure" ecological life as I could design, according to my dichotomous worldview.
Was I happy? No. I was (from one perspective) a discontented, obsessive, ecological fanatic whose main connection to reality was through growing and eating organic food, whose only idea of fun consisted of creating sheet-mulched potato beds or collecting slugs into buckets and dumping them into the creek. Work took precedence over play, "ecology" over art, duty over desire, self-denial over self-gratification. It wasn't sustainable, but it was pure. (I oversimplify a bit, but you get the idea.)
After about a decade of shutting out most of what we generally consider to be the world of music, I couldn't hold out any longer. I started to listen to some ecologically-oriented folk singers, and also to tapes of classical music (which I finally started to be able to appreciate) sent to me by the performers (my family, half a continent away). My ears had recovered physically from the rock concert trauma, but my psychological and emotional recovery had taken much longer.
As I let music into my life again, I noticed its incredible healing properties. In a music-deprived world, I'd grown accustomed to living with a certain level of constant anxiety. As I gradually allowed music back into my life--and allowed myself to consider the possibility that constant anxiety is not a normal, desirable frame of mind for someone attempting to live an ecological life--I also started to hack away at my other dualistic attitudes. From a hypercritical standpoint, everything--including the sheet-mulched potatoes--is unacceptable. But, I'd discovered, that is no way to live. Through a series of real-life, assumption-challenging experiences, and a series of inner realizations, I started to understand the healing power of acceptance. And once one accepts something, it is only one further step to actually embrace it. In the embrace comes wholeness.
The book was on my mind. I didn't want to write a typical
gardening book. I wanted it to be different. I wanted to break the mold--not only for gardening books, but for myself. Despite the inroads provided by accepting certain kinds of music again, my personal world still did not have as much music, humor, or creative expression in it as I actually needed. (In fact, I had been very prone to infatuation with musicians in recent years--as readers of Talking Leaves music reviews may have surmised. Only in retrospect do I recognize that part of my infatuation occurred because these musicians were expressing parts of myself that I'd been suppressing.)
Dawn shed its first light on the landscape outside the train. Against a gradually brightening, red early-morning sky, Mt. Shasta rose to our east. I looked out the window at this majestic mountain.
After my long, sleep-deprived, physically-uncomfortable night, full of too much food and not enough inspiration, the mountain's presence and beauty were stunning. If I could live in the reality of Mt. Shasta, it seemed, I would never again experience anything other than awe, wonder, and gratitude for being alive on this beautiful planet.
As I watched the mountain, my mind returned to the subject of my earlier musings: my organic gardening book-to-be. Then strange phrases and fragments started entering my mind. "Salt and Pepper's Only for When Vegetables Are Bland" ... "Do You Want to Know the Seed Depth?" ... "I Want to Dig by Hand" ... "Here Come the Slugs" ... "All Your Seeds Are Love." (Any resemblance between these titles and "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," "Do You Want to Know a Secret?," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Here Comes the Sun," and "All You Need Is Love" is, as you'll learn, purely coincidental.)
I was aware of a certain timelessness as my mind drifted back and forth over the Beatles repertoire I had listened to over and over, so thoroughly, twenty to thirty years before (and almost never since my mid-teens). I remembered being five years old, spinning around and around as I climbed up onto the coffee table in my parents' living room as we listened to the climax of the just-released Sgt. Pepper album, jumping off and landing on the final piano chord of "A Day in the Life." I remembered the happy times of my life, when the world seemed like home, when I wasn't ruled by a black-and-white hypercriticality, when I was secretly or not-so-secretly in love with someone special or with the world-at-large, and when the Beatles knew about it and sang about it from my record player.
Every Beatles title I thought of, in my sleep-deprived semi-delirium, could be twisted in some way to be about an aspect of organic gardening or farming, and every gardening topic I wanted to cover in my book could somehow be fit into the altered lyrics of a Beatles song. With Mt. Shasta, gardening, and the Beatles simultaneously in my consciousness, the crescendo of titles and phrases came to me nonstop for nearly two hours, at the end of which I had written down the notes that I would flesh out over the following two winters into a full-length book of 57 gardening-related songs (poems, for copyright reasons--to be read to the background of your Beatles albums), 43 lost songs/poems (of which only titles and snippets of information remain), commentary, quizzes, resource lists, etc. The Beetless were born in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, and the rest, as they say, is history.
I published The Beetless' Gardening Book: An Organic Gardening Songbook/Guidebook a little over a year after this encounter. Propelled by this admittedly off-the-wall literary project, I had started a cover band, The Organic VegeBeatles, to perform the Beetless' gardening songs (until a conversation with Sony, the Beatles' music copyright holders, put a damper on further performances, and the songs became poems). But in those halcyon days, since our group had no bass player, I bought and learned the rudiments of playing the bass guitar. All of a sudden I had an obsession other than raising and eating organic vegetables. My life was expanding beyond its formerly narrow bounds.
I started to have fun outside the garden as well as in it. I got up in front of audiences and engaged in witty banter, overcoming my lifelong stage fright. Through this project I rediscovered music--the magic of creating it, not just listening to it. In a fit of overenthusiasm, I even joined the musicians' union. My sense of humor, admittedly often subtle (such as making you read this entire article just so that I can promote my book), was given more chance to emerge. I started to like more and more kinds of music--kinds of music I'd sneered at before. In fact, I started to like more and more kinds of everything, all expressions of peoples' and the universe's immense creativity, as I gave my own self more permission to be creative and expressive. Many of my sacred cow dichotomies crumbled. I bought a piano. I stumbled through Mozart sonatas, listened to tapes of the Beatles, Bach, Buffy St. Marie, and BaBenz�l� Pygmies, and quietly cheered the Beetless as they charmed and weaseled their way into gardener's beds on both sides of the Atlantic.
Last summer, reading Carol Buchanan's
Brother Crow, Sister Corn: Traditional American Indian Gardening, I discovered that, despite the spontaneous, unpremeditated way in which my book was born, it is actually heir to a long tradition. As part of Native American community life (doubtless this applies to indigenous people everywhere), all gardening peoples had gardening songs through which they prayed, recounted the myths, legends, and stories of how they and the creatures around them came to be, told of their intentions and challenges in gardening, and even courted one another in the garden. And many of these songs persist today, in peoples with intact gardening traditions. Children of the Sixties, molded by the change and cultural confusion of our times, and only now finding their way back to the soil, the Beetless nevertheless remember what too many gardeners (including me) have often forgotten: that gardening is a whole experience, worth singing about, and that plants, like people, appreciate good music, kind words, witty repartee, celebration, and love. The Beetless can't live in a world where work squelches play, where "ecology" makes no room for "art," where music is considered just a commodity or a symbol, where poetry isn't important, where people themselves aren't seen as wondrous expressions of nature, where laughter is frowned upon. After too much time spent under the influence of the Blue Meanies (see Yellow Submarine if you've forgotten who they are), I am glad to be back where ecology and art can't be separated, because they're everything.
Chris Roth is managing editor of Talking Leaves. The Beetless' website is at http://members.aol.com/growseed
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Book Excerpt:
PAPERBACK MULCHER
(Music: PAPERBACK WRITER, Lennon-McCartney)
Paperback mulcher, paperback mulcher
Dear Sir or Madam, can you spare that book?
Do you have any more? Can I take a look?
Others use newspaper, cardboard too
But I'm a frustrated writer
So I want to be a paperback mulcher
Paperback mulcher
I will tear off the pages and soak them well
And throw them down kind of pell-mell
The edges need to overlap, I want six layers thick
This used to be a lawn
But I want to be a paperback mulcher
Paperback mulcher
Paperback mulcher, paperback mulcher
When I've got that plot covered with paperbacks
I will bring in leaves and compost, stuff like that
Manure, floor sweepings, old felt hats
Layered and mixed six inches thick
Because I am a paperback mulcher
Paperback mulcher
The first year I might plant potatoes there
The second year most anything, I don't care
Cardboard or wet newspaper could do the trick as well
But my garden is me
And I want to be a paperback mulcher
Paperback mulcher
Paperback mulcher, paperback mulcher
*The weeds won't come through, you will be amazed
It takes so little work to start your gardening days
You can do this on a vacant lot or do it at a mall
You can do it almost anywhere
If you are a paperback mulcher
Paperback mulcher
If you're using cardboard, I've a tip for you
Remove staples and tape first, or when you're through
You'll be digging up metal, plastic, cellophane
For years to come ...
But I'd rather be a paperback mulcher
Paperback mulcher
Paperback mulcher, paperback mulcher
Paperback mulcher (4x)
Comments: *The two verses beginning with "The weeds won't come through" are "extras," tacked onto the Beatles' original tune.
Only one or two layers are necessary when using cardboard. Be careful when gardening in areas where residues of heavy metals or other toxins may be found. This is perhaps the Beetless' most practical "mulch" song. Many listeners have followed its instructions to the letter and reaped bumper potato crops.
�1998 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1998
Volume 8, Number 2
Art and Ecology
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