Philosophy of Plants

One result of the pandemic and spending so much time at home has been my discovery that I can actually parent plants without killing them. I would attribute my improved green thumb to being older and wiser and having finally accepted that overwatering is both the biggest temptation and the biggest mistake. If I’m honest, though, I think just having better light is the real secret to my current success.

When I moved in here, I was all set to spend time taking care of myself after several years of having no home of my own. The pandemic was starting to wind up, and everybody else was staying home, too, discovering the joys (and pains) of enforced domestic life. I had already experienced a period of more or less involuntary solitude during several years of job-hunting. During that time, I worked on learning to make a proper biscuit, did some writing, and read a lot. I wouldn’t say that was a happy time, but I think I made the most of it.

This time, beginning in a new apartment with some difficult years behind me, I was happy to just concentrate on making a home. The first time I walked in here, I was able to picture just where everything should go and what it would look like once my things were here. I instantly knew where I wanted my Christmas tree to be, even though the holidays were months away. I also knew I wanted flowers on the porch.

I started my plant adventures with porch plants only: container flowers, and a pothos for an accent table that I ended up bringing inside at the end of the first summer. The pothos liked being outside but seemed to enjoy the indoors even more, and the flowers loved the porch. Slowly, as I developed a routine of caring for one plant, I’d add another one. The pothos went back outside for the second summer, along with more flowers, and I got an African violet to take its place in the living room. That was my one failure, as I couldn’t seem to figure out what it wanted before it gave up the ghost and wilted quite away.

The African violet didn’t seem to like too much of anything, either water or sun, and was extremely insulted by any moisture that might accidentally touch its leaves. My grandmother had African violets on her kitchen windowsill for years, and this had lulled me into thinking they were low maintenance, though after I thought about it, I realized hers must have had a northerly exposure. The stronger light here didn’t suit them (or might have if I hadn’t overwatered them first), but—oh, well. They were an impulse buy, so lesson learned. It was like trying to take care of a debutante.

I went about acquiring plants with some method in mind (usually): I did research to find out which ones would be likely to do well here without requiring too much fussing. If it was easy-care and I liked the way it looked, I’d go to the nursery center and look for one. Last year, I got a spider plant mixed in with a zebrina for the porch once I decided to give the pothos a permanent spot inside. When I brought it in last fall, I had to cut most of the zebrina out, but the spider plant is still thriving. After I rearranged some things to accommodate my washer, I got a snake plant for a bookcase that had been promoted to the dining room. Although I worried at first that it wouldn’t get enough light where it is, it has proved me wrong by insistently sending up new shoots.

While my assemblage is pretty modest, it’s added what I now know was a missing dimension in my past living spaces. The splashes of green give color to the rooms and serve as reminders that even in the mist of crisis, life goes on, patiently putting up shoots that grow by infinite degrees, making the most of all the light and water that come their way. I may never be a master gardener, but I think I have come to an understanding with my plant children. I give them what they need and then just try to stay out of the way.

Wordplay Attempts to Get It Together

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve reviewed several books and TV series related to the themes of Dark Academia and “kids doing magic.” Now you may be wondering what significance all of this has and why so many TV shows, books, and movies using these ideas keep cropping up. What are we really responding to when we’re attracted to plots and characters centered on wizardry and magic, and what is academia doing mixed up in this? There’s a lot to ponder here. Interest in magic is nothing new, but the sheer number of entertainment offerings involving magical schools and/or occult activities at schools points to something in the collective psyche that keeps circling, as if caught in a whirlpool, around the archetypes of Magician and Scholar.

When I was young, amateur detectives and sleuthing were popular themes in many books and TV series. The Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys of the day used their intellects and detecting skills to solve mysteries. There was little or no magic involved: everything was based on making observations, gathering evidence, and drawing conclusions—all very scientific and logical. Spooky happenings abounded, but they always had an explanation that diligent searching could uncover. It’s tempting to say that maybe this reflected a simpler time, or a more optimistic time, when it seemed that the march of 20th century scientific progress was carrying us all forward, and technology would finally solve many intractable problems. Respect for scientific methods and powers of deduction are at the heart of these stories.

Could it be that the world has gotten so complex (and troubling in its complexity) that simply restoring order by finding “the villain” or solving “the mystery” doesn’t satisfy in the way that it used to? There are so many villains, and in some cases, they’re also our heroes. Contradictions run through many of our cherished institutions and beliefs that can’t be denied any more; we often find we’re standing on shaky ground that we used to think was solid. We assume we’re doing the right thing, as a society and as individuals, only to be questioned by others who have different ideas. Our country is big and diverse, full of contending parties, and although that’s supposed to be our strength, all the opposing voices make it difficult to see our way forward. Not only that, but the world is transforming rapidly around us, climate change bringing about fresh disasters at every turn, and even nuclear war being spoken of as a possibility.

I think the interest in magical schools may point to a deep-seated response to the complex and overwhelming world we’re facing. What is magic but the ability to overcome the laws of physics, the strictures that bind us, and make things happen, things that we want to happen. Magic is a way of breaking through complications and exerting one’s will on the world, instead of being at the world’s mercy. It’s an intense form of psychological agency, reflecting a need to have influence and control over events when we actually fear we may have neither.

Meanwhile, the theme of “Dark Academia” points to a concern, perhaps more accurately an anxiety, about secret knowledge, knowledge that most people don’t have. There is a pervasive feeling, especially in a work like Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, that venerable institutions intimately bound up with power structures harbor secrets that make the rest of us vulnerable. These are only penetrated at great risk. What you don’t know can hurt you, but what you do know can also hurt you. There’s a preoccupation with long-buried secrets trying to come to light only to be pushed down again, things too disturbing to really look at in the sober light of day. Trauma is tied to hidden connections running beneath things, like a dark underground river. This theme is also present in Naomi Novik’s Scholomance books, in which enclaves for the powerful are built, quite literally, on top of trauma.

Themes of secret knowledge and agency may not be present in every work related to magical schools, and there could be other reasons for the genre’s popularity. In particular, I think of a program like Legacies, in which all of the students at the Salvatore School are actually freaks of one kind or another. They are in the one place where they have a chance of being understood and accepted. In some ways, this might reflect the unwillingness of some formerly marginalized groups in our society to remain marginalized. It’s a demand for recognition and acceptance of one’s authentic self, with plenty of heavy-duty spell-casting underlining the need for personal agency. In a gentler way, the same thing happens in The Bureau of Magical Things, in which magical races of fairies and elves go from co-existing with humans but hiding who they really are to letting others see them, gradually forming relationships based on trust.

If there’s one way to sum up the psychological underpinning of the current popularity of magical schools and occult happenings it would be that they are a response to rapid and extreme change affecting our physical, social, and political environment. Most of these works have dark overtones that reflect with some seriousness real-life issues related to change, instability, and uncertainty. There is defiance, certainly, and some hope, but there are no guarantees of a better world in progress.

More About ‘Dark Academia’

I mentioned in last week’s post that “Dark Academia” is having a cultural moment; I decided a while back to plunge into the genre and see what it was all about. You may have noticed a lot of storylines about kids going to magical schools in books, television series, and movies, but in my opinion it takes more than that to qualify as Dark Academia. The Bureau of Magical Things, an Australian program on Netflix, features students at a select (and secret) school of magic hidden behind a bookshop, but the kids are wholesome, and the mood is generally upbeat and sunny. You might call it “Magical Academia,” and its audience is young children.

A truer example of Dark Academia is Legacies, (a CW Network series now on Netflix) about a K-12 school for kids who happen to be vampires, werewolves, and witches, with other magical beings occasionally thrown in (one kid is actually a phoenix, though you wouldn’t know it to look at him). They all attend the Salvatore School, a private institution in Mystic Falls, Virginia, which greatly resembles many a private or prep school that regular mortals may have attended. There are the plaid skirts, the school crest, the gated grounds, the polished wooden floors, and all the other accoutrements of a well-heeled and decorous institution. Some of the characters are so likable that you almost forget they’re dangerous, until the fangs and claws come out or someone casts an especially evil spell.

The school has been established to create a safe haven, protecting the students from the world and the world from them. Attempts are made to school them into controlling their proclivities, although it’s a little unclear how successful Salvatore is in doing this. Every effort is made to present the school to outsiders as simply a private academy; there is an annual football match with the local public high school that Salvatore students are encouraged to lose, the more to cement their reputation as a bunch of harmless preps. While this sounds dark enough, the real kicker is that the magical powers the kids have at the tips of their fingers attract all kinds of monsters, so that not only are they constantly contending with themselves, each other, and the world at large but also with a variety of evil beings that inevitably come calling. One week it might be a Golem; the next week, it’s an evil Cupid.

Another series that I quite enjoyed was The Magicians, a program originally shown on SYFY and based on Lev Grossman’s Magicians novels. At the beginning of this series, a young man who thinks he’s bound for the Ivy League finds that he’s been invited instead to interview at Brakebills, a college of magic in upstate New York that can be reached by various hidden portals, though no one outside the school seems to know it’s there. While Legacies is aimed at a younger audience, The Magicians has adult content; there’s the occasional wild party, some truly terrifying supernatural beings, regular trips to the Underworld (usually one-way), and unforeseen consequences of the use of magic. Unlike the Salvatore kids, who seem to wield their powers with total panache, as if they were in a music video, the students at Brakebills often seem to be spitting into the wind, achieving everything except what they set out to do and breaking things more than they end up fixing them.

What I liked about this series was its total unpredictability; you can never tell where the characters are going to go or what will happen next. The mix of quirky personalities is occasionally grating, but all the characters are memorable, often funny, and sometimes tragic: imagine a group of hip, smart young urbanites with a lot of competitive qualities and neuroses trying to learn how to be magicians while grappling with the usual problems of college life. A magical world called Fillory looms large in the plot, though I found it tedious, as it seems more a child’s fantasy world in which Brakebills students get stuck than the Utopia it first appears to be. That’s probably somehow the point. This fantasy world is more a trap, or perhaps an extended test, than it is an escape; growing into their abilities often means the characters have to figure out how to transcend Fillory. It turns out being a magician is much more than just being able to do cool things all the time.

Perhaps the best exemplar of Dark Academia that I’ve yet come across (this list is not exhaustive) is Leigh Bardugo’s novel Ninth House. When I first heard of Dark Academia, I was imagining something like this and wasn’t much interested in exploring the genre. After the first chapter or two I wasn’t sure I’d finish the book, but if you can get past a fairly stomach-turning beginning, the novel rewards you with a gruesome but fascinating fictional take on Yale’s secret societies. Ms. Bardugo, who was a member of a society at Yale, has said that she was attempting to “hyper-mystify” the societies rather than write a tell-all. I think she means by that that the fascination anything secret has for outsiders simply provided too golden an opportunity for fictional fodder to be passed up, and she’s right.

The Ninth House, in this novel, is the society with the job of keeping the others within bounds and making sure that their rituals and magic are used “responsibly.”  When it appears to the newest initiate of Lethe House that its protocols mainly lean toward covering up wrongdoing rather than policing it, she discovers that the job means more to her than just an escape from an extremely troubled past. As she learns more about the activities of the societies and Yale’s relationship to the town at large, she begins to see the disconnect between what she’s been led to expect and the way things actually are and decides to investigate further.

The book would have been too morbid for me if it were not for the characters, who only reveal themselves slowly; they, too, are keeping a lot of things under wraps. It’s almost as difficult to believe in the beginning that a street kid like Alex will manage to survive a single semester at Yale as it is to imagine her mentor, Darlington, turning out to be deeper than the stuffed shirt and Yale traditionalist he appears to be. I liked the characters better the more I got to know them, and that includes some of their supporting players, the diffident Dawes, always preoccupied with her dissertation, and the skeptical police detective, Turner. In this world of privilege and power, a strategy of keeping motives and means hidden is simply the way things are done.

While one hopes that the actual doings of Yales’s secret societies don’t include using the most marginalized townies as subjects in such activities as the reading of entrails to predict the stock market, you suspect there is some form of truth in the theme of “might makes right” that runs through the novel. Most of the truly bizarre activities Ms. Bardugo depicts are clearly fictional, but there’s a ring of uncomfortable truth in her portrait of a closed society of wealth and power exerting its will over the town and other institutions, and respectable appearances covering up even the foulest of deeds. This is another novel that includes trips to the Underworld and portals to hell dimensions, though these are even more chilling than those depicted in The Magicians. Sometimes, people in The Magicians break into light-hearted, spontaneous song; it’s difficult to imagine anyone in Bardugo’s oppressive Yale environment doing so, unless it were part of a drunken revel.

So which school would I choose to attend, if I had to make a choice? It would clearly be Brakebills for me. Salvatore School seems too dangerous a proposition for a mere human, as does Yale as Bardugo depicts it. Brakebills is kind of a port in the storm. I could imagine settling in there as a campus librarian and trying to stay out of the way of the more wayward spells and trips to the Neitherlands. Maybe I could even come up with a library circulation system that magically extracts wayward books from the desks of patrons who refuse to return them and gives them an invisible rap on the knuckles that leaves them unable to pinpoint the source. That would be fun.

The Scholomance: A Campus Visit

I know nobody else cares, but if anyone knows who’s causing that pinging sound I’m always hearing in my ears, if you could get them to stop, I’ll be so grateful I’d probably bake you a cake. Once I find the party that’s doing it, I’m going to give them a piece of my mind, I guarantee you. I was talking to a customer at the store today when it started up; I mentioned it to him, and we both decided, in lieu of a better idea, that it was coming from a debris field strung somewhere in the Atlantic. OK, that’s off my chest for now. Just remember, though, I warned you: I’m cranky about these sound effects.

I do actually have a topic for this post, and that’s the trilogy I just finished reading that I think some of you would enjoy, Naomi Novik’s “The Scholomance” series. I sometimes use EBSCO’s NoveList database (which you can probably access through your local public library) to find books similar to other books I’ve enjoyed, and I think that’s where I came across the trilogy’s first book, A Deadly Education. I was investigating books in the intriguingly named “Dark Academia” genre, and that led me to this title. Dark Academia is having a definite cultural moment. Some of this interest can be traced back to Harry Potter, but there are a lot of wildly different variations on the theme, as I have found.

In the Scholomance, students attend a school of magic in an alternate universe with the void as its backyard and spend four years of secondary education trying not to get killed. That’s it, in a nutshell. There are no adults around; course schedules appear out of thin air, the cafeteria is self-serve, and monsters (or “mals”) may found at any time in the food, in the shower heads, in the library, or around any random corner at all. Students spend their time learning and perfecting spells and tend to specialize according to their aptitudes. If they survive until the spring of their senior year, they must run a gauntlet of monsters through the gymnasium to escape the Scholomance and find their portals back to the real world.

The survival rate at the school has been pretty poor until Galadriel Higgins (“El” to her friends) and Orion Lake appear on the scene with some superior mal-fighting abilities and new ideas about how to manage monsters. Antagonists at first (as nearly everyone at the school is in this dog-eat-dog environment), they slowly begin to form alliances. One of the joys of the novels is to see how the fiercely independent El gradually comes to see who she can trust and whose talents align best with hers. Alliances in the Scholomance are truly life-and-death decisions, since trusting anyone in an environment in which people are played against one another for survival is a serious thing. While the purported reason for the existence of the Scholomance is to give the young people a fighting chance in the mal-infested world to which, if they’re lucky, they’ll be returning, it usually seems the school itself is rigged against them. When El’s class decides to follow her lead in working cooperatively to kill mals, things take a different turn, though not everyone is sold on the idea.

El, Orion, and their fellow students have the fight of their lives in The Last Graduate, and the build-up to and execution of their graduation exercise is unforgettably exciting and suspenseful. Scholomance students come from all over the world and bring with them the political struggles and rivalries of life as we know it, of New York and London, of Beijing and Dubai. In addition to being mal-fighting warriors, though, the students are also teenagers and experience the normal issues of adolescent angst sandwiched in between the flashy heroics.

Somehow the author maintains a buoyant tone that carries you through the horrors of the Scholomance, and in the final book, The Golden Enclaves, you get to see what a Scholomance education buys you, in case you were thinking of enrolling. I probably wouldn’t agree with my local library on a lot of things, but I do agree with their categorization of this trilogy as science fiction. It’s too much like the real world to come across as fantasy. Although it’s full of magic and spells, it maintains a businesslike approach to realpolitik while also making a daring case for idealism. An uneasy cross between a junior United Nations and a penal colony, the Scholomance may actually succeed in what it sets out to do but at a cost. We can surely say the same about some of our own devil's bargains.

This would make a smashing TV series, so I hope someone gifted ends up bringing this to the screen. (See, just a couple of years of Netflix and I’m already leaning into “Let’s get this streaming so I can watch it from the comfort of my couch. And bring me a bowl of popcorn while you’re at it.”) Yes, I’m all about the hygge these days.

A Poem for Penelope

 Ways of Motion

(A Poem)

Twisting and turning

Odysseus makes his way home.

Adventures, some call them.

I call them tribulations.

Plagues sent by a vengeful god

To throw the man of many turns aside.

While Penelope spun and wove

And undid her work secretly at night.

To fend off the intruders, the desperate,

And the merely curious.

Both masters of craft

One ranging widely, the other

Still as a black lake under starlight.

(Who knew what lay at the bottom?)

Perhaps I have been both, in turn

The one who waited, and one who fought

The one who roamed, and the one who thought

(Who knows what thoughts?)

Sometimes winning by a sword

And sometimes by a loom.  —Mary Hackworth

Wordplay is back. No, you haven’t killed us. We’ve been enjoying the simple pleasures of domesticity for several years, including porch-sitting, baking, and watching TV. Yes, I’ve come to really enjoy television, which is one thing that’s different about me now. The streaming services have created a lot more viewing options, and I quite like seeing what other people are watching as well as finding lesser-known favorites of my own.

No, this hasn’t turned into a poetry blog, but I wrote this poem the first week I was in this apartment, and it seems appropriate to start things back up with it. This is still a blog about mythology and everyday life, and I plan to write about things I’ve been seeing out there in the culture, just as I did before.

One quick reminder: Any opinions expressed here are my own, and they are merely that: opinions. I take full responsibility for them, and my guiding motto is still "Do No Harm."

Social Distancing and “The Tempest”

I did something kind of raw today and made a video in which I talked about my own experiences with “social distancing” and social isolation. As I said before, I do think I have a jump on this in comparison with most other people and that there might be something I could add to the conversation surrounding the psychological impacts of all this coronavirus self-quarantine, which are very real.

It’s one thing to read poems and to talk about one’s writing process; that’s one kind of vulnerability. To talk about a difficult personal experience is yet another level of vulnerable, and I think you can tell from the video that I was searching for words and trying to be honest about my own experience. If that helps you make sense of what’s happening to you, then it was time well spent for me. I decided not to edit it and to just leave it as it is, because it’s just me talking, without a lot of forethought, and once you start editing something to “package” it, it probably loses any of the original virtue it may have had.

I tend not to hold anything back when I talk about my own unusual journey because I don’t want to leave it up to someone else to tell my story for me. No one is more of an expert than you or I on our own experiences. You can visit Wordplay’s Facebook page to see the video.

Our Dickensian Moment

I debuted a video of me reading William Wordsworth on Wordplay’s Facebook page earlier tonight, and I honestly don’t see how you can expect any more of me, but here I am writing my blog post—because it is Wednesday. This is such a time of contrasts, isn’t it? One minute I’m totally frustrated with trying to accomplish a formerly simple task and the next minute I’m almost crying because I’m laughing so hard at something someone else posted re: WFH Fashion or How to Up Your Baking Game Under Self-Quarantine.

It was wild at work this week, with people stampeding through the store, refusing to respect the six-feet rule, and continuing to expect things to function as normal in the midst of a world-wide crisis. Everybody handles things differently, and I understand that, but I have talked to several people who somehow seemed to be in denial that anything unusual was taking place. One very nice woman seemed quite reasonable except for the fact that she just wasn’t accepting the fact that lockdowns in some places mean that some problems can’t be easily solved right now. I had several conversations in which I had the sense that people were hanging on to an everyday reality that no longer exists.

At the same time, I’m charmed by the humor and ingenuity displayed by everyday people trying to make the best of things and cope with challenging circumstances. I’m still wondering what will happen to those of modest means who aren’t really equipped for riding out a tsunami like this one. I’m assuming that good will and understanding from everyone involved will carry the day, and in most cases, this is probably true, but it’s difficult to imagine that all losses will be made good. How could they be? Some things really can’t be undone or redone, and there really are months (and years) of your life that you can never get back, no matter how much you want to. That’s something especially difficult for young people, who haven’t had a lot of experience with life upheavals, to understand.

The surreal is now normal, something I’m sure few of us anticipated could happen almost overnight. You just don’t expect the new normal to radically change from one day to the next. One day, I watched from a quiet corner of the grocery store as at least 20 people descended on the produce department at one time; a couple of days later, I was told I couldn’t stand in the completely empty section of the store that formerly housed the cafe because it was “closed” (though no one was within 25 feet of me or actually even in the section at all). All of the parks in town are closed except for one, which has inexplicably remained open. Last week, they were so packed with people that I was afraid to get out of my car, and now even the parking lots are blocked off, so obviously someone figured out the Petri dish potential of the walking paths—no social distancing with hundreds of people walking at the same time.

I’ve been noticing moments of splendor in the midst of chaos, something I’ve become very adept at doing. I’m often in my car and unable to stop when I notice something springlike and beautiful; if this were not the case, I would take even more pictures. I’ve noticed in the past that photographs often fail to capture the full effect of what I’m seeing, but maybe I’m getting better at gauging whether something is photographable or not. My sense of what’s important has changed since I stopped working full-time years ago. It sometimes seems to me that I accomplish more by taking a photo of a tree than I did by working an entire eight-hour day at my desk job, courtesy of some algorithm of usefulness that I’ve developed on my own.

Not all of the effects of what’s happening will be bad. I am not one to recommend character-building experiences (feeling that I’ve had more than I will probably be able to benefit from no matter how long I live)—but you certainly can learn a lot of things about yourself when you’re thrown out of your comfort zone. Of course, you already know that, so no need to state the obvious—just remember the old chestnut about tough times not lasting. And the glass being half-full, not half-empty. All those old cliches.