Little Weirds(22)

I hired her to start me a small garden of plants that would bloom throughout the year, so that there would always be a flower to say hello to when I return home. I was incredibly eager to tell her what plants I love and to make sure that she would not give me anything like an azalea or somehow misunderstand me and just roll up with a bunch of cactuses and gravel and make me look like a severe woman who has no idea what’s going on. Having “no idea what’s going on” is my central fear, most days.

I told her that I wanted people to come through the big garden door, into my pen, and feel a rush of wildness and color, and to encounter many different green forms. I wanted to present a big, full energy markedly different from the stress of whatever is outside my walls. I told her that I wanted my garden to be like the inside of what I see in myself. You see my garden, you come into my home, and it tells you not just what I like to see and what I want to be around, but how you should treat me. I am the live thing that belongs here, with other live things like this.

This is what I told the woman named Kathleen.

Kathleen patiently told me about the plants and flowers that could live in my garden. My small old dog walked with us and we looked at the sunlight and shade. I pointed to a bunchy blue burst of flowers growing on the hillside, sort of a vine that didn’t lie flat, a bramble. The flowers looked like the shape of a fruit, and I always like it when those two images, fruits and flowers, gesture to each other. I like that and I always have, and I like it when fruit is in flower arrangements and I like it when flowers are in the salad or on cakes and I like it when fruits are on women’s heads in their hats or if their whole hat is fruit.

I have always adored a cornucopia, of course.

I pointed at the blue hill-flowers and asked her, “Can I have that kind?” She told me that I could certainly have it. And then, very seriously, she said, “The only thing is that dogs love to smell the blossoms and they are actually very sticky, so your dog will have flowers on his face, and I don’t know if you’d like that.”

“I would like that,” I told her.

What I didn’t tell her was that when she asked me that question about flowers on my dog’s face, she showed me that a legitimate option for experience—a true one that is real and is deeply concerned with beauty—could be mine. This was my home and my world and the future was all geared up and ready for pleasure and we were getting specific: Do you or do you not want flowers that stick to a dog’s face? Yes or no? If yes, I was a citizen of the world of breezes and Sticky-Dog-Face-Flower. With every small choice, the world was emerging. What would I like, from all of it?

I didn’t tell Kathleen how dear it was to me that she told me this sticky-flower fact in total earnestness. I didn’t tell her that even though everything about me really points to liking things like flowers on animals’ faces, I was pleased that she did not assume. I was pleased that she made sure. Because in making sure, Kathleen gave me the opportunity to say out loud to another person that I would like my old dog to have flowers stuck to his face, and when I said it out loud—that yes, I would like that—I knew it was true. Then I admired myself. What’s more, I felt tenderness about my personality and my choices for delight. I said who I was, on my land.

I didn’t tell her that she was making me more than one garden. One outer, one inner. I was woozy as I watched a space open up inside of my inner me-garden, space that would be private just for me, in which I could observe myself and be private as I gazed upon myself.

I didn’t tell her, “Hey, Kathleen? You’ve revealed yourself to be a woman of wonderful character.” Rather than being unconsciously lazy and telling me something, she had reached out and grabbed a moment. No, she did not miss the moment, this woman Kathleen. She asked a question and so much bloomed and the plants weren’t even there yet.

What I didn’t say, because I selfishly wanted to keep the sweet sap of the moment swelling inside myself, undiluted, was “Actually, more than anything, I would like my dog to have small blue flowers stuck to his small face as often as possible, and now that you mention it, I want this more than most things that I want, but most of the things that I want are like this thing, and it is a certain type of person who feels this way that I feel, and I’m proud to be one, and now I see that I must really not forget that the style of what I find beautiful is incredible to me, that it is incredible to feel lucky to want to want what one wants, to be able to see the rings of yourself this way, and honestly, Kathleen, I am dead serious on this one.”





Letter: Super-Ego


Dear Ms. Slate:

We were absolutely thrilled when, roughly three years ago, you got your hands on an Adam Phillips article in the London Review of Books about self-criticism and the super-ego. We were encouraged when you seemed to take in the information and hold it up to your own interior experience. We looked on in approval as you paraphrased the article to friends and strangers, telling them things like “The super-ego is reiterative. It repeats the most boring, pointy, hurtful things, and if you met it at a party, if it were a person, you would think that the person was not only mean and insane, but also not as smart as they think they are. You wouldn’t listen. You would think they were a shithead.”

You spent time passing this information around, yet upon close analysis, you did not seem to be passing it through yourself. It seemed to be lodged in your mouth, right in your little mouth, like an echo just bouncing around and then flying out of your face at parties and even in meetings, and then it would bounce off other people’s faces and right back into your mouth. Of course, you could have swallowed it down, or explored its flavors. You could have let it work its way through you, but instead you did nothing with this information except to tell it to other people.