it's a fictional essay this time! i don't know who the writer is
the essay text:
...and for no other reason than the endless twists of the dial, yet the perseverance of Nature left her unduly spent, almost a wretch, never again able to touch the souls she had once seanced. Her recovery is uncertain, but this author remains hopeful.
On Fairies
“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” That particular quote of Adams' is unquestionably true: a garden is beautiful for being a garden. We can admire the bouquet of a thousand fragrances caught on gentle breezes, trace with our eyes the serrations of a shrub's many tender branches, track and record the varied motions of flower petals as they cycle through the mornings, noons and nights until they break the patterns and become individuals, sift through the soil and mount root threads beneath a warm microscope, and savor the impending moment, after long days of careful labor, upon which the spinach and carrots and tomatoes have ripened into salad. The garden provides so much, becomes so much. And if we were not there to observe it, the garden would necessarily remain splendorous on its own merits. To expect the garden to provide us with fairies is to disdain the garden's endless material bounties in favor of a magic it could never provide; to demand the garden provide us with fairies is to censure it for failing to show us our own reflection in the head of a lettuce. Humans encounter a creature as alien as a dandelion, and their minds in fear of what it might be and might not be instead declare it a prank, a fey trick, a weed to be plucked before it metamorphoses into a curse of seeds and overruns the boundaries we set for it. Fairies, the ones we look for beneath the ivy leaves, inevitably turn every bush into a tangle of thorns, every flower into a narcissus. Yes, the garden is enough without the fairies. Nature is enough.
Of course, as many thinkers have spilled seas of ink to rebut and refute, this line of logic risks decoupling human from nature: how, they may ask, can we not possibly see ourselves in the garden when science itself has told us that we are born from the same elements found in the soil? The point here is sound: humanity is no more separable from Nature as an ant. And as an ant moves in time with its mind, tempered by pebbles and loam and towering blades of grass, so also do humans move in time with our minds, as we experience whichever environment we have wandered into today. The mind, of course, is another of Nature's many offshoots, sometimes even alien to itself, and the human mind cannot deny its own proclivity to flights of fancy! These flights lead us to weave baskets and stories alike, to lose ourselves in the thoughts of ages, and through much stumbling and meandering perhaps one day arrive at the home of some lost piece of Truth. The human mind, and all its thoughts of the strange and fabulous therein, are beautiful!
We have the fairies all wrong. They are not the reticent caretakers of a conscious garden mass, rather they are the ambassadors and interlocutors of the human mind sent by us on expedition to help us understand the natures of these things that are so unlike ourselves. At our unconscious bidding, fairies learn the languages of worm and leaf and dewdrop, embed themselves amongst the rows of basil and marjoram, restructure their societies to enact the laws and proclamations of aphid governments, and worship at the altars made by roses to praise the trees that shelter their stems and placate the creatures that tickle their roots. All that in a single moment, for they must be ready when we call them back to divulge the truths they have worked so hard to uncover for their employers. Surely we cannot be surprised when they reply to us in the only way they know how to articulate the nature of a garden: practical jokes.
Perhaps in order to mend the bridges spanning human, garden, and the ecotone between, we must teach the fairies the scientific method.
image attributions coming shortly.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
