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Some call them weeds.
The project of putrid purity is torn and tripped up by plants that insist on growing in seemingly intolerable conditions. The toxic, the detritus, the refuse, refused by eyes trained on progress and extraction, become unexpected nurseries for what colonizers have the audacity to name transgressive.
Ruderal plants are the fierce greenlings that grow on the debris of civilization. They burst unbidden through sidewalk cracks and parking lot potholes. They feralize abandoned lots and highway medians. Pick one, and five more spring up. Cut them under, and a new patch appears in the witching hours of hazy nights.
They are inconvenient immigrants to the ruiners who rebrand themselves righteous. They transform wasted land, making way for waves of living diversity in barren places, yet are the ones called invasive.
Not heroes, even of their own tails.
Not domesticated, even when acknowledged as medicine.
Unruly and unrelenting. Ungovernable.
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It’s a hell of a thing to watch the lie of American magnificence fully and perhaps finally disassemble in real time, while couched in the dynamic paradox of a radical institution. In an art history class we were invited to read from The Painter of Modern Life, and to extrapolate what we might name this current epoch, how we would adjectify what a day in the life of a contemporary artist might entail. Though I think the more common term now on this far side of post-modernism is meta-modernism, the word that describes an aura of fertile subversivity, of audacious insistence on collective abundance, is what I propose to be the moniker of this emergent age.
These glimmers of natural resilience in an otherwise grey expanse of concrete and steel. Tendrils curling towards a hazy sky, cellulose holding the memory of long ago clearcut forests. Perhaps these intransigents might call us to their ways, mirroring our innate alchemy. Might catalyze within us stubborn gestures of growth amidst collapse.
~~~
Luminous florets float in the dying light, a trail of rebellious promise leads to my still-pursed lips. Mow, pull, poison, curse, but dandelion will remain and, come Spring, rise again. Here there be ragweed, plantain, hoary bittercress, hemp, nettle, and daisy. They whisper on fragrant wind: “Disobey. Be disruptively fertile. Widen the cracks, pulse awake portals towards paradigms of kinship.” Your blank page be a key, your brush a sledgehammer, your word a shovel breaking through bitter soil. Some seeds only sprout after fire. What a blessing to be alive in such dangerous times.
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