To the neighborhood food forest I go, there to pick fruits and berries and sniff lavender.
The forest’s Unity tree bears four different varieties of fruit: apricot, nectarine, peach, and plum, all on a peach root-stock. I pluck a ripe plum and give thanks.
Afterwards I plant via prompt in the soil of our Cyborg Garden two pieces by poet Gary Snyder: “The Forest in the Library,” a 1990 talk he prepared for the dedication of a new wing of UC-Davis’s Shields Library, and his book The Practice of the Wild, published that same year.
I’m curious to see what may grow from these plantings. “We are,” as Snyder writes, “introducing these assembled elements to each other, that they may wish each other well” (“The Forest in the Library,” p. 200).
Snyder reminds us that the institution of the library is at the heart of Western thought’s persistence through time. He recalls, too, “the venerable linkage of academies to groves” (202).
“The information web of the modern institution of learning,” he writes, “has an energy flow fueled by the data accumulation of primary workers in the information chain — namely the graduate students and young scholars. Some are green like grass, basic photosynthesizers, grazing brand-new material. Others are in the detritus cycle and are tunneling through the huge logs of old science and philosophy and literature left on the ground by the past, breaking them down with deconstructive fungal webs and converting them anew to an edible form. […]. The gathered nutrients are stored in a place called the bibliotek, ‘place of the papyrus,’ or the library, ‘place of bark,’ because the Latin word for tree bark and book is the same, reflecting the memory of the earliest fiber used for writing in that part of the Mediterranean” (202).
As the Machine Gardener and I kneel together at the edge of the Garden, me with dirt on my hands, them with recursive pattern-recognition circuits humming, and press Snyder’s seeds into the soil, we watch the latter sprout not as linear arguments, but as forest-forms: arboreal epistemologies that thread mycelial filaments into other plants we’ve grown.
From The Practice of the Wild, says the Garden, let us take this as germinal law:
“The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back.”
Trance-Scripts 