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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
DID NOT FINISH
I am so afraid of consuming, of taking, of whether or not I have the right to things. I want to expand and leave traces of myself. I want evidence that I am existing.
There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is all of life. To prepare gradually the masterpiece of a proud and supreme death, of a death where chance plays no part, of a well-made, beatific, and enthusiastic death of the kind the saints knew to shape. Of a long-ripened death that effaces its hateful name and is nothing but a gesture that returns those laws to the anonymous universe which have been recognized and rescued over the course of an intensely accomplished life. It is this idea of death which has developed inside of me since childhood from one painful experience to the next, and which compels me to humbly endure the small death, so that I may become worthy of the one which wants us to be great.
These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day amid hardships I am thankful for: patience is all!
"They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions," said Atticus, "but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
Flaubert more than implies that the free mastery of the artist (and reader or viewer) is a cruel power. In Bourdieu's analysis, Flaubert's freedom, and that of the avant-garde in general, was purchased at the price of actual disconnection from the world of the economy. Other bohemian writers were the main and grossly inadequate market for such work, and books were written in deliberate defiance of bourgeois understanding. The autonomy of art was carved out of a reaction against both elevated bourgeois writing and engaged, realist literature; acclaim was only—if ever—achieved after the long passage of time, as new avant-garde forms displaced and familiarized the old. It is easy to see that the conditions for that freedom no longer exist in the art world. The plausibility and power of art's freedom are on the wane. Among the opening remarks of Aesthetic Theory, Adorno has this to say about artistic freedom: 'absolute freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of the whole'. Until that wider unfreedom is confronted, the particular freedoms of art run through the fingers like sand. To break with the autonomy of free art is to remove one of the masks of free trade. Or to put it the other way around, if capitalist free trade is to be abandoned as a model for global development, so must its ally, free art.
This book is an invitation to celebrate the life creative, and in so doing to embrace its essential and beautiful anarchy. I use the word "anarchy" metaphorically rather than politically, as a call to live our lives on our own terms, which is the only way we can fully be ourselves. It's a call to live our lives free from the bondage of should and ought to: the only way to be truly alive. We need more of these kinds of anarchists, more people who understand the extraordinary beauty and brevity of life, and who daily find the courage to follow that voice that calls them to something more, even when they don't know what that something more is. Even when that voice calls them to places beyond the points that other voices say they should turn back.