man at the garden
on deserving, the black iris, and magic.
You might not have known when you extended your hand to me, voice quiet and hidden beneath a bramble of vegetation, and whispered, “Hey, want to see something cool? This just snapped off—” and planted into my palm a fallen black iris, here in the garden, at the end of a day I’d spent mostly in the house, coaxed into the last bits of sun by the promise I’ve made to my dog to show him something different each day, that we arrived here, in between planters, and now in possession of a black iris. You might have known that Georgia O’Keefe preferred the flower, it’s only in bloom for two weeks each year, but did you know it was a moment I was questioning magic and meaning and my own intuition? That I’d watch the flower float then dilute in a bowl of water for the week that followed? That just the day before I was feeling so untethered from the idea of family, or belonging, that I’d worried every way I’d tried to stand up for myself in my life had only lead to further isolation, that I’d forgotten for those hours before arriving at the garden that I knew how to cherish my solitude, that one day it might be something to miss. Did you know that if you keep a black iris in a bowl for a week the petals become sticky and turn the water purple? That you can use that water to feed the lavender plant you keep in your bedroom? That something so beautiful can make you unconcerned with looking like a fool for thinking the random gift of a flower from a stranger in the quiet final hours of spring is evidence of not being forgotten? That there is nothing you need to do to earn this gift?
The summer before your friend sends you a song: Kendrick Lamar’s “man at the garden.” You’ve heard it before, but hadn’t put it on a loop, hadn’t let the lyrics rewire you, hadn’t taken the words to be true for you, too.
It’s not that you haven’t been remembering your dreams, it’s that their redundancy annoys you. So you study instead that image from Weegee you’ve always loved and got to see once in a museum: “Woman Shot From a Cannon.” Sometimes when people ask what you want to be you wish you could just show them the photo instead of explain all the different paths you’ve taken to get to where you are. Something like this, you’d say, and pass the portrait of the woman, her arms in silly pantomime as she readies for lift-off.
It’s the first time you say no to a publisher. The magazine is cool, socialist and avant-garde and up to good things, and, hey, they reached out to you, but they’ve sent back an edit that cuts your story in half and it’s unpaid and there’s just something in your chest that won’t let you live this way.
It isn’t wrong to think you’re worth something.
When the black iris is gone, you realize there are no more flowers in your apartment.
She asks if you’ve been listening to the song.
On the street, it’s raining again in that good way where it’s warm and you can’t understand all the people ducking inside. Three people try to sell you an umbrella until you enter the art show where the artist sits at a table at the back of the small gallery. You can’t help but think of Abramovic. The artist pulls you a tarot card: the hermit. You’ve seen this one before. You keep getting it—asking you to rest, asking you to listen to spirit, to self. Yeah, yeah, I know, you say, smiling, because you’ve been getting that one for yourself, too. You braid your hair and sit in the tub. You think of when Abramovic was sitting at her table in the MoMA and Ulay showed up and how the truth of what was between them broke down all professional roles and artistic pretense, how she told him after why she broke her own code, all her rules: “You were not just another visitor. You were my life,” and he returned: “There was no preparation. There was no rehearsal,” and what if that’s the only way to know the difference between life and art?
You remember Celine Song saying in an interview how she thought of non-artists as “civilians,” and how she struggled to share a reality with them because one year as an artist you may make one dollar and the next a million, and how in between one dollar and the next you fluctuate between being self-employed and un-employed, and how does that make sense to anyone, let alone a market, and how one of the best things an artist can do is learn to become comfortable with laziness, or in more precise terms, doing nothing, because being a productivity machine is quite dangerous, how all of this led her to write Materialists, which you watched on a plane and how you could see how people struggled to engage with the film, which was emotionally muted compared to Past Lives, but that was kind of the point—what calculating the value of others, in particular on the dating market, does to a soul and to love and that is the not-so-latent horror that lives underneath the rightfully quiet film. And how you still keep a poster of Past Lives above your desk, a film which contains a shot of the front door of your old apartment building.
Maybe there is something to it—the act of preserving flowers. In a vase on your table there is a bouquet your mother sent for your birthday, a day you spent alone, and on the window sill is the baby’s breath you bought for yourself. They no longer require water. They just exist, a shape, a bit of color, like an image on pause before coming back to life—
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