She began making fake plants - delicate and brutal emblems of life made out of the most improbable materials, from tiny tender petals painstakingly cut out of used K-95 face masks to the puffy white flowers found when you break apart styrofoam, one of the most environmentally merciless human-made materials. And suddenly a wilderness of possibility came abloom in her mind. She was looking to break boredom, to remember the aliveness of life.
When artist Nina Katchadourian stared down her trash can in the middle of the lockdown, she was not looking to make art. Life - the measure of our aliveness beyond mere existence - is largely of matter of how much beauty, how much meaning, how much improbable loveliness we can make from the scraps of our losses. Lawrence on the antidote to the malady of materialism and trees, solitude, and how we root ourselves when relationships collapse. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.Ĭomplement with Gwendolyn Brooks on vulnerability as power and Bruce Lee on yielding as an act of strength, then revisit D.H. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. In a passage nothing less than countercultural amid our present culture, in which the loudest and brashest is mistaken for the strongest, he adds:īrute force crushes many plants. Lawrence observes how this quiet tenacity of nature, which is the opposite of violence, is mirrored in our greatest spiritual leaders and our highest achievements of civilization. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. But in the end, that which lives lives by delicate sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. LawrenceĬonsidering the drama of life and death, and what it takes for life to persevere against the entropy that haunts it from the outset, he writes: Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) calibrated this loss of perspective in a lovely aside tucked into his writings about the ancient burial practices in different parts of Italy, posthumously published in the splendid collection of travel writings Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays ( public library). We also live in a culture that has warped sensitivity from the measure of our porousness to life - the openhearted porousness from which all creative work springs - into a means of manipulation, extorting sympathy and slack, unconcerned with creation.Ī century ago, D.H. We live in a culture that has warped strength from the measure of our interior tenacity into the magnitude of our forceful self-assertion.
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