Saturday 28th February, 2015.

Earthworm casting - 22/2/15

The allotment gardener of Nowhere in particular traverses the allotment via 'The Wormholes of Ceres' and recreates a plot of  wriggling viccissitudes and muddy factoids. 

I was abandoned in the remote and adipose constellation of, ‘The Humming Garden of Vulpecula’. I have no idea how long I languished there in the putrefaction of its mushy science fiction. I assume I was there to study the cosmic significance of the decaying field of a buried fox. While I was immersed in that field, ambiguities of time and temporality – of Chronos and Kairos – played on my mind. I think they still are. It is possible I became a subject of study by mysterious forces acting through the reservoir of the vulpine corpse. 

It is a sad fact and an equally sad fiction that I am a character issued forth from the mind of Julian Beere. Had I been out of the mind of, say, Stanislaw Lem, I, the allotment gardener of Nowhere in particular, could be, instead, ‘Dr. Kris Kelvin’, from the novel, ‘Solaris’.  The latter can take you on a profound ‘philosophical exploration of man’s anthropomorphic limitations’ however I lack the spirit of enquiry of the scientists in that story/on that planet. Despite or because of their spirit, the planet Solaris caused them a great deal of distress by tapping deep into their psyches and forcing them to confront their personal flaws and tortuous confusions. The planetary field of Solaris studied them. I carry a lot of metaphorical baggage (not all of it my own) and thus I thought I might be studied as traumatically as the victims/subjects of Solaris unless I could wriggle my way out of the situation somehow. I was not going to subject myself to ‘astro-psycho-dramatics’ acted out on the basis of ‘his’ baggage and certainly not in such putrid conditions.

I could tell Julian Beere was disappointed by my will to avoid being probed by ‘his’ fantasies and fictions. What does he think ‘he’ is? A planet? I wanted to know more and to have more to say about the various forms of interconnecting time on the allotment garden.  I tried to make my escape via a labyrinth of (earth?) wormholes and tunnels that permeate the allotment site. While ‘he’ slipped and slid ‘his’ inept way about the surface of the earth I burrowed away within the earth trying to experience it as a wholly different temporal medium. 

Because of an unexpected lightness and absence I soon realised I had not escaped from ‘him’ and that I was actually travelling via wormholes of ‘his’ vacuous plotting. I had to digest so much of ‘his’ cerebral emptiness and force my way through ‘his’ plot twisted midden heaps. ‘He’ had made an empty space worm out of me. I wanted to make soil. Satisfying ‘his’ desire for a garden analogous with space, stars and the heavens was indulging ‘his’ pretentiousness and it lacked substance. I craved gravity but found myself orbiting in the vacuum of ‘his’ interstellar dilettantism.  I was just a speck of a factoid in a vast and ever expanding ethereal factoid belt. I was an enervated worm lost in space. I was just an alimentary hole craving energy, even negative energy, in vermiform.

Meanwhile……..

It was time, thought Julian Beere, to prepare some runner bean trenches. 

A tool shed door creaked and a garden spade and fork appeared. Their emergence boded ill for the vermi-formers of Ceres. The tools were in stellar form – akin to that of the asterism, The Plough - and they were rendered visible by pinpricks of light. They foretold of a cataclysmic upheaval of subterranean time. A celestial storm soon raged overhead in the firmament; his mud-laden wellington booted feet thumped down a weighty drumbeat of imminent trench warfare. 

First he had to collect some unholy slop and swill of a god damned awful concoction he believed was going to replenish the soils fertility. Witness a ferment of his food waste, liquid manure, waste paper and (a ‘secret ingredient’ (sic)) a twinkling of his urine. Was it a coincidence that when he lifted the lid off his ‘permacultural’ cesspool, the crows shrieked and flapped into the sky, blotting out what little winter sunshine there was, such was the ecliptic stench unleashed? Then an ominous silence hung over the plot as he prepared to dig his first spadeful of runner bean trench. The first plunge of the spade into the soil (flesh?) of Ceres might have elicited the screams of many a worm but, in space no one……..

So it was he dug. He carved, sliced and heaved the earth-space, rupturing what might have been an infinite network of benevolent humic cannulae. The blade of the spade beheaded, betailed, cleaved and bisected in a mindlessly horrific blood and mud bath; a grim reap of good intention. He buried the corpses of many a worm and wormhole beneath that faecal paper stew of his, to make for what he reckoned will be a well-fed bed of runner beans. Why didn’t he use the fork? It might have caused less of a massacre of accretive time had he used that tool. 

 Runner Bean Trenching - 8/2/15 - 'dig'

I had to connect with the bloodied mud of his mind, to worm my way in and make him see other ways of nourishing the needs of Ceres. To do this he had to pause long enough to give me time to make my immaterial way up through the soles of his rubber boots and virtually enter into him, to make the ascent of his vascular bundle (being more vegetable than animal that ‘he’ is) to the dicotyledonous arrangement that some might refer to as his brain. 

Paper & corrugated card pulp + food waste + liquid manure (nettle)

Raised Climbing French Bean Trenching - 8/2/15 - 'no-dig'.

“Veg’ head”, the ring necked parakeets mockingly squawked in Antipodean accord. That was enough cause for him to pause in a perverse ‘Doolittle-ian’ reverie and time enough for me to worm my way into him. I instilled in his brain/mind an idea of a raised and inverted runner bean trench that requires little or no digging of the raised beds beneath and so spares the lives of many a worm. He can dump his humic slop on the surface of the earth and we will ingest and egest what we will in our own good time. 

Animals were harmed in the making of this post