The reality we sense is not fixed or static, but, as Carlo Rovelli puts it, a “momentary get together on the sand.” For the quantum physicist, all reality is an ever-shifting interaction of manifold influences, each determining the other, which converge or dissolve under the conditions at a particular time and space that is always in flux. As Rainer Maria Rilke expressed this thought in poetic terms, “Everything/is not itself.”
The human, too, can be seen this way as a node of ever-changing interactions with the natural cosmos and the environment humans themselves have formed through technology and culture. What it means to be human, then, is not a constant, but continually constituted, altered and re-constituted through the recursive interface with an open and evolving world.
Writing a “Raymond Chandler” novel without it being pastiche is a remarkable stunt. The fact Denise Mina has now produced a “Philip Marlowe” mystery that is clearly still a Denise Mina novel is quite an achievement.
“How many borders had fallen in her lifetime?” Irina thinks. “The Berlin Wall, the far-flung boundaries of the U.S.S.R., the shifting puzzle of the former Soviet bloc.” Over the course of the novel, we see the corrosion of familial borders, too; as Ivanito reminds his cousins with a phrase now commonly used, “the political and the personal are inseparable.” As the youngest generation prepares to reunite in Berlin, the underlying question remains: When a map vanishes, what is left in its wake? Or, more important, was there ever a map to begin with?
Those summers I was never home, especially on the weekends, but sometimes I’d stop by to change clothes or grab a quick bite, and she would be there in the garden with her hair pulled high, her ponytail hanging out of the top of an old skate-brand visor I had stopped wearing years before. I see her now in the pink tee she often wore and a pair of denim shorts. Sunglasses and a smile. I moved away at 19, but on the rare occasions when I’d return home, I’d find her out back as if nothing had changed. Her hair would slowly grey. New cats would accumulate, similarly.
So it brought me great joy to read Camille Dungy’s memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, filled as it is with moments in which Dungy and her daughter, Callie, share time together in their backyard, cultivating a space all their own. They started their garden after they moved from Oakland, California, to Fort Collins, Colorado. They were acclimating to a new place, but also learning about the native plants and wildlife. In the process they were discovering what it was like to participate in the surrounding ecology. They named their garden the Prairie Project, and it’s the focus of Soil.
According to David-Antoine Williams, in his 2020 book The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry, we live in an “age of language science.” And this war chest and treasury of corpus linguistics, live thesauri, and machine translations, this lapidary or dilapidated Babel of searchable online texts and libraries, this climacteric of alleged “world history,” has pushed and helped contemporary poets to engage with etymology, or the roots and histories of words, to an astonishing extent, especially in English—though their engagement is part of a long tradition.