Those of us who garden in New England – at least those of us of a certain age – have one ear permanently tuned to Robert Frost whose poetry comes up out of the landscape like chicory in August.
Ever since planting Prunella vulgaris in a part of my front lawn that refuses to host anything but crabgrass and plantain I have been thinking of the poem Frost titled “Design.” The commonest common name for Prunella is heal-all, but it is also called self-heal, woundwort, heart-of-the-earth, carpenter’s herb, brownwort or blue curls. It flourishes in New England by roadsides and in fields, and, as its names implies, it has been used for centuries to treat sore throat, infections, viruses, and a multitude of other ailments. Whether or not it actually has medicinal properties is, of course, a subject of debate among herbalists and those who call them “quacks.”
I planted the Prunella, along with Thymus citriodorus and Carex Appalachia, in an effort to reclaim a piece of my lawn for the natives and the pollinators, and on the assumption that natives could better handle whatever elements in the soil were keeping anything but plantain and crabgrass from growing there. Of course, I was wrong. Only the thyme lasted. Before Carex and the Prunella expired, however, I moved them to more tolerable conditions and have since watered both back to some semblance of health. As for the front lawn, that’s a story for another day.
How much of my determination to save the Prunella came from Frost’s description of it as “wayside blue and innocent” I do not know. What I do know is that I have spent a good part of the season pondering the “innocence” of plants, and re-reading Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, which proposes that plants are far from innocent, that they indeed have designs and that they use humans to accomplish their designs.
I have spent yet more time pondering the question of “design.” Here is Frost’s take on the subject in his poem titled “Design.”
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth–
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth– I
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?–
If design govern in a thing so small.
The answer to his question, of course, is that no thing is too small to be exempt from the charge of design because we humans are wired to see patterns in everything and to assign meanings to these patterns. Frost’s “I” could just as easily have found a rare beauty in the combination of spider, flower, and moth, and seen it as evidence of a higher power capable of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. I submit, therefore, that the point of Frost’s poem is choice – we choose how we will see things.
Participating once in the 60’s in one of the then ubiquitous “sensitivity training” workshops, I recall partiipants being asked to name, without thinking, one thing each person associated with their family of origin. Amid the recollections of “pain” and “humiliation” and “loneliness” and “loss,” I burst out with “laughter.”
I grew up with a punster and a humorist and a father who always saw the funny side of things. Among my earliest memories comes the wry smile and lifted eyebrow of my dad as he labelled one of my friends, prone to gossip, “Little Misinformation” or described a situation he couldn’t grasp as “it’s a “misery to me.”
No doubt this early immersion in the joy of laughter has shaped my sense of design. At any rate, I choose to look for the comic rather than the tragic in the events of self and other, or perhaps, more accurately, to wrap the comic around the tragic. Perhaps you could say I choose to exit laughing.
In graduate school, in the same decade as the “sensitivity training” episode, I delved into the works of John Milton, and explored there the proposal that Eve was responsible for all the evils in the world and that Mary was the solution to the “problem” of Eve. One doesn’t laugh at Milton, which is perhaps the “problem” with Milton, though I must admit that, much like Eve by the serpent, I was mesmerized by his voice which spoke to me in an English made lofty by Latin. In some theologies, this is what is meant by the “divine comedy” – Mary, the mother of Christ who redeems men from original sin, by this birth redeeming Eve who brought sin into the world in the first place.
Alas, satire is the only word in my dictionary that fits a direct response to the proposition of “he for God only, she for God in him,” an assertion which grounds Paradise Lost and forms the basis of patriarchy and of “the divine comedy.” My sense of the comic does not include satire, which can be very mean-spirited. For me, the beauty of comedy lies in its providing perspective and doing so with kindness. So if patriarchy is the act of men ascribing to women all the nasties they can’t accept as part of themselves, then comedy is the act of exposing the trick and inviting men to stop projecting and learn instead to laugh at themselves and their foibles and to embrace women as fellow humans.
The 21st century equivalents of those “sensitivity training” workshops tout the benefits of laughter. Even the esteemed Mayo Clinic has joined the chorus. In the short term, laughter can, according to the Mayo, stimulate various key organs, activate and relieve one’s stress response, and soothe tension. Over the long term, laughter can, and I quote:
- Improve your immune system. Negative thoughts manifest into chemical reactions that can affect your body by bringing more stress into your system and decreasing your immunity. By contrast, positive thoughts can actually release neuropeptides that help fight stress and potentially more-serious illnesses.
- Relieve pain. Laughter may ease pain by causing the body to produce its own natural painkillers.
- Increase personal satisfaction. Laughter can also make it easier to cope with difficult situations. It also helps you connect with other people.
- Improve your mood. Many people experience depression, sometimes due to chronic illnesses. Laughter can help lessen your stress, depression and anxiety and may make you feel happier. It can also improve your self-esteem.
Whoa, this testament from the Mayo should be enough to make even the most serious person sit up, take notice. and look for the joke book. Kind of funny, isn’t it?
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