The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (21 page)

Even so, the use of drugs for spiritual purposes feels cheap and false. Perhaps it is our work ethic that is offended—you know, no pain, no gain. Or maybe it is the provenance of the chemicals that troubles us, the fact that they come
from outside.
Especially in the Judeo-Christian West, we tend to define ourselves by the distance we’ve put between ourselves and nature, and we jealousy guard the borders between matter and spirit as proof of our ties to the angels. The notion that spirit might turn out in some sense to
be
matter (and plant matter, no less!) is a threat to our sense of separateness and godliness. Spiritual knowledge comes from above or within, but surely not from plants. Christians have a name for someone who believes otherwise: pagan.

• • •

Two stories stand behind the taboos that people in the West have placed on cannabis at various times in its history. Each reflects our anxieties about this remarkable plant, about what its Dionysian power might do to us if it is not resisted or brought under control.

The first, brought back from the Orient by Marco Polo (among others), is the story of the Assassins—or rather, a corruption of the story of the Assassins, which may or may not be apocryphal to begin with. The time is the eleventh century, when a vicious sect called the Assassins, under the absolute control of Hassan ibn al Sabbah (aka “the Old Man of the Mountain”) is terrorizing Persia, robbing and murdering with brutal abandon. Hassan’s marauders will do anything he tells them to, no questions asked; they have lost their fear of death. How does Hassan secure this perfect loyalty? By treating his men to a foretaste of the eternal paradise that will be theirs should they die in his service.

Hassan would begin his initiation of new recruits by giving them so much hashish that they passed out. Hours later the men would awaken to find themselves in the midst of a most beautiful palace garden, laid with sumptuous delicacies and staffed with gorgeous maidens to gratify their every desire. Scattered through this paradise, lying on the ground in pools of blood, are severed heads—actually actors buried to their necks. The heads speak, telling the men of the afterlife and what they will have to do if they hope ever to return to this paradise.

The story was corrupted by the time Marco Polo retold it, so that the hashish was now directly responsible for the violence of the Assassins. (The word itself is a corruption of “hashish.”) By erasing the Assassins’ fear of death, the story suggested, hashish freed them to commit the most daring and merciless crimes. The tale became a staple of orientalism and, later, of the campaign to criminalize marijuana in America in the 1930s. Harry J. Anslinger, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the man most responsible for marijuana prohibition, mentioned the Assassins at every opportunity. He skillfully used this metanarrative—publicizing every contemporary crime story he could cut to its lurid pattern—to transform a little-known drug of indolence into one of violence, a social menace. Even after Anslinger’s “reefer madness” had subsided, the moral of the tale of the Assassins continued to trail cannabis—the notion that, by severing the link between acts and their consequences, marijuana unleashes human inhibitions, thereby endangering Western civilization.

The second story is simply this: In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal condemnation of witchcraft in which he specifically condemned the use of cannabis as an “antisacrament” in satanic worship. The black mass celebrated by medieval witches and sorcerers presented a mocking mirror image of the Catholic Eucharist, and in it cannabis traditionally took the place of wine—serving as a pagan sacrament in a counterculture that sought to undermine the establishment church.

The fact that witches and sorcerers were the first Europeans to exploit the psychoactive properties of cannabis probably sealed its fate in the West as a drug identified with feared outsiders and cultures conceived in opposition: pagans, Africans, hippies. The two stories fed each other and in turn the plant’s power: people who smoked cannabis were Other, and the cannabis they smoked threatened to let their Otherness loose in the land.

• • •

Witches the Church simply burned at the stake, but something more interesting happened to the witches’ magic plants. The plants were too precious to banish from human society, so in the decades after Pope Innocent’s fiat against witchcraft, cannabis, opium, belladonna, and the rest were simply transferred from the realm of sorcery to medicine, thanks largely to the work of a sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician named Paracelsus. Sometimes called the “Father of Medicine,” Paracelsus established a legitimate pharmacology largely on the basis of the ingredients found in flying ointments. (Among his many accomplishments was the invention of laudanum, the tincture of opium that was perhaps the most important drug in the pharmacopoeia until the twentieth century.) Paracelsus often said that he had learned everything he knew about medicine from the sorceresses. Working under the rational sign of Apollo, he domesticated their forbidden Dionysian knowledge, turning the pagan potions into healing tinctures, bottling the magic plants and calling them medicines.

Paracelsus’s grand project, which arguably is still going on today,
*
represents one of the many ways the Judeo-Christian tradition has deployed its genius to absorb, or co-opt, the power of the pagan faith it set out to uproot. In much the same way that the new monotheism folded into its rituals the people’s traditional pagan holidays and spectacles, it desperately needed to do something about their ancient devotion to magic plants. Indeed, the story of the forbidden fruit in Genesis suggests that nothing was more important.

The challenge these plants posed to monotheism was profound, for they threatened to divert people’s gaze from the sky, where the new God resided, down to the natural world all around them. The magic plants were, and remain, a gravitational force pulling us back to Earth, to matter, away from the there and then of Christian salvation and back to the here and now. Indeed, what these plants do to time is perhaps the most dangerous thing about them—dangerous, that is, from the perspective of a civilization organized on the lines of Christianity and, more recently, capitalism.

Christianity and capitalism are both probably right to detest a plant like cannabis. Both faiths bid us to set our sights on the future; both reject the pleasures of the moment and the senses in favor of the expectation of a fulfillment yet to come—whether by earning salvation or by getting and spending. More even than most plant drugs, cannabis, by immersing us in the present and offering something like fulfillment here and now, short-circuits the metaphysics of desire on which Christianity and capitalism (and so much else in our civilization) depend.
*

• • •

What, then,
was
the knowledge that God wanted to keep from Adam and Eve in the Garden? Theologians will debate this question without end, but it seems to me the most important answer is hidden in plain sight. The
content
of the knowledge Adam and Eve could gain by tasting of the fruit does not matter nearly as much as its form—that is, the very fact that there was spiritual knowledge of
any
kind to be had from a tree: from nature. The new faith sought to break the human bond with magic nature, to disenchant the world of plants and animals by directing our attention to a single God in the sky. Yet Jehovah couldn’t very well pretend the tree of knowledge didn’t exist, not when generations of plant-worshiping pagans knew better. So the pagan tree is allowed to grow even in Eden, though ringed around now with a strong taboo. Yes, there
is
spiritual knowledge in nature, the new God is acknowledging, and its temptations are fierce, but I am fiercer still. Yield to it, and you will be punished.

So unfolds the drug war’s first battle.

• • •

I’ve removed most all of the temptations from my own garden, though not without regret or protest. Immersed this spring in re-search for this chapter, I was sorely tempted to plant one of the hy-brid cannabis seeds I’d seen for sale in Amsterdam. I immediately thought better of it, however. So I planted lots of opium poppies instead. I hasten to add that I’ve no plans to do anything with my poppies except admire them—first their fleeting tissue-paper blooms, then their swelling blue-green seedpods, fat with milky alkaloid. (Unless, of course, simply walking among the poppies is enough to have an effect, as it was for Dorothy in Oz.) Unscored and so at least arguably innocent, these poppies are my stand-ins for the cannabis I cannot plant. Whenever I look at their dreamy petals, I’ll be reminded of the powers this garden has abjured in order to stay on the safe side of the law.

So I make do with this bowdlerized garden, this densely planted plot of acceptable pleasures—good things to eat, beautiful things to gaze upon—fenced around by heeded laws. If Dionysus is represented in this garden, and he surely is, it’s mainly in the flower border. I would be the last person to make light of the power of a fragrant rose to raise one’s spirits, summon memories, even, in some not merely metaphorical sense, to intoxicate.

The garden is a place of many sacraments, an arena—at once as common as any room and as special as a church—where we can go not just to witness but to enact in a ritual way our abiding ties to the natural world. Abiding, yet by now badly attenuated, for civilization seems bent on breaking or at least forgetting our connections to the earth. But in the garden the old bonds are preserved, and not merely as symbols. So we eat from the vegetable patch, and, if we’re paying attention, we’re recalled to our dependence on the sun and the rain and the everyday leaf-by-leaf alchemy we call photosynthesis. Likewise, the poultice of comfrey leaves that lifts a wasp’s sting from our skin returns us to a quasi-magic world of healing plants from which modern medicine would cast us out. Such sacraments are so benign that few of us have any trouble embracing them, even if they do sound a faintly pagan note. I’d guess that’s because we’re generally willing to be reminded that our bodies, at least, remain linked in such ways to the world of plants and animals, to nature’s cycles.

But what about our minds? Here we’re not so sure anymore. To take a leaf or flower and use it to change our experience of consciousness suggests a very different sort of sacrament, one at odds with our loftier notions of self, not to mention civilized society. But I’m inclined to think that such a sacrament may on occasion be worthwhile just the same, if only as a check on our hubris. Plants with the power to revise our thoughts and perceptions, to provoke metaphor and wonder, challenge the cherished Judeo-Christian belief that our conscious, thinking selves somehow stand apart from nature, have achieved a kind of transcendence.

Just what happens to this flattering self-portrait if we discover that transcendence itself owes to molecules that flow through our brains and at the same time through the plants in the garden? If some of the brightest fruits of human culture are in fact rooted deeply in this black earth, with the plants and fungi? Is matter, then, still as mute as we’ve come to think? Does it mean that spirit too is part of nature?

There may be no older idea in the world. Friedrich Nietzsche once described Dionysian intoxication as “nature overpowering mind”—nature having her way with us. The Greeks understood that this was not something to be undertaken lightly or too often. Intoxication was a carefully circumscribed ritual for them, never a way to live, because they understood that Dionysus can make angels of us or animals, it all depends. Even so, letting nature have her way with us now and again still seems like a useful thing to do, if only to bring our abstracted upward gaze back down to Earth for a time. What a reenchantment of the world that would be, to look around and see that the plants and the trees of knowledge grow in the garden still.

CHAPTER 4

Desire: Control

Plant: The Potato

(
SOLANUM TUBEROSUM
)

T
o my eye, there are few sights in nature quite as stirring as fresh rows of vegetable seedlings rising like a green city on the spring ground. I love the on-off digital rhythm of new green plant and black turned loam, the geometrical ordering of bounded earth that is the vegetable garden in May—before the plagues, before the rampancy, before the daunting complexities of summer. The sublimities of wilderness have their place, okay, and their legions of American poets, God knows, but I want to speak a word here for the satisfactions of the ordered earth. I’d call it the Agricultural Sublime if that didn’t sound too much like an oxymoron.

Which it probably is. The experience of the sublime is all about nature having her way with us, about the sensation of awe before her power—about feeling small. What I’m talking about is the opposite, and admittedly more dubious, satisfaction of having our way with nature: the pleasure of beholding the reflection of our labor and intelligence in the land. In the same way that Niagara or Everest stirs the first impulse, the farmer’s methodical rows stitching the hills, or the allées of pollarded trees ordering a garden like Versailles, excite the second, filling us with a sense of
our
power.

These days the sublime is mostly a kind of vacation, in both a literal and a moral sense. After all, who has a bad word to say about wilderness anymore? By comparison, this other impulse, the desire to exert our control over nature’s wildness, bristles with ambiguity. We’re unsure about our power in nature, its legitimacy, and its reality, and rightly so. Perhaps more than most, the farmer or the gardener understands that his control is always something of a fiction, depending as it does on luck and weather and much else that is beyond his control. It is only the suspension of disbelief that allows him to plant again every spring, to wade out in the season’s uncertainties. Before long the pests will come, the storms and droughts and blights, as if to remind him just how imperfect the human power implied by those pristine rows really is.

In 1999 a freak December windstorm, more powerful than any Europeans could remember, laid waste to many of André Lenôtre’s centuries-old plantings at Versailles, crumpling in a matter of seconds that garden’s perfect geometries—perhaps as potent an image of human mastery as we have. When I saw the pictures of the wrecked allées, the straight lines scrabbled, the painterly perspectives ruined, it occurred to me that a less emphatically ordered garden would have been better able to withstand the storm’s fury and repair itself afterward. So what are we to make of such a disaster? It all depends: on whether one regards that particular storm as a straightforward proof of our hubris and nature’s infinitely superior power or, as some scientists now do, as an effect of global warming, which is adding to the atmosphere’s instability. In that view, the storm is as much a human artifact as the order of trees it shattered, one manifestation of human power pulling the rug out from under another.

Ironies of this kind are second nature to the gardener, who eventually learns that every advance in his control of the garden is also an invitation to a new disorder. Wilderness might be reducible, acre by acre, but wildness is something else again. So the freshly hoed earth invites a new crop of weeds, the potent new pesticide engenders resistance in pests, and every new step in the direction of simplification—toward monoculture, say, or genetically identical plants—leads to unimagined new complexities.

Yet these simplifications are undeniably powerful: often as not, they “work”—get us what we want from nature. Agriculture is, by its very nature, brutally reductive, simplifying nature’s incomprehensible complexity to something humanly manageable; it begins, after all, with the simple act of banishing all but a tiny handful of chosen species. Planting these in intelligible rows not only flatters our sense of order, it makes good sense too: weeding and harvesting become that much simpler. And though nature herself never plants in rows—or parterres or allées—she doesn’t necessarily begrudge us when we do.

In fact, lots of new things happen in the garden, novelties unknown in nature before our attempts to exert control: edible potatoes (the wild ones are too bitter and toxic to eat), doubled tulips, sinsemilla, nectarines, to name a few. In every case nature supplied the necessary genes or mutations, but without the garden and the gardener to make a space for these novelties, they would never have seen the light of day.

For nature as much as for people, the garden has always been a place to experiment, to try out new hybrids and mutations. Species that never cross in the wild will freely hybridize on land cleared by people. That’s because a novel hybrid has a hard time finding a purchase in the tight weave of an established meadow or forest ecosystem; every possible niche is apt to be already filled. But a garden—or a roadside or a dump heap—is by comparison an “open” habitat in which a new hybrid has a much better shot, and if it happens to catch our fancy, to gratify a human desire, it stands to make its way in the world. One theory of the origins of agriculture holds that domesticated plants first emerged on dump heaps, where the discarded seeds of the wild plants that people gathered and ate—already unconsciously selected for sweetness or size or power—took root, flourished, and eventually hybridized. In time people gave the best of these hybrids a place in the garden, and there, together, the people and the plants embarked on a series of experiments in coevolution that would change them both forever.

• • •

The garden is still a site for experiment, a good place to try out new plants and techniques without having to bet the farm. Many of the methods employed by organic farmers today were first discovered in the garden. Attempted on the scale of a whole farm, the next New Thing is an expensive and risky proposition, which is why farmers have always been a conservative breed, notoriously slow to change. But for a gardener like me, with relatively little at stake, it’s no big deal to try out a new variety of potato or method of pest control, and every season I do.

Admittedly, my experiments in the garden are unscientific and far from foolproof or conclusive. Is it the new neem tree oil I sprayed on the potatoes that’s controlling the beetles so well this year, or the fact I planted a pair of tomatillos nearby, the leaves of which the beetles seem to prefer to potatoes? (My scapegoats, I call them.) Ideally, I’d control for every variable but one, but that’s hard to do in a garden, a place that, like the rest of nature, seems to consist of nothing
but
variables. “Everything affecting everything else” is not a bad description of what happens in a garden or, for that matter, in any ecosystem.

In spite of these complexities, it is only by trial and error that my garden ever improves, so I continue to experiment. Recently I planted something new—something very new, as a matter of fact—and embarked on my most ambitious experiment to date. I planted a potato called “NewLeaf” that has been genetically engineered (by the Monsanto corporation) to produce its own insecticide. This it does in every cell of every leaf, stem, flower, root, and—this is the unsettling part—every spud.

The scourge of potatoes has always been the Colorado potato beetle, a handsome, voracious insect that can pick a plant clean of its leaves virtually overnight, starving the tubers in the process. Supposedly, any Colorado potato beetle that takes so much as a nibble of a NewLeaf leaf is doomed, its digestive tract pulped, in effect, by the bacterial toxin manufactured in every part of these plants.

I wasn’t at all sure I really
wanted
the NewLeaf potatoes I’d be digging at the end of the season. In this respect my experiment in growing them was very different from anything else I’ve ever done in my garden—whether growing apples or tulips or even pot. All of those I’d planted because I really wanted what the plants promised. What I wanted here was to gratify not so much a desire as a curiosity: Do they work? Are these genetically modified potatoes a good idea, either to plant or to eat? If not mine, then whose desire
do
they gratify? And finally, what might they have to tell us about the future of the relationship between plants and people? To answer these questions, or at least begin to, would take more than the tools of the gardener (or the eater); I’d need as well the tools of the journalist, without which I couldn’t hope to enter the world from which these potatoes had come. So you could say there was something fundamentally artificial about my experiment in growing NewLeaf potatoes. But then, artificiality seems very much to the point.

• • •

Certainly my NewLeafs are aptly named. They’re part of a new class of crop plant that is transforming the long, complex, and by now largely invisible food chain that links every one of us to the land. By the time I conducted my experiment, more than fifty million acres of American farmland had already been planted to genetically modified crops, most of it corn, soybeans, cotton, and potatoes that have been engineered either to produce their own pesticide or to withstand herbicides. The not-so-distant future will, we’re told, bring us potatoes genetically modified to absorb less fat when fried, corn that can withstand drought, lawns that don’t ever have to be mowed, “golden rice” rich in Vitamin A, bananas and potatoes that deliver vaccines, tomatoes enhanced with flounder genes (to withstand frost), and cotton that grows in every color of the rainbow.

It’s probably not too much to say that this new technology represents the biggest change in the terms of our relationship with plants since people first learned how to cross one plant with another. With genetic engineering, human control of nature is taking a giant step forward. The kind of reordering of nature represented by the rows in a farmer’s field can now take place at a whole new level: within the genome of the plants themselves. Truly, we have stepped out onto new ground.

Or have we?

Just how novel these plants really are is in fact one of the biggest questions about them, and the companies that have developed them give contradictory answers. The industry simultaneously depicts these plants as the linchpins of a biological revolution—part of a “paradigm shift” that will make agriculture more sustainable and feed the world—and, oddly enough, as the same old spuds, corn, and soybeans, at least so far as those of us at the eating end of the food chain should be concerned. The new plants are novel enough to be patented, yet not so novel as to warrant a label telling us what it is we’re eating. It would seem they are chimeras: “revolutionary” in the patent office and on the farm, “nothing new” in the supermarket and the environment.

By planting my own crop of NewLeafs, I was hoping to figure out which version of reality to believe, whether these were indeed the same old spuds or something sufficiently novel (in nature, in the diet) to warrant caution and hard questions. As soon as you start looking into the subject, you find that there are many questions about genetically modified plants that, fifty million acres later, remain unanswered and, more remarkable still, unasked—enough to make me think mine might not be the only experiment going on.

• • •

May 2.
Here at the planter’s end of the food chain, where I began my experiment after Monsanto agreed to let me test-drive its NewLeafs, things certainly look new and different. After digging two shallow trenches in my vegetable garden and lining them with compost, I untied the purple mesh bag of seed potatoes Monsanto had sent and opened the grower’s guide tied around its neck. Potatoes, you will recall from kindergarten experiments, are grown not from actual seeds but from the eyes of other potatoes, and the dusty, stone-colored chunks of tuber I carefully laid at the bottom of the trench looked much like any other. Yet the grower’s guide that comes with them put me in mind not so much of planting vegetables as booting up a new software release.

By “opening and using this product,” the card informed me, I was now “licensed” to grow these potatoes, but only for a single generation; the crop I would water and tend and harvest was mine, yet also not mine. That is, the potatoes I would dig come September would be mine to eat or sell, but their genes would remain the intellectual property of Monsanto, protected under several U.S. patents, including 5,196,525; 5,164,316; 5,322,938; and 5,352,605. Were I to save even one of these spuds to plant next year—something I’ve routinely done with my potatoes in the past—I would be breaking federal law. (I had to wonder, what would be the legal status of any “volunteers”—those plants that, with no prompting from the gardener, sprout each spring from tubers overlooked during the previous harvest?) The small print on the label also brought the disconcerting news that my potato plants were
themselves
registered as a pesticide with the Environmental Protection Administration (U.S. EPA Reg. No. 524-474).

If proof were needed that the food chain that begins with seeds and ends on our dinner plates is in the midst of revolutionary change, the small print that accompanied my NewLeafs will do. That food chain has been unrivaled for its productivity: on average, an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed a hundred people. Yet that achievement—that power over nature—has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quantities of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel. This expensive set of “inputs,” as they’re called, saddles the farmer with debt, jeopardizes his health, erodes his soil and ruins its fertility, pollutes the groundwater, and compromises the safety of the food we eat. Thus the gain in the farmer’s power has been trailed by a host of new vulnerabilities.

All this I’d heard before, of course, but always from environmentalists or organic farmers. What is new is to hear the same critique from industrial farmers, government officials, and the agribusiness companies that sold farmers on all those expensive inputs in the first place. Taking a page from Wendell Berry, of all people, Monsanto declared in a recent annual report that “current agricultural technology is unsustainable.”