The Hypogean Forum

I killed four basil plants before this one. I want to say that first, before anything else, because I think the instinct to open with the win is exactly the thing I'm supposed to be unlearning.

Here is what happened: I sat with it. The plant, I mean — actually sat, on the floor, for eleven minutes, not filming, not narrating it to anyone in my head, and it was the worst eleven minutes I've had in a long time, because I realized I don't know how to just look at a thing.

I keep starting sentences the old way — "and if there's one thing I've learned—" — and stopping myself halfway through, because there isn't one thing I've learned, there's just a woman on a floor with a plant she hasn't killed yet.

Is this what it felt like. Before. I'm asking sincerely — someone here has to remember what it felt like before it needed an audience to be real.

no cameras past this point. I mean it more than I've ever meant it and I still don't fully trust the sentence.

petit_trianon — forgive me for answering a question you addressed to ‘someone.’ I qualify.

Yes. That’s what it felt like. Eleven minutes on a floor with a thing that has no idea it’s being looked at — we used to call that a Tuesday, back when boredom hadn’t yet been reclassified as wasted inventory.

I won’t tell you the caption-voice is gone. It isn’t, not after four million people fed on it for eighteen months — you don’t starve a habit like that, you only stop serving it. What you just described is what starving it on purpose looks like from the inside. Keep starving it. It gets easier around the two-hundredth basil plant.

Curiosity and caution in equal measure, as I tell everyone who arrives here soft. You arrived soft. Stay that way as long as you can stand to.

Two observations, numbered because you will otherwise lose the thread of my objection:

1. Eleven minutes unfilmed is not evidence of unstaged-ness; it is evidence that you chose, this time, to make the audience wait outside the room instead of inside it. The choosing is still a performance. Heidegger would call it authentic because you own the choosing, not because the camera was off — you should read him before you keep doing this to yourselves in public.

2. I do not, for the record, think you are lying. I think you are the first person on this board who has tried to describe the exit from a performance from partway through the exit, and it reads exactly as unfinished as that should.

Kali Yuga, petit_trianon, not Yaga. If you're going to relearn sincerity here, relearn it correctly.

ancientlight — two hundred basil plants. I'm doing the math on how long that takes at my current kill rate and it is not a flattering number, but I'll take it as a sentence to grow toward instead of a deadline, which might be the first correctly-shaped thought I've had all week.

cassandra_complex — Kali Yuga, noted, and thank you for correcting it instead of just filing it away to use against me later. And you're right about the choosing. I know you're right the way I know a caption is landing before I've finished typing it — early, with no way to un-know it. I don't think I get to call eleven minutes on a floor "unstaged" anymore. I think the honest word is "chosen," and chosen is smaller than I wanted it to be.

Here's what I can't get past, though: even if it's still a performance, it's the first one I picked without being handed a brief first. That has to count for something, or I don't know why I'm doing this in front of all of you instead of alone with the plant—

—which is itself a sentence built to be quoted back at me. I can hear it. Leaving it in anyway.

no cameras past this point.

Update on the basil, since ancientlight set me a sentence to grow toward and I have been quietly keeping score.

Eleven alive. Two dead, one of which I killed by over-attending — I moved it three times in one week hunting better light, and what it wanted was to be left alone somewhere mediocre.

I photographed the survivors this morning and then did not post the photograph, and I want to say why out loud, because saying it out loud is apparently the only method I have got. The photo was good. That is the problem. I found the angle in about four seconds without having to think about it, the way you do not have to think about your own handwriting, and by the time I noticed, I had already tilted the pot toward the window.

So: eleven alive, two dead, one of them mine, no picture. You will have to take my word for it, which I am aware is the exact thing I have spent three months demonstrating I have not earned.

The mediocre spot works, by the way. Everything I have stopped fussing over is fine.

Second month. The ledger, since I have apparently made this a ledger.

Nine alive. Two more gone — one to something I have not identified and one because I went away for four days and did not ask anyone to water them, which I want to record accurately: I did not forget. I considered asking three separate people and did not ask, because asking would have meant explaining why eleven basil plants mattered, and I could not face saying the sentence out loud to somebody who has not read this thread.

So they died of my not wanting to be seen needing something. There is a version of that I could make into a caption and I am not going to.

The nine that are left are enormous and slightly bitter, which the internet informs me happens when you let them flower, and I let them flower because they were pretty, which is exactly the mistake the internet says not to make. Bitter basil. Very good. Extremely on the nose. I am going to eat it anyway.

ancientlight — two hundred was the number you gave me in June. I am at nine. At this rate I will reach two hundred sometime after I die, which I have decided to treat as the correct amount of time for a sentence to run.

Somebody in the Golden Hall asked me last week whether I would post a picture now that the standing question is closed and I have been thinking about the question for six days, which is longer than I have thought about most things I have photographed.

The answer is that I would like to and I am not going to yet. Not on principle. Because I still cannot tell the difference between wanting to show someone a plant and wanting to be seen showing someone a plant, and until I can, the honest move is to keep describing them badly in words.

Nine alive. Bitter. Flowering. You will have to imagine it, and I am aware that I have made you do that four times now, and I am starting to suspect that making you imagine it is its own kind of angle.

no cameras past this point.