Those who hate gardening need a theory...

Our yard has been an eyesore for several years now; new grass is long overdue. September's the month for this: temperatures are mild(er!) and leaves are still on trees. But, September slipped by and now it's a race before the trees start shedding their massive foliage. Last Saturday I got hoppin' mad at seeing (already!) a growing carpet of sycamore leaves on the lawn: those will all have to be raked before the reseeding process can even begin. But it's a big yard, and in fact the most barren area was only lightly covered with leaves; so I dragged out the boombox, started up some c.1973 Deep Purple and ZZ Top (hard to stay gloomy listening to those) and undertook the dusty, sweaty work of preparing the soil for the seeding itself (the easy part) -- which I finally did on Monday.

Now I've just got to work out how to water the area regularly over the next few weeks. But not overwater it. And, hope that the soil was properly prepared, and that I used the right amount of fertilizer. And, remember to fertilize it again before winter. Mess up on any of those, and it could all be for nought! (Ask me how I know...) This is why I get a bit anxious pushing around the seed spreader: in 10 minutes, I can easily blow through $100 worth of seed -- it's like world-class champagne. So inevitably, I cringe as my mind's eye sees dollar bills shooting out of the seeder. It doesn't help that the seed variety I'm using is exactly the color of money. Sometimes I think I should just confront the pretense, cut out the middleman, and spread shredded money directly on the lawn.

"Those who hate gardening need a theory..." I found that piece of Internet flotsam some 10 or 15 years ago, attributed to (renowned Polish philosopher) Leszek Kolakowski. I thought it meant that forming and testing theories could make anything enjoyable; I found the idea intriguing, and tucked it away for future reference. But more recently (thanks to Google's searchable books) I found the context for that quip: Modernity on Endless Trial, Ch. 21. Turns out the intended meaning was completely different ... and quite a bit funnier:

The General Theory of Not-Gardening: A Major Contribution to Social Anthropology, Ontology, Moral Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Political Theory, and Many Other Fields of Scientific Investigation ---
Those who hate gardening need a theory. Not to garden without a theory is a shallow, unworthy way of life. The alternative to not-gardening without a theory is to garden. However, it is much easier to have a theory than actually to garden.

Kolakowski then provides Marxist, Psychoanalytical, Existentialist, Structuralist, and -ah- Semiotic arguments for not gardening. For example:

People garden in order to make nature human, to "civilize" it. This, however, is a desperate and futile attempt to transform being-in-itself into being-for-itself. This is not only ontologically impossible; it is a deceptive, morally inadmissible escape from reality, as the distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself cannot be abolished. To garden, or to imagine that one can "humanize" Nature, is to try to efface this distinction and hopelessly to deny one's own irreducibly human ontological status. To garden is to live in bad faith. Gardening is wrong. Q.E.D.

The whole 2-page chapter is similarly clever nonsense -- well worth a read. On days where none of those five schools of thought afford a sufficient basis for not gardening, at least I'll have something to smirk about as I work.