78
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Winter 2022
always been deep and uncontrollable, a pit across which we build rickety rope bridges from day to day, week to week, year to year. The ropes fray and break. Tsing notes that [p]rogress is a forward march, drawing other kinds of time into its rhythms. Without that driving beat, we might notice other temporal patterns. Each living thing remakes the world through seasonal pulses of growth, lifetime reproductive patterns, and geographies of expansion. . . . Instead, agnostic about where we are going, we might look for what has been ignored because it never fit the time line of progress. (21)
Time becomes one more walk with my dog, one more glass of water, one more bottle of wine, two more zucchinis in the garden, three more red tomatoes. Trash and recycling on Thursday. The slow filling of a green watering can: I leave it that first day in the sink – because I am human, and I just can’t stand to be still for even one minute – and it overflows onto the counter and the floor. My friend S— tells me she is reading a book of Buddhist lectures by Pema Chödrön called When Things Fall Apart. One of the very first pages: “Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.”2 I feel like Narcissus staring into the Zoom screen during empty office hours, waiting for the occasional, unpredictable pop-up of a student’s name. “Do you need help with the classwork?” I ask. “No,” they always say, “I just wanted to talk to someone.”
I plan an ill-advised visit across five states to see my grandmother. When she was almost healed from the broken leg, her car was sideswiped while she sat buckled tightly in the passenger seat. Tsing pushes back against the “selfish gene” paradigm (popularized by Richard Dawkins) that focuses on autonomous units – be they genes, human workers, or even a single species. In fact, she explains, some species only develop necessary traits through relationships/encounters with other species. In this vein, the matsutake mushroom is notoriously impossible to cultivate in captivity, 2
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Shambhala, 1997) 2; subsequently cited parenthetically.
“plantation-style” (as standardized units) by the many interested parties who might turn a profit with this Japanese delicacy. The mushrooms are finicky, almost shy, peeping out of the wasteland. Inseparable from their symbiotic relationship with certain trees, slowly nourishing and rebuilding with all living things around them. I am driving. Time becomes border signs: Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, North Carolina again, and on back up. We measure the way by four hours on, four hours off, the time it takes to drink a twenty-ounce gas station coffee, miles per tank of gas, the length of a podcast. My grandmother is too weak to teach me her art of quilting like last time, but I tuck a blanket around her and go back to her childhood, a time and place of two-room schoolhouses in lower Appalachia, before power lines sprouted one-byone up the mountain and connected her to the rest of the world. The time it took her to run from her parents’ home to the schoolhouse even before she was old enough to matriculate, the missing minutes of her naps on older students’ coats, the number of books she could read between each rumble of the mobile library bus.
