On Gardens; or, the Life in Mary Ruefle’s Grocery Store Garden

Wandering through fabricated idylls of eternity

In the parking lot I want to sleep but open the door in a great effort to meet the air. Soon I am in the mart itself, I am in the ninth aisle, I am not pushing a cart or anything else, I have never had a baby, I am free and virginal, walking down the aisle on my own two dangling legs, and at the end of the aisle is a garden of leaves and blossoms, I am in the garden, there are plants and flowers, everything is green and alive and growing and there are masses of color to choose from, red, yellow, orange, white, purple…

- Mary Ruefle, “They Were Wrong”

No matter how strange the text, reading often involves taking for granted a common world of surfaces and structures. Especially when reading contemporary writing, or writing from the recent past, we share basic points of orientation, so that even a divergence from familiar worlds of strip malls and supermarkets and ballparks occurs against them: in the writing our known world may be ignored, assiduously reconstructed, exaggerated, diminished, or any combination of these, but is always present in some form as the grounds of our reading.

The same elements that we take for granted might be utterly exotic and perplexing to future readers in different cultures, readers who will have nothing in their societies like the structures and forms in ours. Reading our literature in the—to them, ancient—original, or reading it in translation, they might find certain phrases or scenes inexplicable, and in their confusion they might imagine all sorts of outlandish variations on the already-outlandish and supersized American reality.

Here’s an example. In “They Were Wrong,” Mary Ruefle makes strange again a familiar part of modern grocery stores: the flower section, where vegetation can give an illusion of swarming life in the middle of bright, soilless markets. “[A]nd at the end of the aisle is a garden of leaves and blossoms…everything is green and alive and growing.” We recognize instantly this humorous evocation of an actual garden of leaves and blossoms “growing” in the market, even as no one in daily life would think of these commercial displays as gardens. Maybe when they first appeared in history, an innovation beyond the potted plants and bouquets in bodegas and green grocers of earlier eras, they were an annunciation of modern mercantile ingenuity, declaring the start of an era of abundance and crass similitude, and customers were impressed by these little vegetal domains. But any such novelty is long past. These displays are now ordinary at markets everywhere in America, so to call one of them a fact-of-the-earth garden, to stay momentarily, willfully, on the surface of mercantile contrivance, is an odd but good-spirited indulgence—we need poets to renovate humdrum existence with the playfulness and trickery of their seeing. For those of us reading this text in the same period it was written, future trips to the grocery store might involve a sort of cheer that wasn’t part of such errands before: seeing these displays, we’ll recall this passage and think of Ruefle’s narrator saying, “I am in the garden…everything is green and alive,” and just a little bit of the gaudy world around us will be less dreary.

The narrator hasn’t left the store—she’s in Aisle Nine, she’s at the end of Aisle Nine, then in its garden, still under a roof and fluorescent lighting and in the serene regulated air of a climate-controlled interior. And yet, she’s not really in the store at this point, or not totally in the store, because she has entered a little jungle of masses of living color that block out cereal boxes and overlarge bags of chips. But then she’s also not completely transported either—before all those colors “to choose from,” she remains aware that the purpose of this garden is not, like that of a park, for her to sit in and have some form of respite, but to buy something, to take home a small part of this convenient flourishing. For a moment, in her emphasis on blossoms and growing, the narrator speaks the language of the park, or, some might say, the language of nature. The physical world around her is brilliant and alive. Then the patterns of consumerism reassert themselves and break the spell: a man is there! In the middle of the garden! Buying pink roses in cellophane for his wife!

Stop, I say, as the man bends down over his flowers, flowers that will in time move on and belong to his wife, please don’t smell the roses—but it is too late, he has done it—and now I can smell them, too—the air is saturated with sacred attar—and I, who was so close to being energized, who came all this way from the beginning of time, want nothing now but to fall asleep, to lie down on the floor at the end of the ninth aisle, among the houseplants, and sleep the sleep of ages, having spoken to a man who ignored my sage advice, and now looks as tired of the world as I am.

Let’s imagine for a moment that no spell of associative language has been achieved. Instead of a contemporary reader understanding that the sudden garden in the store is still, no matter how absorbing the narrator’s somnolent visions, a commercial artificial paradise—instead of that, let’s imagine a reader in the distant future who interprets everything here in the most literal way, a reader intent on puzzling out everything described about this earlier civilization. Let’s imagine that not much is known about our time by this future civilization—maybe this reader is a scholar attempting to preserve our texts and decipher our language and understand how we organized our society. Let’s assume that by this point in the future societies no longer have massive grocery stores selling every variety of good, from kitchen and cooking supplies to plumbing and gardening materials, and let’s imagine that this society is organized according to significantly different principles (but let’s not guess what those might be!). Without going into too much speculative detail about these successors, we can still imagine a pioneering reader who, never having seen one of our hangar markets, begins with no picture in mind of the “mart” into which Ruefle’s narrator has gone. They have only an emergingly intelligible ancient language to go on: “in[to] the mart itself…in the ninth aisle…at the end of the aisle is a garden…I am in the garden, there are plants and flowers, everything is green and alive and growing…” This poor excavator of the past might believe that our markets contained actual recessions of soil in the middle of chemical-bright floors. If they lack detailed familiarity with the physical, commercial, and cultural makeup of our world, how easily they might “discover” from this description something bizarre and miraculous: that wherever a market was built in our times, a fertile portion of original ground was reserved within the new structure, and in it various green and colorful things of the earth were cultivated and harvested—and then pulled and wrapped right there for customers. Suddenly, the times we lived in were magical. Look! All along we’ve been able to go to the market in a pseudotrance and pass abruptly from rows of haranguing brands into gardens, bringing ourselves into quick contact with the ancestral stuff of existence.

This doesn’t seem so implausible to our future cultural excavator—after all, Ruefle’s narrator takes us from the beginning of time all the way to the present moment when she enters the grocery store:

Now I am in my car, I am on my way to the flowers, and I find traffic peaceful when it is backed up at a stoplight. Just sitting here—I’m in the driver’s seat of course—with a car in front of me and a car behind me, is profoundly nice. It feels right, it feels like everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be, as if everything that ever happened from the beginning of all events, time chief among them, has led to this very line of cars at this very red light; the death of dinosaurs, men and women living in caves, the weaving of cloaks, the whole Middle Ages, the cultivation of maize, the suckling of a little boy who will grow up and die in the wrestling ring—all these things led to this moment, a moment of bluish exhaust rising from the tailpipes of cars as peacefully as smoke from the pipe of an old sailor. Now the light has changed and this historical moment of peace is gone, we are moving forward, I am moving forward towards my flowers and another is moving forward towards his can of soup, still another moving towards, who knows, a sooner death than any of the other customers.

To go further in this encounter with the ancestral stuff of the world, there’s a clever play of words bracketing the first three-quarters of the prose. It begins, “They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I never believed them. They say all writing is an argument with the world,” and later, after passing through traffic and a broad recapitulation of earthly history, when the narrator is pulled out of her trance in the grocery store by the man buying flowers for his wife, she asks, “could anything be more idyllic, less argumentative, than that?” The arrangement of idyllic and argumentative as counter qualities brings us back to the opening line, where she reminds us that they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and words, as writing, make “an argument with the world.” The cleverness is that in idylls a thousand words compose a picture, not an argument. “Idyll” originally meant “little picture” (eidos, “form,” and yllion, the diminutive suffix) and referred to a genre created by the poet Theocritus, who wrote little talking pictures in the 3^rd century BC. Our association of “idyllic” with what is pleasant, peaceful, natural, even ideal, comes down from the poems of Theocritus, which featured rustic scenes of herdsmen and deities and subdeities engaged in singing competitions and suffering love torments, putting their voices far through the echoing world. Even in their little battles they aren’t argumentative so much as competitive, not dealing in debates of ideas but contests to prove the supremacy of one’s song over others’. And so with Theocritus as a tutelary spirit, a thousand words—which is a good length, by the way, for an idyll in contemporary English—might quickly defy the “picture is worth a thousand words” assumption. Those words must be written with wit and playfulness, lightness and beauty, and if they privilege voice and emphasize a pastoral quality, look, you’ve written an idyll, now a thousands words are a picture, and listen, your picture is all full of voices. Voice becomes a resounding, capacious, multifarious solitude, bringing forth entire worlds and histories within its phantom shape, carrying it all into the unformed time to-be, when future readers or listeners will find it, mysteriously transformed. And isn’t that what Ruefle’s narrator has done on her little trip to buy flowers at the grocery store?

In the end, words can only do so much. Even if the meaning of words—and a good deal of the world they refer to—from earlier civilizations can be preserved, how, ultimately, can you translate custom across time without a measure of the grotesque? All times are already grotesque to some extent in their peculiarities—what seems now to be reasonable, benign, maybe ingenious and good fun, normal, will look to the future incomprehensibly strange or morally abhorrent or even enviable. It might also seem to be a bizarre variation on the world of the future, a record of human behavior where various instincts, qualities, and passions are generally recognizable but in exaggerated forms, indicating monstrous correspondences to the elements of succeeding generations’ lives. For an obvious example, take one form of entertainment among ancient Romans. Isn’t the savagery, the merciless mockery, of a slave in the coliseum—crawling away from a chariot pile-up to bleed out his final minutes before being finished off with an extravagant stroke, which ecstatically declares his subhumanity to stadium cheers—utterly grotesque? Wasn’t that an abominable mix of spectacle, violence, “entertainment”? The Romans largely didn’t think so. It was sport to them! Today our most violent sports are remarkably tame in comparison. Would a Roman, exhumed and reanimated, understand our repugnance? It made perfect sense then, it was part of the substance of their days, those weren’t citizens, that was their place, in the ring, gladiators! Now, if it’d been citizens, if members of the Senate, the nattering, justifying, exhumed Roman corpse says to us, well, then…and at that point we can tell those bloodless blood-coveting lips to spare us the excited qualifications and get back to their long night. There’ll be no reconciling their views and ours. The sport of their days is barbarism to us.

And still, across all civilizational difference, voices in idylls come to us from the remote and obscure, in their artifice seeming to emerge directly out of the land, carrying keen memory of the fall from paradisal origins. This memory drives idyllic song, even at its most playful, to sing of immemorial desire for the unattainable, and the pain and exile of history. In Philip Sidney’s “Yee Gote-heard Gods,” desire “Hath cast me wretch into eternall evening,” and what then? “Me seemes I heare, when I doo heare sweete musique, / The dreadful cries of murdered men in forests.” Ruefle’s narrator is much lighter than that. Her voice isn’t plaintive, or if it is, it doesn’t proclaim its plaintiveness, instead concealing it in subtler registers. Her narrator doesn’t appear to suffer the pressure of incipient madness. For that matter, her voice is solitary, not in dialogue with another, as in “Yee Gote-heard Gods.” But even with those differences, there’s a common denatured condition that she and Sidney’s singers endure. In both scenarios we are very far from where we would hope to be. After traveling a great temporal distance, Ruefle’s narrator stands in front of a man buying flowers for his wife, nothing more idyllic, less argumentative, more Arcadian, more Edenic, less historical, than that. This rose-smelling, rose-buying man is an Adam, his offstage rose-receiving wife is an Eve, and our narrator their anti-Adam, an intervening angel. This Adam isn’t reaching for the fruit of knowledge, of course, just roses in cellophane, and it’s not sin he’s spreading, just grocery store rose attar, but it releases contagious drowsiness, precipitating a fall that is like a clown variation on the original—not a fall out of immortality and G-d’s favor into the exile of mortality, but out of the world of physical action, the world of deeds and movement and bodily wakefulness, into a world of sleep, fog, haze, a world that isn’t here or anywhere: from history into dream, out of which we are always climbing, mulishly, back into history, where we think it will be different this time, where we think we can change things. But in reality we are with the narrator, who, like Matthew Arnold’s caricature of Shelley, is “an ineffectual angel”: we can’t take hold of or halt the course of events.