-a garden in 12 acts-

—1—arrhythmia—

somewhere along time bending and time travel, a garden is a medium of time where missed tempos and seasonal motifs reside, like a repetition of a note in extended meter, unquantized, uncounted, occasionally palpable, an impression of numerous registers turning passage into phrases. arrhythmia, garden space of hasty configurations, like stutter, still in transposition. a punctuation by an inability to perfect time, like a bodily willingness to hold time but not keep it; marks of de-compositional tempo with runaway borderlines. temper skipping in feverish pace to furious philosophies and amateur beats for nothingness. enough to leave a trace of place in escape of placement.

—2—a land of magic and monsters—

a cathay was once imagined as a land of magic and monsters. now it’s most commonly associated with a bailed-out airline along a pacific still drawn by ambitions of conquest from more than one imperializing fantasy. to claim an island is not an easy feat; islands never sit alone. they always come from somewhere and are well-versed and well-practiced in visioning elsewheres, now here, nowhere, here now. Once a European name for China with boundaries as loosely defined as geographies of the “barbaric” outside, Cathy could describe any land or people as long as it figured opposite to shifting ideas of a Western fortress. Flexible like the colour yellow, changing in tones and shades, a land of magic and monsters provides an origin for invasive narratives, fabricated from silk, spices, cheap labour, disposable lives, high tech yet un-innovative, aesthetic-less uncivilization, invasive threat in direct market competition. empire makes magic and monsters instantaneous like invisible money, easily withdrawn convenience like blockchain metamorphosis. finance is an alluring mechanics of conversion, ingesting time by astronomical servings, theft by one-sided conversion in seconds, hours, days, decades, centuries. the global capitalist embedded in living and dying bodies says it’s symbiosis but would never admit that he always shits and eats in the same place. A land of magic and monsters, Cathay is placeless existence, lazy living in the flex time of imperial topography, where i become magical monstrous, summoning magic and monsters yet to emerge.

—3—postures—

an uptake of many postures, peripheral strike action in slow motion. postures are side glance actions that are in actuality more about commitment and comradery than behavioural acts. i took a nap on a plinth last night filled with make-believe records and documentation of lost gardens. the claim seems to be that it is always important to document to ensure nothing goes missing. documentation is vacillating as Carl Linnaeus showcased. records themselves can go missing or become acts of violence causing beings to become missing or become something not according to their own accord. make a plinth, pose in place, like a practice of refusal-garden tending and reject all forms of conquisitive lingering. pose still, pose sleepy, pose elusive, pose in the way of any acquisitive ordering of worlds as wonder-commodity.posture for nothing, to take up space as nothingness in liberation, no beginning nor end, no contours, no definition, all place, all mood.

—4—borrowing views—

you can never see a garden in its entirety, and you’re not meant to either. there is no perspective from which a collective can be seen in whole, only singularity in detail. perspectives of retreat and refusal cannot be seen all at once but are nonetheless seen present from some place at some time. the borrowing of views (借景) is essential to gardens, yet taken too literally, it becomes dispossession, but better, it can become an act of disorderly conduct in defiance of public order, because the borrowing of perspective involves a practice of shifting power. the gravity of borrowing is that it might render to irrelevance any separation of nature and architecture, viewer and plant, ornament and soil. garden perspective in celluloid is rhythm mapping, overlapping, undilluted, pedagogical borrowing, prepared through motions of utopian tilling. a transgression of space in non-ownership is principal to borrowing a scene. borrowing is a temporary occupation based on co-temporaneous presence, where borrowing scenery is perspectival lending, a way of constructing libraries in consent.

—5—repetition—

mu as a unit of measurement is dissolved, washed loose in translation. training and practice and skills and drills are acts of transliteration, sonic modulation marking distance and time in transference modularity. a practice of interchangeability in repetition, garden and gardener negotiate how to dispel a language of mastery and conquest in material life, that is only an imposed inheritance. training makes contestation spatial like choreography laid out, puncturing time.

—6—structural failure—

the Garden is an imperial project of political economic foundation—highly vulnerable to both capital’s structured crises and to the growth of planetary rebellions. this does not even begin to encompass all that we can describe as gardens. 園 (jyun)is distance brought to square in abstraction. failure as a performance of after-weather, can make openings at moments when the integrity of existing conditions is found in disassembly. chaotic, dirt, disorder, mass produced, uncivilization. unapproved, vagabond growth, wantons living in garden form. capillary action sometimes lives in the wild as bio-composting straw. “i would not have called it a garden.” tagged plastic-free mulch.jpg; nostrawsforfishes.gif. botanical tremor.png. One of the times i ran away on new years eve, i ran only until they could see that i chose to walk casually instead of run. He came up to my face so close i could see how his pores are held shut and said Asian invasion in repetition. It was the first time i understood that at 5’3 i could stand in for a whole army, continental in scale.

—7—exhaust—

i am made of stardust and condensed organisms numbering in gazillions, dying and living easily accounting for an invasion of perpetual internalized threat, if that is, we were to get caught up with defending the leaky, dripping membranes of an ordering subject in suspension. colonizing bodies always want to burn down a garden to put up their own, collecting seeds, streams and steam as weapons of mass destruction, fit for glass and iron casing and displays for a proper public re-education. exhausted of planetary trans-plantations of commodity plant genus and un/free labour divisions, colonialized public spaces are more often than not the first places where exhaust is left. public dumping grounds at the entry way of enclosure. a neoliberal commons, private and planetary at once. siphoned rhythm made out in exhaust; time carved out of exhaustion. contemplate together elsewhere with instruments blown through with exhausted air. like weeds and medicine, grow works of time minus work and time-tellers with free-time hours.

—8—withholding—

ran out of tea for the national colonial collection. botanical time gone off. utopias modeled after improvement ideologies are betrayed by a damp-heat microloscene. testing procedures at the heart of botanical empire, a syndrome of acute hoarding, a prolonged patrilineal malady, cellulosis. a plague to circuits of taking without permission created the conditions for our transplantation. when we thrive with each other, we are invasive, species status always in flux. to produce new and better plants, maximum disposability needs to be available in all seasons. the “tropics” are forever the go-to, because clearly, management can now keep a few houseplants alive, and with pest-free water and rising oceans, old imperial metropoles can be the “new tropics”. the stars are aligned it seems for hoardiculturalists to get scurvy in 2022.

—9—disobedience—

for the unproductive gardens churning waste into poses held in composure, in calm calamity i offer you compost tea, an astronomical economic alternative. like lumpen masses en masse, in space, minerals chilled and gathered in militant undercurrents, rivers and ground water reservoirs. outside, mad impossibility creates routines of interior motives for utopian fabrication. world making possibility is an analytic urgency of a practical scope, with gardens woven between gaps for porosity and for escape. Recollection at a break to disobedient rhythms, tapping space to calibrate holding back in drawn out tempo, fermata time, frustrating walls and leaving them susceptible to the effects of erosion, breakdown and border-consuming lycaenid.

—10—catastrophic inactivity—

depression pisses off bosses more than madness because it appears a reasonable, regular response to given stresses of a day, nothing a prescription of 24 continuous hours of self-care won’t resolve, a chance to optimize productivity again for the next few seasons. depression brings catastrophe, how abject lulls yield calamitous obstruction for the operations of circulation, production, accumulation, putting on hold the logic of producing to survive. catastrophic catatonia, making time for immobility in routine, rolling inactivity of surviving at edges and marginalia. a circuit break in time to install a more preferable mode of chill.

—11—place-

a stone eroded by water is an abstract approximation of the monstrous and the beautiful, slow rupturous misplacement. dyssynchronous presence as portal via poly-rhythmic beingness, intangible form in time image.

—12—experimental strike-

experimental gardens in the 18th century were supposed to be spaces of perfection, creating new species and varieties best fit for human use. it is botanical in the order of bio-security. securus: free from care; originates from principles of isolation; to parse cellulous space for productivity gardens that can supplement the increasing divestment of care from bodies engaged in life-long labour, self-worked allotment provisions to offset social abandonment. in a breach of garden security, i invite you to lay down awake to make care space for experiments in strike action, a prototype for experimental perforation.