Two Excerpts from John Janovy Jr.’s
The Ginkgo
ONE: a fictitious essay written by a female student from a ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills
Tell why I chose the ginkgo tree, in three typed, double-spaced pages, without once mentioning money, politics, health, agriculture, the military, sex, sports or religion. What kind of an assignment is this? What am I supposed to learn by writing this paper? What else is there to mention, other than the list of topics you’ve denied us? And “why?” Who asks “why” anymore, except lawyers in a murder trial? I’ve never done anything that needed an explanation. Never have I been asked to tell “why” I made a decision, until now. And now it doesn’t really matter what I’ve decided to do: pick a perennial. No wonder you’ve given us three weeks to produce these three pages.
I’ve chosen a tree. It looks like any other tree, until you study it closely; then you discover it has strange leaves. Most leaves are pointed at their tips or have jagged edges. The ginkgo’s leaves are pointed at their base and gently flattened, sort of splayed out. They look like triangles, maybe arrows, pointed toward the trunk. Maybe I’m beginning to see a reason for picking this plant after all. Maybe you wanted us to find something truly unique about ourselves and our plants. Leaves that point toward the trunk are certainly alone compared to leaves that point out toward the street.
The leaves also have tiny ridges on them; my textbook would call these ridges veins. I did something you told us not to do. I looked for information in the book about my plant. There I discovered that ginkgos have been on Earth since the Age of Dinosaurs. Thus I picked the ginkgo because it lets me imagine myself in a horror movie, with dinosaurs rampaging around on all sides, and discovering a ginkgo tree, then saying, “Gee, that’s the tree I picked for biology! How did it get inside this horror movie?” If the ginkgo could talk, it would probably be asking the same thing about me. Would the ginkgo think that the world I live in today is a horror movie? I don’t know. But sometimes it looks that way, doesn’t it? I have this disturbing feeling that maybe the ginkgo remembers the Age of Dinosaurs as wonderful, free, young and exciting times and now considers the Age of Humans a terrifying, crazy, out-of-control time.
I also chose this plant because I knew that if I got desperate, I could always go to the library and find out if my choice was a good or bad one. I always thought you went to libraries in order to find “references,” books that would make your papers true. Now my book tells me that ginkgos have been here since the Jurassic. I don’t know whether any of the other authorities in my life would have known that fact. Certainly my friends back home in Carson County haven’t a clue about the Jurassic. But then neither did I, before I looked it up. My high school friends would have wondered why anyone would want to know anything about the Jurassic.
Suddenly I’m beginning to see a difference between me and the people I grew up with; I have a reason to possess a deeply buried fact about a world that disappeared a hundred million years ago. But I didn’t actually need that piece of information to write this paper. I discovered I wanted the information and appreciated having my mind teased about the Jurassic, but could have written three pages without knowing how long ginkgos have been on earth. But the very word, Jurassic, separates me from my home, from everything I valued and hated as a child, from my friends, from the only life I really knew. The fact that I now know this word—Jurassic—and have a reason to use it, cuts me off from Bodmer, from the Spindler boys and the Johannes girls. That fact even cuts me off from my parents and my little brother. I am different now and feeling suddenly alone, just because of a single word.
I’m sorry for all these unanswerable questions, personal comments about your grading system and unflattering remarks about people back home. I suppose you get a lot of comments about home towns. High school seems to be a major topic of conversation at college, at least among the people I live with here. But my first exposure to the ginkgo made me think unflattering thoughts about the people back home. Is that one of your purposes in giving these assignments, to help us wash away the lives we left, so that you can fill them up with something else? Like those pictures you showed in class? Are those pictures supposed to replace our memories? If so, I don’t know whether I want this to happen.
Let’s return to my tree. I chose the ginkgo because I happened to be standing by it and you walked by and told me a story about Linnaeus. I thought at the time it was a rather dumb story, and probably not entirely true, but nevertheless it livened up an otherwise dull morning. However, in all honesty, I did take a quick look around campus and saw no other ginkgo trees. So in retrospect, I chose this one because it was the only one in my world. It was my symbol of individuality.
Since then I’ve found several others. Now that I’ve learned what to look for, I can see things I didn’t see before. They look strangely different from mine, yet just as strangely, the same. But they’re not mine. They’re in the wrong places. They play the wrong roles. Maybe “wrong” is the wrong word. They are different; they play different roles. Is different the same as wrong? Of course not. But then—yes—all my life, different has meant wrong. Especially back home, anything or anyone that was different was also wrong. For example, back in my high school, people think colleges are full of weirdos. Is a weirdo different or wrong or wrong because it’s different or different because it plays the wrong role or wrong because it goes to college or doesn’t go to your church? I don’t believe I’m actually “mentioning religion” when I use the word “church,” am I? No; I’ve given that word a role other than the one it would have in everyday conversation, so I’ve not violated your rules. I’m just choosing an organization to illustrate the idea that difference can sometimes be seen as evil.
That was certainly the case with all the people I went to school with, especially the Spindler boys and the Johannes girls. If you keep asking me to write these kinds of papers, you’ll probably hear more about the Spindlers and the Johanneses, who were my loves and hates, respectively, as well as my neighbors, than you ever wanted to know. These people all seemed to have a pretty clear idea of good and evil, and evil was anything different from them. Sometimes, I felt, that anything was me. But then my friends also went to church a lot more than I did, and most of them were Catholic, in addition, which I came to feel was the surest way to acquire a strong sense of good and evil, as well as an especially sure way to acquire a strong sense of us and them. I guess I’m talking about religion after all. Feel free to take your red pen and mark out this paragraph. I’m way over my minimum requirement anyway.
But then, by doing that, you might end up marking out my best thoughts. That would be a problem for a teacher, wouldn’t it? To mark out a student’s best thoughts simply because the subject of those thoughts was forbidden? So you have a small problem. You didn’t forbid a discussion of right and wrong, however, so I’ll continue. Are oak trees different or wrong or weirdo? They can’t be all bad; the squirrels love them. But then I guess no matter what kind of a tree you are some animal might love you, especially if you just stood there, faithfully, never going anywhere, and let him crawl up your sides, snuggle in between your limbs and nibble on your acorns. Maybe if I were a modern day Linnaeus and could take the name of my plant, I could then stand in front of the mirror in the morning and study myself and ask why anyone would choose me. What do I have that would be attractive? Why would anyone plant me? Only as an ornamental or maybe as a source of inspiration? In the winter, will my ginkgo be plain, almost clinical, like I am in the morning, or will it be dressed?
Here I am asking these questions and I don’t even know whether my tree loses its leaves in the winter. Pines keep their needles all year. Why do I assume the ginkgo loses its? You see, I’ve recognized a default assumption, just from picking a plant and checking up on it in a book. I have this picture of leaves that fall: They are broad, fluttery, green, flat, attached by a thin stalk. So I assume that anything that looks like a leaf will eventually die, wither and fall, after a blaze of glory, in that season we call “the fall.”
I have chosen the ginkgo, therefore, because it allows me to test my default assumptions. You can probably tell from this paper that since I’ve used the word “default,” I’m taking a computer science course. Otherwise, I’d never have used the word “default.” Even the idea of a “default assumption” is not present among my acquaintances. If this were English class instead of biology, my teacher would use her red pen to make a little check above every “default” in the last two paragraphs and above the two “fall”s in the last sentence of the above paragraph and above the “paragraph”s and “sentence”s in this sentence. You’re not supposed to use the same word too often. That’s bad style.
But I use default assumptions all the time; why can’t I use the words for them? I guess it’s a default assumption that I can use bad style in biology class but not in English class. I can say exactly what I mean in biology class, no matter how crudely—isn’t straight talk the essence of science?—but in English class I have to say things well and if I say them rather obliquely, too, then so much the better. So I chose the ginkgo because it allowed me the luxury of thinking about the rules for communicating in various domains of intellectual endeavor. Do you like the sound of that last sentence? It seems rather academic, like some professor would appreciate. I learned to talk that way in philosophy class.
You’re not going to grade me for my style, are you? No, you said you wouldn’t. You said, verbatim: Do the assignment and you will get your credit. I’ve done the assignment. I’ve done more than you’ve asked and maybe more than you expected. Have I done more than the others in the class? It seems like you’ve gotten a great many questions from me. Questions after questions after questions. I came here to learn skills and all I find are questions, which I write down and give to you. Maybe learning to ask questions is the same as learning skills. Maybe learning to express the questions you usually hold inside is the same as getting an education. If so, it seems like my parents are spending a very great amount of money so that I can learn to do something little kids do naturally. Did I naturally express my questions when I was a little kid, only to lose that tendency and have to spend thousands of dollars to get it back? More questions.
I chose the ginkgo because it happened to be the first plant I looked at seriously, as a candidate, and it fulfilled my needs. My need was for three pages, and I got eight or nine, so I’ve been more than provided for, taken care of beyond my expectations, by, of all things, vegetation. This tree is starting to fill the role of a good husband. Isn’t that what husbands are supposed to do, take care of you beyond your expectations? This exercise started as a pure chance event, an encounter between a girl and a tree. We, rather I, fell in love at first sight and am now thinking about husbands. My friends back home would really think that a tree husband was a weirdo. My friends think that husbands are supposed to be cowboys. If your assignment was intended to shed a new light on my friends back home, it sure worked.
Of course this encounter with the tree happened purely by chance, I think. We plan so carefully, yet important things happen by accident, like running into this tree at a particular time when you came walking by. Are plans only an illusion? Are the acts we get to plan for, then carry out, only the minor ones, while the truly significant events occur at random? If so, what kind of a world am I living in? I could have said, of course, that God guided me in my search for the perfect perennial plant, directing my feet toward the corner where my ginkgo stands, and that God made me stand there, waiting for you to come along and tell me a story about Linnaeus, and that God made me choose this tree, knowing that I could write 10 pages when asked for three. Then God would be indistinguishable from good luck. But then, the next student could just as easily decide that God made him choose an oak tree instead of a ginkgo.
I’m out of thoughts and ideas. I chose the ginkgo because a subconscious voice told me I’d exhaust my supply of questions if I started writing about it. I assume this paper is confidential. You may show it to your wife but you may not read it out loud to the class. This is my private communication, probably to myself, but I’m handing it in because your job is probably boring and you need a little boost once in a while and it’s not often a truly strange idea like your assignment turns into an essay full of questions. But don’t show it to anyone. Give me my 25 points and give me my paper back. And give me some help if you can. I don’t want to end up like you, reading these kinds of papers for the next 30 years. I don’t want to be a slave to some scheme that teaches me how to find a rich husband and I don’t want to be a physical therapist, spending the rest of my life trying to rehabilitate injured high school jocks, and I don’t want to marry a doctor and sit at home with his babies. But most of all I don’t want to go back to Carson County.
TWO: a section of another fictitious essay by the same student
You know what I did one time? My mother was out working—make that trying to work—in the garden. We have a big garden. My father had brought in a bunch of topsoil from south of the river and spread it out near the house and dug in a lot of manure to make this garden. It was a dry year. The dirt was hard. My mother was out taking care of her tomatoes. She was chopping away at the bindweed, at its base, so that the runners choking her tomato plants would die. But I picked up some dirt and a piece of bindweed stem and put them in a plastic cup. Then I put the cup on my window sill and watered the dirt. You see, I’ve done this bit with the sprig in the glass of water before.
I don’t remember how long it took—days, at least, or weeks, maybe, certainly not months—but the bindweed grew up and all through the Venetian blinds. The only dirt it had was that little bit in the plastic cup. My father came into my room and asked why I was growing that goddamn bindweed. I told him I was curious about it, since it was such a pest. He looked at me with a strange sort of expression, kind of a combination of sadness and hesitancy and something else I can’t even tonight describe. It was almost as if he was saying to me: I wish someone had told me it was all right to be curious about a pest when I was a child; instead, they told me to kill pests. But my father hadn’t really told me it was okay to be curious about a pest. In fact, in a way, I’d told him! Maybe I only reminded him of something he already knew. After all, this was the same man who found an elephant tooth on his father’s ranch, then, by the time he grew up and had children of his own, forgot to let them go digging for giants in the sand. Or maybe he didn’t forget. Maybe he was just waiting until we were ready in some way. Are these paper assignments getting me ready to hear what my father has to teach me about giants? I hope so.
My mother, however, was not very impressed with my bindweed. You won’t be able to close the blinds, she said. I told her there was nobody to see in except coyotes and insects. And she looked at me with a funny expression, too, sort of like she was saying: When you’re a woman, you don’t even let coyotes and insects see into your room. I thought at the time she said that because she was afraid. Since coming down here, I wonder whether she said it because she thought that if you’re a woman, you don’t give up your right to be completely alone at times of your own choosing. A coyote looking in your window meant you had lost your privacy.
Bindweed represents something that cannot be controlled. It is insidious, lies buried beneath the surface until some random set of circumstances liberates it. Then it goes crazy and covers even the ground cover. It’s a grasping thing; anything with tendrils is grasping, right? Bindweed is not like my ungrasping vine, but instead grabs at its environment. Bindweed does everything for my little plant community that the Devil is supposed to do for my big person community. Bindweed would go into the museum for the express purpose of rearranging its thoughts, knowing in advance that the rearrangement was not what the gardeners wanted to have happen.
You’re seeing right through this narrative, aren’t you? You’ve read so much technical literature, and so many difficult and obscure sentences, that a college girl’s essay can hide nothing from you or from your kind. My ginkgo is God to the vine and bindweed is the Devil, and they all grow in a square hole in the concrete, and none of them—except maybe the bindweed!—can grow over the concrete, and my ginkgo reaches into the sky where the ground cover can never go, and the bindweed tries to grab and choke everything it touches. My tree is God. Our trip into the museum was a descent into Hell, something similar to what happened when the bindweed held my blinds open and I could see out the window, and I loved it. And this silly exercise of telling you about the vine sprig I broke off and tried to throw away has turned you into a Snake in the Garden of Eden where good cowboys and cowgirls get pissed on and fed shit by sons of bitches and told it’s The Good Life. And I guess that makes me Eve, right?