Pirates and farmers

“Perhaps you can divide artists into two categories,” says Brian Eno. “Farmers and cowboys.”

The farmers settle a piece of land and cultivate it carefully, finding more and more value in it. The cowboys look for new places and are excited by the sheer fact of discovery, and the freedom of being somewhere that not many people have been before.

Brian Eno on “farmers and cowboys” pic.twitter.com/MDIM3D59jd

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) July 13, 2021

I’ve heard him say this numerous times over the years, but I only recently realized he borrowed the dichotomy from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!

The farmer and the cowman should be friends
One man likes to push a plough
The other likes to chase a cow
But that’s no reason why they cain’t be friends

The tension between the cowboy and the farmer seems to me a holdover from our origins as a hunter-gatherer species who then turned to agriculture. Contemporary humans mostly live a sedentary life, but we began as nomads. I feel that need to move within me.

my notes on a Brian Eno interview with Rick Rubin

“The cowboy and the farmer are genuinely inimical types,” wrote Larry McMurtry, in his essay collection on Texas, In A Narrow Grave. “They have seldom mixed easily.” Of his cowboy ancestors, he writes:

To the McMurtrys, the plow and the cotton-patch symbolized not only tasks they loathed but an orientation toward the earth and, by extension, a quality of soul which most of them not-so-covertly despised.

“The cowboy’s contempt of the farmer was not unmixed with pity,” McMurtry writes. While the farmer and the cowboy both live hard lives, cowboys still see themselves as “the chosen of the earth.”

I have known cowboys broken in body and twisted in spirit, bruised by debt, failure, loneliness, disease and most of the other afflictions of man, but I have seldom known one who did not consider himself phenomenally blessed to have been a cowboy…

McMurtry’s friend and Texas native, Dave Hickey, set up his own dichotomy of plot workers and frontier finders, but he changed “cowboys” to “pirates.” In Pirates and Farmers, he writes:

I am going to explain this to you very simply. All human creatures are divided into two groups. There are pirates, and there are farmers. Farmers build fences and control territory. Pirates tear down fences and cross borders. There are good pirates and bad pirates, good farmers and bad farmers, but there are only pirates and farmers.

Some pirates, Hickey says, “recognize the importance of farmers,” but farmers “always hate pirates.” The farmers recognize the pirates sometimes even before the pirates recognize themselves. It is very dangerous, Hickey says, to try to be a farmer when you’re really a pirate. (Hickey obviously identifies as a pirate.)

I asked Daniel Oppenheimer, author of the book Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, why Hickey switched his metaphor from cowboy to pirate. For at least two reasons, Oppenheimer says. One, Hickey has long had a complicated relationship with Texas and the cowboy image. (For example, Hickey was pissed that Oppenheimer put a picture of him in a cowboy hat on the cover of his book.) Two, Hickey believes in the possibilities of pleasure, and a pirate simply has more fun than a stoic cowboy.

I asked Oppenheimer if he felt more like a farmer or a pirate, and he said that while he’d love to be a pirate, when honest with himself, he felt more like a farmer.

Flaubert said you should be regular and orderly in your everyday life so you can be violent and original in your work, and that describes many of the writers I know. The only pirating we usually do is in the mind: reading books, searching the stacks — and sometimes the world — for new material.

In fact, many self-identified pirates suspect they’re really farmers. The irony of Eno’s cowboys and farmers division is that he’s both — a cowboy always searching for new ideas and musical frontiers, but also a farmer planted in his studio, cultivating his work. As he told the NYTimes:

“In my normal life I’m a very unadventurous person… I take the same walk every day and I eat in the same restaurants, and often eat exactly the same things in the same restaurants. I don’t adventure much except when I’m in the studio, and then I only want to adventure. I cannot bear doing something again, or thinking that I’m doing something again.”

This got me wondering, as I often do, about nouns and verbs. Maybe it isn’t a question of being a farmer or a pirate, but whether you’re farming or pirating. Maybe they’re two different artistic modes that we operate under.

Eno himself calls what he does “Import and Export”:

I like taking ideas from one place and putting them into another place and seeing what happens when you do that.

So, sometimes Eno is pirating: setting sail and looking for ideas to steal, but when he brings them back to the studio, he starts farming, or gardening, cultivating the ideas, cross-breeding, seeing what emerges.

* * *

At the risk of being too literal with the metaphor, I went looking for examples of pirates who farmed.

Or pirate gardeners.

Then I found the the pirate-botanist:

In the 17^th century, finding plants and animals new to Europeans was a rough, ferociously competitive business. There were fortunes to be made, money enough to attract outlaws, slavers, men who crisscrossed the world for years at a time.

Many a botanist took to the seas to hunt for plants to bring back to be cultivated back at home.

My wife Meg pointed out that the whole reason Mutiny on the Bounty exists is because they turned the quarters of the Bounty into a huge greenhouse to transport bread fruit plants from Tahiti, effectively overcrowding the crew. (Oh, the perils of mixing gardening and pirating!)

And here is very much where I’d like to land, once again, on the fault line between two plates rubbing together, or walking a rope held tight with a tension between two poles.

I would like to be a pirate gardener.

I’d like to stay happily at home, in the studio, planting my seeds and cultivating my garden, and when I get bored, like Ishmael, and “I find myself growing grim about the mouth,” then it’s time to take to the seas and do some pirating, steal a few seeds from foreign lands to bring back to my own garden, where I’ll stay happily until I get bored again.

* * *

A few footnotes:

1. “Pirates and farmers” could possibly map to the concepts in David Galenson’s Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity. In that book, Galenson identifies two kinds of artists: conceptual innovators, who “make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at an early age” (Vermeer, van Gogh, Picasso, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and Orson Welles) and experimental innovators, who “work by trial and error, and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life” (Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, and Alfred Hitchcock). I say “possibly” because I have not, as of yet, read the book.
2. On the ways farmers and pirates experience time, see the Olga Tokarczuk excerpt in my post on circular and linear time.
3. In his essay, “The Storyteller,” collected in Illuminations, Walter Benjamin divides storytellers into “two groups, which, to be sure, overlap in many ways”: farmers (“the resident tiller of the soil”) and sailors (“trading seaman”).
  
  “‘When someone goes on a trip, he has something to tell about,’ goes the German saying, and people imagine the storyteller as someone who has come from afar. But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions.”
  
  Benjamin notes that when you combine “the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home, with the lore of the past,” that’s when you get the good stuff.

“Imagination is when you close your eyes and think of a door.”
—Dave Hickey

Yesterday I read Mary Ruefle’s chapbook, On Imagination, in which she writes, “Anything involving an image in the head is an act of imagination.”

The imagination — the ability to make images in your head that aren’t right in front of your eyeballs — seems to me such a crucial human tool that I find myself resenting people who don’t seem to possess much of one. It’s one of the reasons I shout at the television every time a guest on House Hunters whines, “I don’t like the carpet.” (A lack of imagination will cost you — especially in real estate.)

The other day on my walk I was rushed by an off-leash pitbull. “He’s friendly!” his owner shouted, like they always do. I usually curse off-leash dog owners as stupid or entitled or whatever, but on that particular day I wondered: Do people who let their dogs off-leash simply lack an imagination? Or do they simply refuse to use it when it comes to their beloved pets? This makes much more sense to me: that they simply cannot or will not picture in their minds the worst happening.

Me, on the other hand, I spend all day thinking about the worst that can happen. “Fear comes with imagination,” writes Thomas Harris in Red Dragon. “It’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.”

(I fear, now, that I plagiarized him in Show Your Work!: “The trouble with imaginative people is that we’re good at picturing the worst that could happen to us. Fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn.”)

This is an idea at the heart of Ruefle’s essay. She says it “irks” her when artists speak of the imagination as only a benevolent tool, “as if there were nothing pejorative or destructive about it.” On the contrary, she writes, “the imagination is a full, rounded, complex thing.” She calls the imagination her “daimon” because it is “my best friend and my worst enemy.”

Something that stopped me in my (admittedly) prejudiced tracks a few years ago was the discovery that there are literally people who cannot think in pictures. It’s called “congenital aphantasia.” Researchers estimate that 2-5% of the population are “non-imagers,” or “mind blind.” Here are a few non-imager testimonials:

“Part of me still believes that when people say they’re ‘picturing’ something, they mean it metaphorically, like I do,” says Kelly Sandoval, a fiction writer from Seattle who is a natural non-imager. “To me, seeing images in your head sounds like a superpower.”

“It’s kind of like learning your best friend can move objects with his mind,” agrees Bruno Ferreira from Rio de Janeiro. Having no personal experience of thinking in pictures, non-imagers often grow up seeing references to mental imagery as simple figures of speech.

(It’s interesting to me that this is the exact opposite of Temple Grandin, who writes about her autism and visualization abilities in her memoir, Thinking In Pictures, “When I was a child and a teenager, I thought everybody thought in pictures.”)

Is there a silver lining to not being able to make images in your head? According to Kelly Sandoval, “Not picturing things means that when I write, it’s fairly easy to get the words down.”

If she could teach the world just one thing about being a non-imager, it’s that “it’s not a lack of imagination. You don’t need pictures in your head to be creative. You just need ideas. And ideas come in all sorts of forms.”

In fact, the imagination need not be limited to pictures. In his essay, “The Reach of Imagination,” Jacob Bronowski writes, “To imagine means to make images and to move them about inside one’s head in new arrangements.” But, “I am using the word image in a wide meaning, which does not restrict it to the mind’s eye as a visual organ.” In his usage, “image” includes signs, and, oh hey, words: “the most important images for human beings are simply words, which are abstract symbols.”

So, basically, as Sandoval noted: Just because you can’t see pictures in your head doesn’t mean you don’t have an imagination.

Oh, also: Not being able to make pictures in your head might help you avoid the bad stuff that comes with along with the skill (in his essay, “Of the Force of Imagination,” Montaigne said that he made it his business to avoid and resist his imagination!):

Overactive visual imagery is thought to play a role in addiction and cravings, as well as the development of anxiety disorders such as PTSD. It may be that the inability to visualise might anchor people in the present and allow them to live more fully in the moment.

Oddly, this one of the last points of Ruefle’s essay. She feels like she’s not as good of a teacher as she used to be, because she’s older now, further away from the age of her students, and she simply doesn’t care about the same things that they do.

One way to look at it is to say they are interested in the future, and, having a very difficult and limited kind of future, I am not much interested in it, while at the same time I am more and more interested in the present moment, and I don’t mean the general state of affairs this month, I mean the bug walking across my lettuce leaf.

For those of us who are still interested and invested, we’ll need our imaginations, in whatever form they take.

“One idea about the imagination is that it is the agency of our soul which creates the future,” says Lewis Hyde. “It allows us to call into being worlds that don’t yet exist.”

To create a future, we need better imaginations, and for better imaginations, we need to feed them better ideas and better images.