Mud: Condition, Conditioner, Conditioning…

So I lied.

I have another poem which I wrote straight in to Word and haven’t touched it since. When I was at the Garden there was a brief conversation about how potatoes condition the soil so that it’s not too crumbly and not too sticky. Two things entered my mind. First, a reading by Julia Copus at this year’s Stanza Festival in Scotland. She talked about how ‘falling in love’ was an inaccurate phrase, since it implies that love is outside of us. Better to think of love as something involuntary that rises up through you. Second, I thought of some graffiti on the toilet wall in the English Faculty: ‘LOVE IS NOT A POTATO’ is written in sprawling letters and beneath it there’s some wise-crack response that I can’t remember. I was taken by the idea of conditioning – of love being something that makes you fertile ground for all the growths that accompany it – purpose, jealousy, satisfaction, self-worth, libido.

The etymology of the word as a verb isn’t so positive. It’s Old French, comingled with Spanish, and means ‘ to impose a condition on, to limit with conditions’. The first entry in the OED says:

To treat about conditions; to make conditions, make terms; to stipulate, bargain with.

And it’s not until definition 9a. that it says:

To bring to a desired state or condition; to make fit or in good condition.

My thesaurus throws up words like: treat, prepare, prime, temper, process, acclimatize, acclimate, season. The act of conditioning implies that there is someone for whom something else must reach an optimum state, so that something else might happen. How creepy to think of some weird, unknown aspect of yourself conditioning your body to give/receive love without your consent. We can’t choose who we fall in love with, is the old maxim. But we can choose the plants we grow. There was definitely a kind of adoration in the faces of the gardeners are they carted compost from the heap to the flower bed. It’s such straight forward, rich, black stuff.

There’s something about nothingness in there too which arose from a question I had and have yet to properly explore – does it exist in nature? (there are vacuums, but even they have to be contained by something else.) Is there some branch of science that can explain why we seem to think we came from nothing? If we get rid of nothing as a concept, isn’t it then easier to think about things being infinite? And so on.

I get a lot from potatoes.

And I thought I’d spare you the handwriting this time.

—–

Love is not a potato

I noticed, squatting, that someone had written
‘Love is not a potato’ on the toilet wall.

I remembered this weeks later when a gardener
Felt some soft, black, earth between her fingers

And said that potatoes were the key: potatoes kept
The earth crumbled and stuck, moist and clay,

To itself, falling from itself, moist and firm.
What else is love? If the bald, pocked potato

Saw the mysterious black earth across the room
And held her together – what else constitutes

The thing we all crave, need, want – love to have
And have to give. Love is the potato conditioning

The soil. It is the thing within the thing.

Silent mimicry. It lays in the earth
As we will lay in the earth one day,

Our bodies still and yielded to the gaseous mouths,
The putrid oils, the parting in to nothingness.

I wonder if nothingness exists. If there is such
A thing as no-thing. From where did we come?

We ask, as if the answer was not in the potato,
Ancient root sprung from ancient roots.

The point is that it sprung. There is no nothingness
On earth. Earth fills every space, as love does –

All sturdy stuff. All stuff that will outlast.
The potato curled in its dumb sleep,

The speechless girl struck dumb by the eerie
Beauty of earth crumbling between finger and thumb.