Poem Song for Dov Shamir in: Dannie Abse (1963), Dannie Abse, p. 8
“Plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.”
"The Art of Fiction" - interview by Robert Faggen, The Paris Review No. 130 (Spring 1994) <!-- p. 92 -->
Context: I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers. … The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
An Afternoon with Mark Pesce: The Uncut Version http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/interview.html
“Out upon you, Jerry! Jerry, you're a pity!
Jerry, turn about and plant a garden in the City!”
The Garden City
More Nursery Rhymes of London Town (1917)
Hyakujo: The Everest of Zen
Context: Any mundane activity can become meditative. Digging a hole in the garden, planting new roses in the garden — you can do it with such tremendous love and compassion, you can do it with the hands of a buddha. There is no contradiction … I say unto you, your every act should be a ceremony. If you can bring your consciousness, your awareness, your intelligence to the act, if you can be spontaneous, then there is no need for any other religion: life itself will be the religion.
“God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures.”
Of Gardens
Essays (1625)
“Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!”
382
Daybreak — Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881)
“In Nevada, there was a time when you couldn’t get unemployment unless you tried sex work first.”
The Humanist interview (2012)
Context: If someone wants to be called a sex worker, I call them a sex worker. But there is a problem with that term, because while it was adopted in goodwill, traffickers have taken it and essentially said, “Okay, if it’s work like any other, somebody has to do it.” In Nevada, there was a time when you couldn’t get unemployment unless you tried sex work first. The same was true in Germany. So the state became a procurer because of the argument that sex is work like any other. This is not a good thing.
I also do not feel proud when I stand in the Sonagachi, the biggest brothel area in all of South Asia. It’s in Kolkata, and everything is written in Bengali except “SEX WORK.” And the term is used in various sinister ways by sex traffickers, who even describe what they do — which is to kidnap or buy people out of villages — as “facilitated migration.”
I’ve only ever met one woman who actually was a prostitute of her own free will. She didn’t have a pimp. She could pick and choose her customers. That’s so rare. So we have to look at the reality and not romanticize it. We have to be clear that you have the right to sell your own body but nobody has the right to sell anybody else’s body. No one has that right.
