On "A Little Green Left"
The genesis of my paean to molecular hope
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“I Let My Plants Die…”
Some people are experts at taking care of houseplants. It’s not just that they know when and how much to water them — these people seem to speak the plant language. I’ve watched them: traversing their apartments, watering cans in hand, whispering to their plants in a tongue I’m forced to assume was withheld from me for inscrutable karmic reasons. I must have been a heatwave in a past life, or a particularly avaricious weevil.
Suffice it to say I’m not one of these people. I have two plants in my apartment, neither of which I acquired myself, both of which should be a cinch to take care of. One is a spider plant, which has indeed survived weekslong bouts of water deprivation; the other is a succulent, which, despite its perch on the windowsill, where my apartment receives peak natural light, continually withers and browns.
Aspects of my plantcare ineptitude are mysterious to me. It seems a semi-mystical act, ruled by a runic logic that I can see working but that was omitted from my genetic code.
Other aspects aren’t. The opening line of “A Little Green Left,” the song of mine that, in the last year or so, seems to have resonated most with live audiences, is:
I let my plants die, when I was feeling low
Unlike many of my songs, “A Little Green Left” is based on true events. Last July, neglect had caused my spider plant to wither almost to the point of death. Its shoots had gone beige and brittle; after pruning, they lay around the stem, a foul tribute to the little life that endured, that had receded so far inward.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to care for the plants. It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt me to see them dying, or that I didn’t know how simple it would be to nurse them back to health. There was something in me that stopped me from doing it.
Betrayal
To understand what the stopping agent was, you have to think about a time in your life when you were actively doing something that felt wrong to you. Not just something irritating — making a second trip to the grocery store after forgetting a key item — but something that felt fundamentally like a betrayal. Working for a boss you despised, being unfaithful to a friend or a lover, spending money you didn’t have on things you didn’t need — some action that violated a core principle of decency, but that fate or desperation compelled you to commit.
The essence of my violation had to do with time and money. People much older than I might think it quaint, but after passing the threshold of 30 last year, I could feel time accelerating. I could see myself viewing life in units of years, rather than weeks or months; I could feel myself picking up speed en route to our common destination. In a grand view, the difference in velocity was minimal, but when you’re as obsessed with your own properties of motion as I am, little differences are impossible to ignore.
As my pace quickened, I couldn’t help but notice I was allotting more of my time to activities that didn’t feel reflective of the meaning I saw in life. Probably, each of us has our own concept of meaning, and when my version looks like yours, and when our version looks like theirs, friend and peer groups take shape, and subcultures, and industries. In some platonic ideal of life, we each spend our lives championing our notions of meaning. And that’s the exact opposite of what I was doing. The vast majority of my time, especially my good time — the hours of the morning when caffeine courses through my bloodstream and the lens I see life through is polished spotless — was going toward activities that made me money.
Money. It either bespeaks my privilege or my humanity that I don’t see money-making activities as core to the fabric of life. Money may lubricate the gears of human societies beyond certain population thresholds, maybe more effectively than any other lubricant, but it does not reside at the essence of life, and therefore should not be one’s primary or sole object of focus. I really believe this, and I imagine that, on some level, you do too, even if the relentless machine of late-stage capitalism has mass-produced it out of you.
Spending an outsized portion of my time on activities whose sole value was money-making meant violating a core belief. Day in and day out, moment in and moment out, I had full-blast conscious awareness that I was committing the finite resources of my life to something I didn’t believe in. At the same time, I was devoting my leftover resources to something I did believe in — the dogged, likely doomed, but no less necessary pursuit of artistic absolution — but the proportions were all wrong.
In effect, I had a life I didn’t want. I was putting fuel into an engine I didn’t want to run. Strange as it may seem, and as innocent as my bystander plants no doubt were, watering them felt like tacitly agreeing with this life — growing it, propagating it, propounding its fundamental assumptions.
Getting back to “A Little Green Left,” this is what I meant when I wrote, “I let my plants die, when I was feeling low.” To translate “feeling low” from lyric to prosaic confession, it meant: “resentful of the fabric of my life, and resentful of anything that symbolized its growth.”
As the second verse of the song indicates, this blockage extended to more than just my houseplants:
I made my friend cry, because I couldn’t feel
Her heart within mine, the spirit in the steel
But when it came time, to find another friend
I found a little green left upon our stem
I don’t really want to share details here because they involve other people, and so sharing risks airing dirty laundry. All you need to know is that I treated people who were important to me as if they weren’t, and felt the ill effects like seismic events in my heart.
It was this latter transgression that prompted significant changes. I cut my full-time work hours from 40/week to 30/week, accepted the reduced income as the cost of doing spiritual business, and allocated more and more of my time, my good time especially, to the dogged, likely doomed, but no less necessary pursuit of artistic absolution.
Propagation
The video for “A Little Green Left,” whose stills punctuate this newsletter, is a short dystopian piece where everyone in a city is forced to make the same unholy trade: life force for pay, vitality for prosperity. I had the vision for the video years ago, and it wasn’t until the combined prompting of life events, song, and meeting Magdalene Kennedy, a tremendously talented animator, that the moment seemed right to set it in motion. I’m astonished by what Maggie accomplished, and I’m heartened by how faithfully it brings the metaphor to life.
If you’ve ever been in a position that rings familiar, where your life proceeded according to a set of values that you inherited and resented, where you felt like investing in it meant betraying that which must not be betrayed, I hope you hear in “A Little Green Left” the paean to molecular hope that I intended it to be. If it rings true to you, I invite you to propagate it: to plant it in soil where it might grow, to extend it to others who might be suffering in kind.
Or, you know, who just can’t keep a succulent alive.
Masterful writing. As I always do when I read your work, I learned a ton.
But, Dustin, if you want to see time speed up, just wait till you're my age. The passage of time now defies the laws of physics.