While listening to last weekend’s rebroadcast of the France Culture podcast L’Art est la matière (1), a comment from the episode’s guest Clélia Nau struck me: while we typically associate “vegetating” with languor and passivity, the origin of the word is in fact quite the opposite. The Oxford dictionary’s primary definition of vegetate is to “live or spend a period of time in a dull, inactive, unchallenging way,” but the Latin vegetare means to invigorate, to impart energy to. It’s only in a secondary meaning, termed “dated” and in reference to plants, that the English verb means to grow or sprout.
Vegetation has retained its connotations of lushness and life (if I describe a scene full of the stuff, I assume you’ll picture bounding greenery and floral colors), but we derogatorily use the term “vegetable” to describe people we perceive to have little or no brain function. While plants grow and spread at a much more visible rate than humans do, they’re also much less motile, and so, we can have it both ways in our metaphors and etymological forks.
I certainly feel that I’m vegetating in the dull sense of the word these days. I’m currently sitting in a corner of my converted attic-cum-bedroom in a tiny village on the north coast of Brittany, and I feel desperately inefficient most days. This isn’t strictly true, but feelings don’t always care for facts. Every morning, rising seems like a gargantuan task. I want to fall into a deep nap most afternoons, and once again, extricating myself from the comforter I have used to turn myself into a giant, fluffy slug is something that quite nearly brings tears to my eyes. Over and over, I tell myself that I don’t want to do anything. That I can’t. That it’s all just too hard. But then I do get up, and I practice and go outside and eat and pick up bread and put away my clothes and hang new drawings on the wall and answer an email and and and… I do the various things that feel impossible to fathom from my bed or while driving home through the winding country roads, mutter-sighing to myself, “I’m so tired,” and never feeling that I accomplished anything at all.
I am not supposed to accomplish anything; I am supposed to be on vacation. I have been saying for over six months that I need time off. I have been protesting too much, the way that people with little conviction generally do: “You know, you might not hear me practice everyday. I might not practice much at all. You know, I’m going to really sleep a lot. I might stay in bed most of the day for a while. Don’t be alarmed. I’m going to be really inactive. You know, I’m not going to try to do anything over the course of these weeks.” Relatively hollow threats, repeated redundantly to an audience that never asked. The problem with not quite committing to vegetating in the modern English sense of the word is that you also can’t vegetare in the Latin sense. Mostly, you’re left with a series of half measures.
In my defense, most people are terrible at committing to a relationship with rest. We all know it’s hard to say no to things. But more terrifyingly, as I see it, is the counterbalancing necessity that arises to say yes to what’s left behind. Time continues to flow and will be filled, whether willfully or not. To commit to saying no to outside forces is to commit to a relationship with yourself.
I’m reminded of another facet of vegetation: chaos and force. There’s danger in growth when you crave control and order — in what direction will it all go? I find myself as overawed (and overwhelmed) as Werner Herzog explaining the violence of the jungle (2). Growth is a painful, chaotic and scary business, figuratively and literally. By that measure, rest — a radical element of rejuvenation, let’s not forget — often is as well. Just look at what we get up to in dreams, for god’s sake. Is it any wonder that Freud wanted to codify their meaning? In the anarchy of a body at rest, perhaps the two opposite sides of vegetating converge.
Notes:
“Écologie des formes,” 23 July 2022. Original broadcast on 7 November 2021.
Blank, Les, director. Burden of Dreams. Flower Films, 1982.