Home > Author > Stanley Crawford
1 " Finally when he climbed below deck after dark, wondering where his dinner was, perhaps with a storm come up and rough seas and blinding rains, I'd sulk and lure him into the warm and steamy darkness and from the hairs of his warm body I'd breed a myriad smiling, sparkle-eyed one-year-olds, my broods, my flocks. In the churning seas, below the waves, together inside our hammock woven in coarse sailcloth by Unguentine's deft hands, a spherical webbed sack which hung and swivelled between the two walls of our bedroom, we would spin round and round with lapping tongues and the soft suction of lips, whirling, our amorous centrifuge, all night long, zipped inside against the elements. Now, years and years later, those nights, the thought and touch of them is enough to make me throw myself down on the ground and roll in the dust like a hen nibbled by mites, generating clouds, stars and all the rest. "
― Stanley Crawford , Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine
2 " You pay homage when and where you can. I love the smell of the bulb as the earth opens and releases it in harvest, an aroma that only those who grow garlic and handle the bulb and the leaves still fresh from the earth can know.Anyone who gardens knows these indescribable presences--of not only fresh garlic, but onions, carrots and their tops, parsley's piercing signal, the fragrant exultations of a tomato plant in its prime, sweet explosions of basil. They can be known best and most purely on the spot, in the instant, in the garden, in the sun, in the rain. They cannot be carried away from their place in the earth. They are inimitable. And they have no shelf life at all. "
― Stanley Crawford , A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm
3 " Cultivated crops, like words, like language, are things that glide into view out of the murkiness of the past. I think of my words as mine, but the chances are than even after fifty or sixty or seventy years of chewing on them, writing them down, word-processing them as a speaker and as a writer, I won't succeed in putting a single new one into circulation. Same with plants, with crops, as a gardener and farmer. What we're given in words and cultivated plants has been worked over for hundreds of generations before it comes to us, and the chances of our adding to it are very slim. What we add is illusion: each time we're born, the world looks new, is new, which gives us a strange kind of leverage against the weight of accumulated biological and cultural existence, which means for a while, off and on, now and then, under certain circumstances, we believe we are the owners or managers or the franchise operators of this world, not the other way around, and that we have invented almost everything in sight, from the words that drop so easily from our mouths to the plants we grow in our gardens. "
4 " To dream a garden and then to plant it is an act of independence and even defiance to the greater world. "
5 " So that where I once did not know who or what you were, now I wonder who I or we are, or what. What planet is this anyway, my dear? "
6 " Often he vanished for days down the spiral staircase into the engine-room to overhaul the weary machinery, leaving me with a curt note tacked to his then-favourite aspen, the Aspen Laura-Anne, a white-limbed thing with noisy leaves: 'A due-south drift, please, love, for a day or two, n'est-ce pas? "
7 " So what about you?" I would conclude. "What about your life? Is it organically lived?" Here I might pause to summon up the courage to bring up the forbidden subject. "And if I may ask, what about the money you would offer to pay me with? Is it organically earned? In short, how have you managed to solve these problems in your life? Have you actually figured out how to live a clean life in a dirty age?" "
― Stanley Crawford
8 " All human livings in industrial society are ultimately based on agricultural production and mineral extraction. One of the ways these processes are transferred upward and outward is through endless cycles of buying and selling. Which is to say that one cannot live in this kind of world without being involved in these cycles, nearly or remotely. "
