Known and Felt and Seen

Weed is not a rank. Taxonomy has kingdoms and families and genera and species, and it has no rank anywhere in it called weed, because a weed is not a kind of plant — it is a sentence somebody has passed on a place. The plant is perfectly visible the whole time it is being one. It is simply not supposed to be there, and the verdict is written in a hand that is never the plant’s own. Dolly Parton spent sixty years handing out the opposite verdict — to children who had not applied for it, to men dying in a decade that had decided they deserved to, to a trans woman in a film her audience had not asked for — and one of the sharpest readers in American letters spent months working out why she could afford to.

Nine hands, and the specimen is a person Link to this section

This sheet is a wall rather than a reading, and the difference is not decoration. A reading has an order and arrives somewhere. A wall has a chorus: several people standing in front of the same thing, each seeing something the others could not, every slip signed. A herbarium sheet that has been in a drawer long enough looks exactly like this — a specimen, and a stack of determination slips in different hands.

The specimen here is a person, and that is the reason for the form rather than an awkwardness in it. Nobody gets filed under one determination. The nine hands below span forty-seven years and they do not agree, and the disagreement is not a problem the sheet is going to solve at the bottom.

• I wasn’t getting interviewed much, and Dolly of course was, and I guess I looked sort of alone. And she started saying, “Hey, everybody, come over here and talk to Lenora — she’s just a little girl getting started like the rest of us did.”

• I got a huge gay following and some really macho-looking women. To me, people are people. Many of my friends are gay, male and female. I don’t judge people. I don’t care what people do in their bedrooms.

• People are not perfect. They will sometimes take your love and give nothing back or, worse yet, use it against you. But they are still all there is. They are the greatest of God’s creations. Loving one another is our only reason for being.

• I don’t mean to sound like the inside of a Hallmark card. I do think, though, that it’s time we learned to use the word love without cringing.

• Having a big gay following, I get hate mail and threats. Some people are blind or ignorant, and you can’t be that prejudiced and hateful and go through this world and still be happy.

• I do understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen. Of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!

• Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine,I’m begging of you please don’t hesitate.

• Dolly is a white Southern multi-millionaire boomer who produces self-consciously white music while wearing a stylized drag of a fallen Southern belle.

• Knowing what we love does not diminish who we love, only how we choose to love them.

A weed is a sentence about a place Link to this section

The plant drawn at the head of this sheet is Asclepias tuberosa, and in most of North America it is called butterfly weed. It is not a weed. It is sold in nurseries, planted deliberately in gardens meant to feed pollinators, and it is the host plant of the insect it is named for. The word is simply left over — the residue of a verdict passed by people who wanted the ground for something else, still attached to the plant long after the verdict was quietly withdrawn.

That is what the word does. Weed is not a rank, and no flora in the world can tell you whether a plant is one, because the answer is not in the plant. It is in the bed, and in the hand of whoever keeps it. Move the same species four feet and the answer changes. Nothing about the plant changes at all.

A herbarium has a formal instrument for this, and it is the reason this site is shaped the way it is. A specimen carries determination slips — small labels, added over the years, each one a botanist saying this is what this is, signed and dated. A later hand can disagree with an earlier one, and both slips stay on the sheet. The determination is never pretended to be a property of the plant. It is always somebody’s reading, with a name on it.

What a weed does not get is a slip of its own. The verdict arrives without a signature, from nobody in particular, and there is no procedure for appealing it — which is precisely what makes it useful to whoever is holding the hoe.

Visible is not legible Link to this section

Tressie McMillan Cottom has a distinction that does the rest of this sheet’s work, and she draws it in a different essay from the one about Parton. Being visible and being legible are not the same thing, and collapsing them makes the conversation worse. You can see a lamppost. Seeing it costs you nothing and asks you for nothing. To be legible is to be a thing other people can make sense of — which means being a thing that is understood to be supposed to exist, here, in this room, in this conversation.

Put the two words beside the plant and the whole thing resolves. A weed is perfectly visible and entirely illegible. Nobody is failing to see it. What it lacks is the standing to be there — the quiet agreement that a thing of this kind belongs in a bed of this kind, which is granted to the plant beside it and withheld from this one for reasons that have nothing to do with either.

Readers of this cabinet know the condition from the inside. Being ill in a culture that files illness under failure, being Autistic in a room built for one kind of attention, being Disabled in a building that was drawn without you, being queer anywhere that treats a life as a claim requiring evidence — none of these is an experience of invisibility. People can see you the entire time. What is missing is the assumption that you were supposed to be there.

The book arrives because you exist Link to this section

In 1995 Parton began mailing books to children in Sevier County, Tennessee. Not the poor ones, and not the promising ones. Every one, birth to five, one book a month, until school. Three decades later the programme runs in five countries and the count is past three hundred million books, and in all that time the thing that was never added is a test.

No income threshold. No application beyond an address. No reading assessment, no referral, no diagnosis, no waiting list, and no annual review to confirm the child still deserves it. And the parcel does not come addressed to the parent or guardian of anybody. It has the child’s own name on it — a two-year-old who cannot read a word of it gets post.

Read through the plant, that is not generosity. It is a refusal to determine. Almost everything else a child might need arrives with a slip attached: free school meals have an income threshold, special education has an eligibility determination, therapy has severity cut-offs, disability support has an assessment and then a reassessment. Each of those is defended the same way — resources are finite, so they must be targeted — and that is true, and it is not the whole sentence.

A gate does not only ration. It sorts. Sorting requires somebody to decide who is worth it, by criteria written by people who will never be measured against them, and once that apparatus exists it is available for other uses and gets put to them. Families learn to describe a child in the language of damage because that is the language the form rewards, and then go home and live with having said it. The cost of a gate is never only the people it turns away. It is what it teaches everyone who gets through.

What the Imagination Library does is remove the hand from the bed. The book does not arrive because a child qualified. It arrives because the child exists and somebody knows the address.

She made a record for it, too — her first for children, with the proceeds going back into the programme.

Claimed, without a test Link to this section

The same operation shows up in a department nobody was asking her to work in.

1984, in Interview, unprompted: To me, people are people. That is not a brave sentence by the standards of 2026. In print, from a country singer with a conservative religious audience, in the first years of the AIDS crisis, it was one then.

1989. Sandollar Productions — hers and her manager Sandy Gallin’s — produced Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, about the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It was the first Sandollar project she was not in: she put the company behind it and stayed off the screen.

2005. She wrote and sang Travelin’ Thru for Transamerica, drawing, she said, on a transgender relative and a transgender friend. It was nominated for an Academy Award, and she received death threats for it.

The thing to notice is what is absent from all three. Nobody had to become respectable first. There is no version of this in which she asks the men on that quilt to have lived differently, or asks a trans woman to be less inconvenient, before the work goes out. It is the mailing label again, in another department: the standing is granted up front rather than earned by performance, and it is not revocable for bad behaviour.

And the smallest instance is the clearest, because it cost her nothing and she did it anyway. A room full of disc jockeys is interviewing the famous woman and ignoring the Black singer sitting next to her, and the famous woman says the other one’s name out loud until the room turns around. That is legibility being handed over directly, in the only way it can be: by somebody the room already reads, spending it.

The paper died and the claim did not Link to this section

In April 2020 she gave a million dollars to Vanderbilt for coronavirus research. On 2 March 2021 she sat in a chair at that same hospital, put her own arm in the frame, and sang the line at the top of this sheet.

The money was the smaller half. What she actually spent was the attention: she took the most-covered song in her catalogue — one most of the English-speaking world can already sing from memory — re-tooled it into a public-health instrument, and made herself the demonstration.

For the readers of this cabinet that landed somewhere very specific, and it is the point where this sheet’s own figure comes back round.

Autistic communities had by then spent more than two decades answering the claim that our existence is vaccine injury. The paper it was built on was retracted in full by The Lancet in 2010, and its lead author was struck off the medical register the same year. The determination was formally withdrawn. The claim went on circulating regardless, and is circulating now.

That is the butterfly weed exactly. A verdict does not have to be current to keep working. Asclepias tuberosa is still called a weed two centuries after anybody troubled to defend the judgement, because a name outlives the hand that wrote it and nobody goes back to read the slip. And a retraction is a determination slip — a later hand disagreeing with an earlier one — which means it arrives under the herbarium’s honest and uncomfortable rule: the old slip stays on the sheet. It is not lifted off. What changes is only which one a reader decides to believe.

Answering it is thankless work, too, because it is not really an argument about immunology. It is an argument that we are damage — not different, damage — and the people making it are frequently sincere and frightened, which makes the work sadder and slower rather than easier.

Which is why what she did counted in a way an argument could not have. She did not re-determine us. She did not take our side, or name us, or correct anybody. She took the most legible thing she owned — a song everybody already loved — and spent it, on camera, making the thing itself ordinary and funny and safe to be seen doing. She was not doing it for us. She was doing it for everybody, and that is the entire point: we were included without having to ask, and without first having to explain ourselves.

It is the mailing label a third time. The standing is not granted to a category once the category has made its case. It is simply never withheld in the first place.

The drag was an argument, and the ground under it was not neutral Link to this section

She was also, for sixty years, running the operation on herself.

The look was assembled on purpose out of exactly the material a small town uses to write somebody off, and she said so for decades without a trace of apology. The wigs, the nails, the deliberate excess: none of it was an attempt to become legible to the people who decide these things. It was a refusal to apply. She built a category she was the only member of, and then declined to leave it, and the culture eventually widened to fit rather than the other way round.

That is as queering as a career gets, and it is the point at which this sheet has to stop admiring and start reading.

Cottom’s essay is the sharpest account anybody has given of why the refusal was survivable, and it is not a takedown — reading it as one is the first mistake. She spent months on it, and she says plainly what Parton gave her: a map of female ambition built from stigma and difference rather than inheritance, offering, in her words, a repertoire to triangulate the stigmatization of my blackness.

Then she says the other thing. The drag works, she argues, because it is white — blonde operating as an unmarked identity, one that reads as no particular race at all and therefore filters for whiteness without ever having to name it. Parton could be spectacularly illegible along the axes of class and gender and remain perfectly legible along the one that was doing the underwriting. The ground she was standing on was never in question, which is what made it affordable to stand on it so loudly.

Cottom is sharpest on the line everybody quotes. Asked about Black Lives Matter, Parton said: Of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No! Cottom notices that the radical clause is the second one — the first time she can recall Parton naming herself as simply white, with no class modifier softening it — and she notices what is still, carefully, left unsaid. Her phrase for the habit is ever the artist of misperception.

This sheet is not going to resolve that, and putting it here is not a disclaimer. A determination slip that leaves out the inconvenient reading is not a kinder slip. It is a less true one, and the smoothing away of the awkward half is the exact operation this cabinet exists to refuse. The two readings sit on the same specimen, in different hands, both signed, which is what a wall is for.

Cottom got to the formulation first and it is hers: knowing what we love does not diminish who we love, only how we choose to love them.

A determination in a loving hand, and wrong Link to this section

There is one more slip, and it belongs at the end because it is the only one on the sheet that is mistaken.

On page 297 of her autobiography, Parton writes: The poet Emily Dickinson said, ‘The only thing I know about love is that love is all there is.’

Dickinson did not say that. The poem is there underneath it, and what happened to it in the carrying is worth looking at slowly.

Dickinson’s poem is about the limits of knowing. That love is all there is is all we know of love — and the poem’s move is to say that this ignorance is enough, that the load should be sized to the groove it has to run in. The subject of the sentence is the boundary of our knowledge, not the quantity of love in the universe.

What survived the journey is the warmth. What fell off is the epistemics — the whole hedge, which is also the whole poem. And the reason it fell off is the ordinary one: the tidied version travels further. A sentence with a qualification in it is heavier to carry, and hands that are carrying it fondly put the heavy part down.

We are not correcting her to score a point, and the correction is not the interesting part. This site publishes its own errors for exactly this reason, and the ledger exists because the characteristic failure here is not an invented source but a tightened one — a sentence trimmed to fit, with the attribution left attached. Every sheet in this cabinet carries a line at its foot saying how many times its own label has been corrected.

So the last determination slip on this wall is a wrong one, in a loving hand, and it stays on the sheet with the correction beside it rather than being lifted off. That is what a herbarium does with a misidentification, and it turns out to be the answer to a question this sheet could not otherwise have finished: you can love something down to the misquote. The slip does not have to be right to stay. It only has to be signed.

What this sheet will not tidy Link to this section

She died on 25 August 2026, at eighty. She had written in 1994 that there was plenty of life and love left in her and that she planned to enjoy every blessed second, and she got thirty-two more years of it.

The method she leaves is one sentence long and it is not a sentiment: decide the category honestly and generously, then spend the whole budget on the thing itself rather than on the apparatus that decides who gets it. That is not soft-headedness, and the arithmetic usually supports it — a test costs money to run, costs the applicant time and paperwork and dignity, and reliably turns away the people with the least capacity to fight it, who are the ones it was ostensibly built to protect.

Or, in the vocabulary of the drawer this sheet is filed in: stop determining, and let the thing grow where it came up. The plant at the top of this page has been called a weed for two hundred years by people who were wrong about it, and it never once stopped being what it was while they said so.