Corpus torrentis in locum signat.
The body in the river marks the spot. For some reason I worked up this phrase in a febrile hour of tossing and turning in the middle of the night. I then spent the next hour - or perhaps just several intense minutes, who knows - spinning this idea out to larger Baroque ideas about the nature and scale of reality. Briefly, according to Kwa Chunglin, one can contrast two ways of engaging the world: Romantic, in which one sees a large and inclusive system that extends above and beyond the viewer, and the Baroque, one that contains worlds within worlds that repeat endlessly downward and inward. Romantics use telescopes; Baroques use microscopes.
And so we have a body (of a person) floating in a body (of water). It is a Baroque image to be sure. One could extend the perspective to see bodies within the personal body: colonies of bacteria, for example, and even viruses that inhabit the bodies of the bacterial bodies. Complicating the scene is the fact that the body is floating, and presumably moving because the river itself is moving. So what we have is a body that marks a place, always the same place, that which is informed by the body, but also different places, because the body is always moving. So the river itself is a body within a body: call it the land, the earth or what have you.
What does this have to do with plants? Well, as I have remarked before, I find the sessile nature of plants to be among the most characteristic and charming of their features. Corpus terrenus in locum signat. (Let me confess at this point that my Latin is at best shaky. A genuine Latin scholar would surely do better). The body in the earth marks the spot. No form of life is more rooted in the earth than plants. Are they then the first and ultimate makers of place (in general) and places (in specific)? No, I would give the pride of place to the earth and elements of it (stones, et cetera) and then plants, which means that humus plays a special role, being the decayed remnants of defunct plants that add their own uniquely organic component to soil, that most special kind of earth.
All of this leads me back to the notion that plants are the great translators of the universe, mediating between Earth and its denizens on the one side and the Sun on the other.
The body in the river marks the spot. For some reason I worked up this phrase in a febrile hour of tossing and turning in the middle of the night. I then spent the next hour - or perhaps just several intense minutes, who knows - spinning this idea out to larger Baroque ideas about the nature and scale of reality. Briefly, according to Kwa Chunglin, one can contrast two ways of engaging the world: Romantic, in which one sees a large and inclusive system that extends above and beyond the viewer, and the Baroque, one that contains worlds within worlds that repeat endlessly downward and inward. Romantics use telescopes; Baroques use microscopes.
And so we have a body (of a person) floating in a body (of water). It is a Baroque image to be sure. One could extend the perspective to see bodies within the personal body: colonies of bacteria, for example, and even viruses that inhabit the bodies of the bacterial bodies. Complicating the scene is the fact that the body is floating, and presumably moving because the river itself is moving. So what we have is a body that marks a place, always the same place, that which is informed by the body, but also different places, because the body is always moving. So the river itself is a body within a body: call it the land, the earth or what have you.
What does this have to do with plants? Well, as I have remarked before, I find the sessile nature of plants to be among the most characteristic and charming of their features. Corpus terrenus in locum signat. (Let me confess at this point that my Latin is at best shaky. A genuine Latin scholar would surely do better). The body in the earth marks the spot. No form of life is more rooted in the earth than plants. Are they then the first and ultimate makers of place (in general) and places (in specific)? No, I would give the pride of place to the earth and elements of it (stones, et cetera) and then plants, which means that humus plays a special role, being the decayed remnants of defunct plants that add their own uniquely organic component to soil, that most special kind of earth.
All of this leads me back to the notion that plants are the great translators of the universe, mediating between Earth and its denizens on the one side and the Sun on the other.
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