As I was watering my dymondia yesterday, it occurred to me how little my engagement with them is enhanced by their name. While I like the word dymondia, and especially the full name of the plant, dymondia margaretae, it is not really present in my mind as I look at them, water them and weed around them. It is this refusal to become enrolled in human culture, at least in some respects, that lies at the heart of plant charm. A plant will not come when you call its name. It will never be your pet.
Yes, we pot plants, and perhaps even name them, although I think the practice is rare, but they are never fully domesticated. Ontologically, they are just too strange to become complacent participants in our pathetic dramas. It is their cool distance, their seeming indifference, that makes them so appealing.
Yi Fu Tuan observed how humans make pets even out of inanimate entities; water, for instance, by training it to leap in a fountain. And Michael Pollan gave us the remarkable image of plants as, not pets exactly, but as exploiters, seducing us to do their bidding in the evolutionary game of reproduction, by intoxicating us or nurturing us in exchange for aiding their proliferation and distribution.
Those arguments not withstanding, I suppose my thesis here connects to my thinking about the poverty of ideation. When I look at a poppy, my experience is far richer if I forget, momentarily, that in English the name of that flower is 'poppy'. It is this pre- or ex-lingual state of relations that I value because it renders the engagement with a thing, any thing, much more complex and whole than it would otherwise be as mediated through language. Words, as the saying goes, just get in the way.
This post has been difficult to write. Usually I just tap them out and then go back a day or two later to clean up the typos, misspellings and grammatical errors. I see this as a hopeful sign because it signals to me that I am writing from wordless experience, and so I struggle to find the words that fit. Far too often I am far too glib, with one word creating another, immersed as I am in a wordy world.
But what I am finding is that the wordless world is much more appealing, and that I must develop this ability to represent the world, without using words. But that too might have its own traps.
Yes, we pot plants, and perhaps even name them, although I think the practice is rare, but they are never fully domesticated. Ontologically, they are just too strange to become complacent participants in our pathetic dramas. It is their cool distance, their seeming indifference, that makes them so appealing.
Yi Fu Tuan observed how humans make pets even out of inanimate entities; water, for instance, by training it to leap in a fountain. And Michael Pollan gave us the remarkable image of plants as, not pets exactly, but as exploiters, seducing us to do their bidding in the evolutionary game of reproduction, by intoxicating us or nurturing us in exchange for aiding their proliferation and distribution.
Those arguments not withstanding, I suppose my thesis here connects to my thinking about the poverty of ideation. When I look at a poppy, my experience is far richer if I forget, momentarily, that in English the name of that flower is 'poppy'. It is this pre- or ex-lingual state of relations that I value because it renders the engagement with a thing, any thing, much more complex and whole than it would otherwise be as mediated through language. Words, as the saying goes, just get in the way.
This post has been difficult to write. Usually I just tap them out and then go back a day or two later to clean up the typos, misspellings and grammatical errors. I see this as a hopeful sign because it signals to me that I am writing from wordless experience, and so I struggle to find the words that fit. Far too often I am far too glib, with one word creating another, immersed as I am in a wordy world.
But what I am finding is that the wordless world is much more appealing, and that I must develop this ability to represent the world, without using words. But that too might have its own traps.
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