peardg, photographer

This is what our “winter” Olympic weather is like. Cherry blossoms. In February. Gads, the implications.

Work hours have been long of late. I get to work in the dark and leave in the dark and even though the days are beginning to get – by minute degrees – longer, I have not been outside enough to see it.

But then I have my lunch break.  So today I went out to drink my coffee and eat my banana and sat in the only dry area outside my building. And for the first time this year, I smelt the first rush of budding winter honeysuckle. The fact that the air smells of flowers in January was not what brought me to the coast, but it is certainly a large part of what keeps me here.

After work, it was dark and raining. Not terribly hard, but for long enough that the city was soaked and the roads had patches of standing puddle. I had come by car that day (long, boring story) and so had to drive home. Getting out of downtown after work is a bit of a tense dance but once out and moving in the traffic along the edges of the core, one can often go at least two blocks before getting stopped by another light. The final stretch home for me is a long road that runs between older homes set well back from the road and with gardens aggressively healthy. What struck me in those final slow but steady miles was the interplay between the water, the lights and the smells.

I drive with my window open in all weather bar outright hurricanes. Driving along the last straight toward home, the air warm enough to swirl the mix of cedar, winter bloom and the occasional wood fire from someone’s woodstove through my car, the lights from the streetlamps, the homes, the businesses, sparked along the thin sheer of standing water, and broke open in sprays of colour when car tires plundered the still of flat water. Driving was like moving along a gently undulating fold of black satin. It was impossible to discern the lane markings; driving was more a matter of trusting the tail lights of the person in front of you, which surprisingly, was comforting. By the time I got home it was if work had never been.

The title poem from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest has a stanza (the middle of three) that goes

Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this
road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.

I know what he means by “Blue, this blue.” I understand that “blue” the word, and that colour, they both hold the same things, this set of experiences, these feelings. The memories float under the word and when it is used; there they are, pushing up against awareness, skewing perception a little to the left, a little right.

Rudbeckia hirta

The Rudbeckia, for me, is like this. In its Fall form there is a bag it carries, full of memory and feeling that transfer — onto a poem, an essay by Searles, my sense that the moon pulls at me, sliding as it does, invisible across the day-sky.

Bits from that Rudbeckia bag spill out at the oddest moments. Sometimes I can figure it out, but others? No. But I trust it, this ability to transfer meaning acquired one way, and then transfered to some other entity, by some other process, to be used some other way. The thing I would love to know…how are we able to do this?

Which is, of course, is how I come to be reading Searle and Lakeoff and Johnson.

By the way, the moon has set and the leeks are soaking in the sink.

I’ve been gardening interspersed with reading Searle’s “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” poems randomly selected from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest and Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh. All the while I have been deeply conscious of the fact that the moon has been crossing the day-sky unseen.

The moon rose sometime around midnight (it is at last quarter) and is, as I sit here writing, close to setting. It will set before dark, and since I have been poorly this weekend, it was daylight before I woke and so, for this day, although I can feel the tidal pull of the moon on my awareness, I have not seen it for at least two days now.

I feel better today, having slept the lion’s share of two days and when I went out this morning for tea, the garden presented itself as a “must do.”  Some plants are still strong, even though the nights have been a bit frosty, but others have long since died back. The tomatoes, cilantro, the lupins, the sweetgrass and the poppies have become dried letters from summer.  When I pulled the dead tomatoe branches today, there was a faint smell left, and I even found one small orange tomatoe left clinging to a wizened branch. The poppies dried to leave architecturally beautiful seed pods on elegant stems.  I have saved those and put them dry into a ceramic pot outside my door. On dark moon next I’ll cut back the lupin pods and place them there along with the poppies.

The moon will be in Cancer at the moment, sinking to the horizon, just north of west. That’s how it feels, that the moon in Cancer is sinking to the west, but of course what is really happening is that I, on a spinning earth, am backing away as I stand and look to where I know the moon to be – that as I spin backwards, the edge of the earth is rising up and hiding constellation after constellation, until finally, it will hide a moon already hidden.

What has that to do with Searle and poetry? More on that after I go pull the remaining leeks.

My first thesis was written about this plant. It was a terrible thesis but I had a few good ideas and the research did teach me a lot about how people and their actions are organized almost entirely without awareness around their received beliefs.

The plant itself is rather beautiful in flower, although in the wild I haven’t seen its blossoms. It grows primarily by rhizome. This plant came with me to the west coast in a pot. It doesn’t grow naturally here, but if you go up toward the arctic you can find a different type – Hierochloë alpina. This one is Hierochloë odorata.

I use the plant as a ‘membrance from home. It grows like crazy in the plains and I have spent many wonderful months wandering around looking for it, watching people gather it, listening to people tell stories about it, reading about other cultures’ use of it. I also use it as an incense. Given my history with it, and its wonderful smell (one generic name for it is “vanilla grass”, another “holy grass,” and of course the one from North America is “sweetgrass”), I find it most efficacious in augmenting a calm, peaceful, receptive state.

But the blossoms…the are so delicate, very small, and rather like little white tongues tasting the world.

The picture, by the way, was taken last spring by peardg.

Lovely isn’t it.

Sometimes there is a book that is so exactly matched to one’s contours that reading it is a bodily experience. It’s ideas, phrases, arrangements of revelations, so much like ourselves that, like sucrose at the attachment of sucrase, we cannot help but be metabolized.

For me one of those books is The Botany of Desire. In honor of the upcoming harvest festival, I have just reread the essay in that book called “Desire:Sweetness Plant:The Apple.”
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OK so someone tells me that part 1 of this post contradicts the post called “Talk to plants and proud of it; some of them even answer back.” Here’s my analysis:
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In the opening sections of The Secret Life of Plants the authors speak of Raoul Francé. Writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, Francé says that plants can move, can reach for things they want. At the time this is news, and stunning in its implications. But what are they, those implications?

Tompkins and Bird:

Plants, says Francé are capable of intent: they can stretch toward, or seek out, what they want in ways as mysterious as the most fantastic creations of romance.

Earlier in the passage the authors have cited the ability of a tendril plant to move toward a support, and change course if that support is moved. That kind of observation leads to the idea that plants have intent. I understand the leap; if it were a human being faced with such a need, our movements almost certainly would be accompanied by the intent to seek what we need to grow. I get sleepy at work, my hand reaches for the tea cup and along with it goes the experience of intending to stay awake. It’s natural for us to assume the universe does things the same way we do, but one of the possibilities that come with having the capacity to reason (or the intent to reason) is its use in questioning such assumptions.
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