Althouse: And in the mind of the plant...

June 23, 2007

And in the mind of the plant...

... there is no good will toward you.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...: Identification can be tricky, but this appears to be a fancy parasol she found at a River Oaks boutique.; 6/23/07, 2:19 PM
rhhardin said...: Bataille: ``At least at first glance, and in general : in fact, most flowers are badly developed and are barely distinguishable fom foliage; some of them are even unpleasant, if not hideous. Moreover, even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centers by hairy sexual organs. Thus the interior of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty ; if one tears off all the corolla's petals, all that remains is a rather sordid tuft...''

``The Language of Flowers''; 6/23/07, 7:54 PM
Eli Blake said...: Ah yes,...

One of mankind's most deeply hidden nightmares.

But there nonetheless, as it comes back again and again, from generation to generation, in the terrified screams of a child, in the sweat-stained palms of an adult who has to move among the weeds at night, to a Hollywood producer who conjures up an image that has been conjured so many times before, to the child now an adult dreamer, who wakes up feeling so uneasy and not so sure why.

To be attacked, not by an animal--

For even the most viscious animal is something within the realm of experience, a soul which we can at least understand even if it is in fear, an eye we can gaze into and feel the presence of a creature which can know, and feel and comprehend even as we breathe our last...

But by something truly alien.

We know they can move, we've all seen sunflowers and four o'clocks and understood how runners can run under the ground and pop up far away and yet still be one...

Which leads us to hugeness. Not the hugeness of a beast, such as an elephant or a lion or a bull that we might fear,

But a mindnumbing definition of hugeness. The two hundred foot stalk of bamboo, the enormous leaves of jungle banana trees, the vine that emanates from a single root and grows to cover acres and acres, the weed with a plentious supply of water that grows to monolithic size.... we've all seen these.

We know they eat meat. Only insects, such as the Venus flytrap and the Pitcher plant. Or is it always only insects....

Would come as a giant pod, or would it be thousands of streamers? Or both? Would it strike right away, or plant spores which would grow.... Would it be as benign as Jack's beanstalk, or would it be?....

An alien malevolence. A presence, but an incomprensible one. Muscles, but not-- and so not within our ability to judge. So clearly alive, with the veins and the hair and the flow of sap in the veins, yet so clearly not like us.

Had evolution worked just a bit differently....; 6/23/07, 9:53 PM
Paco Wové said...: "a mindnumbing definition of hugeness."

E.g.:
What's the world's largest clone?
It's not a sheep, but an aspen tree...and it's a natural clone, not a human-engineered one. Nicknamed 'Pando' (Latin for 'I spread'), this 'stand' of 47,000 aspens in Utah is actually a single tree. It weighs six million kilograms (13 million pounds) — making it not only the world's largest clone, but also the world's largest living thing...; 6/24/07, 8:41 AM