“I am a writer, and a writer is deeply conflicted…and it is in his work that he reconciles these deep conflicts. …it does not set the world in order … it doesn’t, it doesn’t change anything… It just is a kind of harbor.” Leonard Cohen quote, after leaving a Zen Buddhist mountain retreat in California.
Skunk cabbage in on my mind because it carries inside three or more generations of future growth, attached. So, it carries its own past and future ancestry. Every time I look at one my photographs of the plant I find new movement… I am surprised at how the surface changes… and sometimes creatures emerge from underneath the heated waters…
So, I am rereading with renewed interest the wonderful writings of Craig Holdrege, this time about skunk cabbage, a forest marsh plant that is in bloom right now, here in Maryland.
https://www.natureinstitute.org/article/craig-holdrege/skunk-cabbage
Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus)
“….The bright green leaves unfold in a beautiful spiraling pattern. Each leaf is rolled in upon itself and at the same time enwraps the next leaf. It’s the closest thing to an archetypal process of unfolding you can imagine.”
and further down he states…
“Most plants in any given population are well-established, with numerous years of development behind them. But they also prepare for the future. In the summer I dissected a skunk cabbage, peeling away leaf after leaf from the base of the stalk. What I found astounded me, even though, having done some reading before, I was somewhat prepared for it. At the base of one of the middle leaves there was the bud of a spathe that will grow out in the following spring. It was about 2 cm long and already deep wine-red in color. A few leaves further inward another spathe bud was visible — smaller and still white. This spathe would emerge in the spring after next. Another, even smaller spathe follows after a few more leaves; it would emerge two and a half years later! When I cut the rootstock lengthwise, I could see several more tiny spathe buds (the size of the tip of a ball-point pen) at the base of the shoot. Spathes are being prepared years ahead.”
More photos of skunk cabbage on my Flickr site.
The circular context here comes from another book that currently fascinates me – Metamorphoses, by Italian philosopher, Emanuele Coccia. In this book he tries to make the case that we are in metamorphosis, in flux and change, all of us, not just humans. Compost at its most beautiful!
“Every time we voice, for example, the famous Cartesian saying cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, for a moment we allow the spirit of Descartes to be reincarnated in us, we lend him our voice, our body, our experience. It is he who says ‘I’ in us, in a sense thereby contradicting his own argument: the self is not a substance, it does not have a personal structure, it is more like a musical theme that ceaselessly invades minds and colonizes bodies without ever allowing itself to be definitively adopted by any one body rather than another. Every idea is an itinerant self, just like Leopold’s atoms. Every self is a carrier of the spirit of others: of their ideas, their life force, their past. It is only thanks to this capacity for psychic transmigration– or, to use the old technical theological term, metempsychosis– that something like a community is possible.”p.104
He mentions that word quite a few times… me·tem·psy·cho·sis /ˌmedəmˌsīˈkōsəs,məˌtemsəˈkōsəs/noun: metempsychosis; plural noun: metempsychoses
the supposed transmigration at death of the soul of a human being or animal into a new body of the same or a different species.
Coccia does not stop there, though. At the end of the book he states:
“…We must not respect the Earth for its fragility. We must experience it differently, because the planet is our future flesh. The flesh of tomorrow, of the day after tomorrow and of a thousand million years to come.
The fact that the Earth is our future means that the future never comes from outside. On the contrary, if there is a future it is only because there is no exteriority, because everything is already inside. Inside this planet. Everything on its surface. The future is the skin of the planet, which is undergoing continual transformation: it is the cocoon of its metamorphosis.” p.179
This book will feed me for years to come… challenging my best intentions, fundamental liberal concepts that I have been guarding with zeal, in the preservation of my badge of difference. Maybe allowing freer range for the embroideries of the imaginaries, with analogies becoming precious discoveries of more kinship?
Beautifully perceived and beautifully communicated! The photographs are lovely as well.
this is lovely!!!!