Intermission

School started two days ago. I’ve been less engaged with my plants. I’m curious if approaching orchids with amorous intent creates the equivalent of misogyny between species by projecting onto the face of the plant the face of a woman, third in the middle who stands for progeny, which makes single the multiple and which condenses the waste of man into the waist of a woman. I read The Botany of Desire, disapprovingly, because it strives to see the world from the plant’s point of view but seems to have forgotten its premise by Chapter 1. Humans conveniently forget what is difficult—that much is understandable, I guess. Yet I choose wrath over pity. The odd connection between orchids and misogyny isn’t so odd, but it’s concretely growing out of my class on Early Modern poetry and the depictions of women and romantic love therein. “Female Complaints,” it’s called. Turns out there’s a long history of women being transformed into plants, or of plants being thought of as feminine.

Women can, of course, be educated, but their minds are not adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy, or certain of the arts. Women may have happy inspirations, taste, elegance, but they have not the ideal. The difference between man and woman is the same as between animal and plant. The animal corresponds more closely to the character of the man, the plant to that of the woman. In woman there is a more peaceful unfolding of nature, a process, whose principle is the less clearly determined unity of feeling. If woman were to control the government, the state would be in danger, for they do not act according to the dictates of universality, but are in influenced by accidental inclinations and opinions. The education of woman goes on one only knows how, in the atmosphere of picture thinking, as it were, more through life than through the acquisition of knowledge. Man attains his position only through stress of thought and much specialized effort. [Source]

This passage from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right apparently reports the beliefs of his students. To me it reeks of envy, not malevolence. How great it would be to learn “in the atmosphere of picture thinking,” i.e., via some kind of mysterious, osmotic process! Knowing via “stress of thought” and “specialized effort” seems so dull in comparison. Yet I’d more reasonably state that both forms of learning are innate to all humans. With the start of classes, I’m wondering if I lack some of that masculine vigor. I don’t dream of glory anymore. I’m not in search of a promised land that will liberate me from the past constraints of gender and occupational obligations—playing the cello, doing mathematics, being female. There aren’t any lacks driving desire; perhaps I miss certain people in my life, and find myself inadequate in certain respects, but my living space—my prized domesticity—is nearly Edenic, an unfortunate condition which seems to follow me wherever I go. Unfortunate, yes, because a sense of living in immortality breeds fickleness, derangement. I had left California to escape that feeling of plenitude, the plenitude that would erupt into mania. I know now that it isn’t enough to simply be with plants and to admire them. A plant can be just as inchoate and malformed as a young person:

Who is younger than I?
The contemptible twig?
that I was? stale in mind
whom the dirt
recently gave up? Weak
to the wind.
Gracile? Taking up no place,
too narrow to be engraved
with the maps

of a world it never knew,
the green and
dovegrey countries of
the mind.

A mere stick that has
twenty leaves
against my convolutions.
What shall it become,

Snot nose, that I have
not been?
I enclose it and
persist, go on.

Let it rot, at my center.
Whose center?
I stand and surpass
youth's leanness.

My surface is myself.
Under which
to witness, youth is
buried. Roots?

Everybody has roots.

(William Carlos Williams,
Paterson, pp. 30-31.)

I think of the browning leaf tips of my seedling orchids—perhaps I shouldn’t worry, perhaps it’s just part of a simple acceleration in the turnover rate of growing surfaces, as one would expect from the image of a child who outgrows her shoes or whom sheds hair or skin cells rapdily. Do children shed their cells more quickly than adults? Who knows. But we do know that children experience “synaptic pruning,” in which the brain gets rid of “extra synapses”—this process ends somewhere in a person’s mid-twenties. I don’t know what to say about this other than that pruning is one of the most satisfying activities a plant-grower can experience; pruning roots, pruning branches—all a chance to participate in the grand future of a plant.