September
Updated: 10/6/21 at 4:03 PM
On the first day of the month, I moved various plants to the living room grow space—strawberries, kogiku squash, acerola, fig, strawberry guava, spanish jasmine, and peanut. Since then, they’ve been growing alright, though I’m worried about the low airflow, relatively low humidity (50-60%) and the lack of heat. It’s strange to see them there in the living room, under cool artificial light. It won’t be until the heat turns on in the winter that I feel good seeing them wrapped up in there. Many of these plants would thrive with highs in the 80s, and I noticed some white mildew lately, to which I responded by running a 120 mm fan. Perhaps the heat doesn’t matter, and I’m just being delusional… But the airflow certainly matters. I guess I miss the summer heat, the late sunsets, and the differential between what the leaves absorb and the shade beneath, not that I’ve ever had the opportunity to take shelter under a squash leaf.
In response to the cooler nights, I moved the Alocasia ‘Polly’ from the garden back into pots indoors. Perhaps this was unnecessary. I’m impressed by how well it grew out there, in the shade of the Colocasia—last summer, I probably sunburned it badly. The terrarium orchids are doing well. In my inattention, I failed to notice the spike on the Tolumnia—excited to see those blooms whenever they open. Phalaenopsis stuartiana, which previously had no good roots has since grown six new roots, and I can see an incipient new leaf inside the crown. The slow-growing and apparently finnicky Psychopsis is growing new roots, so I’m no longer too worried about it. None of these marks of progress lend themselves to satisfactory photographs, so I’ll hold off on that, which is otherwise a project I’m quite invested in (how do we pictorially represent growth?)
Seedling progress is slow—I feel a bit dejected about the Dendrobiums, which for the most part don’t seem to be growing very well or rapidly, at least not in terms of foliage. If I’m doing something wrong, I don’t know how I would figure out what it is without doing some serious damage to the plants, so I’m just keeping things as they are. On the upside, the new angraecoids all seem to be doing well, including the fearsomely expensive Erasanthe, whose new root nub is quite green and plump, and clearly progressively lengthening. There are, of course, various plants which are not doing well, and which I feel quite hopeless about, like the ailing Lycomormium squalidum that came with horrendous heat damage and rot on the leaves. It keeps on losing leaves, and I don’t see any signs of new root growth. I should have asked for a refund on that plant, but I guess the survival of the Lycaste locusta makes up for it.
This marks a particularly busy and drab phase of my horticultural endeavors. The fruits of ignorance and inattention are those “sudden” changes, like the appearance of new roots or a new flower spike. I’m hoping that my literary endeavors lead me back to plants accidentally and organically, as they did today or yesterday, while I read Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea. I’m afraid of it all, though. Afraid of things in the world “distracting” me from my plants, from their slow but constant growth. A blotched leaf appeared on Dendrobium senile, which turned to two—yellow, with brown spots. Nothing would lead me to believe the cultural conditions are causing this; perhaps it’s just the deciduousness of the plant that happened to coincide with some bacterial or fungal infection.
I feel I will not remember having written these words in a matter of weeks, but that this forgetting will be the condition for its appreciation. If only the most boring works were the brightest, which is really how flowering plants function for their human caretakers. My fingers float over the keys, my brain in its lack of imaginative power falls into the rhythms of consonance and rhyme, I open the yellowed pages of a book, whose material dignity grants it a nearly divine potency, it’s a work by the New Critic Yvor Winters. My eyes want to close, I’m perpetually sleepy. I copy a quote of a quote, and open up a block quote tag:
Our arts, certainly our poems, should fill us with pride because they furnish our perfect experiences. But they fill us also with mortification because they are not actual experiences. If we regard them in a certain mood, say when the heat of action is upon us, they look like the exercises of children, showing what might have been. Participating in the show which is poetry, we expel the taint of original sin and restore to our minds freedom and integrity. Very good. But we are forced to note presently, when we go out of the theater, that it was only make-believe, and as we go down the same street by which we came, that we are again the heirs of history, and fallen men.
(John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body, p. 249, qtd. in Yvor Winters' The Anatomy of Nonsense, p. 224.)
There’s something scintillating and blithe about the word “child” whenever it appears on the page, I’m inclined not to feel so pessimistic about poetry being “only make-believe.” The discussion continues with another damning pronouncement:
And poetry, according to Ransom's theories, is precisely contemptible. Aside from the doctrine of imitation, which is so confused that it will not stand criticism even within the terminology of Ransom's own thought, Ransom offers no principle of rightness in poetry. Poetry is an obscure form of self-indulgence, a search for excitement by ways that Ransom cannot define, in which we proceed from a limited and unsatisfactory rational understanding of our subject to as complete a confusion as we are able to achieve; it is a technique, not of completing rational understanding, but of destroying it and getting nothing in return. The poem is composed of rational understanding, which is there because we cannot quite get rid of it, but of as little as possible; of a conglomeration of irrelevancies of meaning; and of what Eliot would call, I suppose, an autotelic meter, which goes on its secret way, accumulating irrelevancies of its own and helping to force additional irrelevancies into meaning.(p. 225)
Accumulating irrelevancies of its own and helping to force additional irrelevancies into meaning. I love this sentence, it feels like a decisive step taken forward, not back. “Accumulation,” in my mind, aphetically transforms into “mulation,” which with a subtle graphemic alteration becomes “mutation,” that crucial mechanism behind all those seemingly superfluous reproductive designs, so attractive to insects and humans, in the family Orchidaceae. Another quote, this time from a famous poem (in translation):
Alas, what am I? what was I? The end crowns the life, the evening the day. For that cruel one of whom I speak, seeing that as yet no blow of his arrows had gone beyond my garment, took as his patroness a powerful Lady, against whom wit or force or asking pardon has helped or helps me little: those two transformed me into what I am, making me of a living man a green laurel that loses no leaf for all the cold season.(Petrarch, Canzone 23, trans. Robert M. Durling)
And it continues… with various transformations (stone, swan, deer, …). But I find this passage to be a poem in itself; the transformation into the laurel is the transformation towards which Petrarch is faithful. I’m reminded of the glabrous leaves of phalaenopsis, or of the foliage of citrus trees, above all Citrus australasica, pushing out copious new leaves, reddish and glazed with a cuticle so thick that the entire leaf appears translucent.
Pictures are easy to pass over quickly, though some are sticky to the mind. Montaigne complains about his poor memory in the Essais, and seems rather pleased that this fault enables him to say—“Books and places which I look at again always welcome me with a fresh new smile.”
September 19
Happy to report various plant growth updates: Coleogyne usitana, which I’ve had for two years, is putting out a flower spike. I suspected that its strange new leaf would contain a flower, but couldn’t be sure until the bud emerged this week. The Tolumnia spike is also developing into visible buds, and the leaf on Papilionanthe vandarum is progressively lengthening, and I’ve noticed that the root tips are turning a bluish green, a wondrous turquoise, as they grow. I’ve also got a new growth on Bulbophyllum medusae. I unfortunately noticed a desiccated, aborted bud on Bulbophyllum burfordiense, but at least I know now that it has attained flowering size (and I may expect another attempt from the plant soon). Some of the plants I was most worried about, Angraecum rutenbergianum and Dendrobium subuliferum are making a steady recovery. There are no fatalities or signs of decline with respect to my new Ecuagenera acquisitions, with the exception of Masdevallia sanctae-inesae, which I continue to be worried about. The recovery of Lycaste locusta is moving along smoothly; I will pot it up soon. The Phragmipedium flower tresses have fully unfurled; check its post for pictures.
October 2
