Let’s take a walk in the park.
I began my last series of work with this phrase as my guide. Appropriating the name from a set of choreography a collaborator and friend of mine, Nikima Jagudajev, uses in multiple dance-based works, and has taught me. It involves choreographed, pedestrian-like movements that are meant to be performed in pairs, where you can begin with a partner and continue with another if they meet you at certain set moments. Within its structure and title this series of movements opens itself to the potential to mutate—in the way it can loop, change, and shift depending on when and where, and with whom, it is performed. In this sense, the title and content run parallel in my mind, and they fit within this idea of the activity of the park.
The park is a container for activity, not just human but any kind performed by its inhabitants that is permitted within the confines of its manicured and maintained architecture. For me, the park became a habitat and method to understand how to tie in the many different mediums and interests I have been exploring, in order to associate a repertoire of poetry, video, sound and performance together without a narrative thread. Instead, these different media could form their own paths and sections of a fictional park, and the process of reception became a walk through it. In reflection, the park can be something both more and less than this. It is another point in my thinking, a point that follows my obsession first with trash, then ingrown hairs and one that now leads to my current fascination with metamorphosis and plants.
I’m currently writing a text, a verse–based narrative, written in the second person, that brings a “you” to a semi-fictional park, which itself begins to simultaneously grow and decay when confronted with both a collapse and cohabitation between the real and the virtual. My immediate references are Dante’s journeys in The Divine Comedy, Ovid’s descriptions of metamorphosis, and Leslie Scalapino’s journey through a city in New Time, to name a few. However, these two former references have been more like paths through this park than actual means to disrupt, or ways to break from the stunted solutions they suggest, specifically regarding the metamorphosis of human bodies to plant bodies. Recently, like lightning striking midway through my journey in the park, the term vegetality struck me. Vegetal being, as defined by philosopher Michael Marder, has helped me to understand metamorphosis more critically, peeling back its fantasy and spectacle as a pseudo-salvation from humanity’s evils, and instead to understand it as an encasing and materialization of trauma, a prison of self without the means or ability to change or escape this now fixed state. (1)
Before metamorphosis, let me first discuss Marder’s discussion of the etymological journey of the word garden from a recent conversation about his most recent book Green Mass: The Ecological Theology of St. Hildegard of Bingen. In this conversation he brings up St. Hildegard von Bingen’s use of the terms viriditas, which he defines as, “the green in green or the green that greens, refers to the self-refreshing power of creation”, and ariditas, which describes drying or as Marder puts it “ariditas is a deadly force drying up life itself.” And further traces the garden back to it’s etymological roots, pointing to an interesting slip of the way it has developed since its original latin. Marder says:
“In a sleight of hand the word itself has changed its semantic form, by switching from an adjective which it was in the vulgar latin expression gardinus hortus (enclosed garden) to a noun. So gardinus, enclosed, became garden instead of hortus, so the latin hortus was dropped and gardinus, which was the adjective meaning enclosed, was kept as the description of what we call garden in English.” (2)
In this sleight of hand, I begin to understand better how I projected onto the spectacle of the metamorphosis of Daphne in Ovid, or the dark woods of the suiciders in Dante’s Inferno. Just as the park is almost violently controlled and affected by its surrounding borders, these metamorphosized people are now confined, their consciousness within a wooded prison. The park can never be wild again, instead, it can overgrow or overcome its usually urban architecture and surroundings, but it can never in this sense reclaim its wildness. Park etymologizes back to enclosure or pen, indicating an intention or inherent quality of domestication. In this sense, the sleight of hand that removed hortus from gardinus, also removes wildness from the park. A park is a playpen built within city streets to inhabit and maintain a monitored wilderness as an enclosure for its human population to rest or play. However, the park, like the garden, denies itself as a habitat. Just as the garden refuses other forms of life, with the use of insecticides and other pollutants meant to keep the garden “healthy,” the park is also constructed to reject and remove any unwanted visitors.
Can we then see these classical depictions of metamorphosis as not salvation for, but salvation against trauma? In fact, these victims of extreme trauma are not encased and then transform into plants as a means to escape, but instead, they undergo metamorphosis because they are no longer able to fit within the architecture of a hegemony where they cannot exist. Cupid’s arrow strikes Apollo, and because they are gods and powerful, their actions bear no consequence. Instead, as Apollo chases Daphne all around ancient Greece and as she, exhausted, calls out to her father for assistance–it is at this moment that she can no longer bear existence. She can simply not bear to be a part of a reality where she has no agency, and where her agency and subjectivity have been stripped. She states, “Change and destroy the body which has given/ Too much delight!” (3) Daphne’s “she” is shed, that which defines her humanity, her gender, her sexual desirability metamorphosizes to that which can be managed––a garden, or a park. She transforms not for her salvation, but to cement the shedding of her human body to become only gardinus; form without content. Even more so this newly transformed laurel tree, as well as the dark wood in Canto XIII of Dante’s Inferno, become emblematic of ariditas “…imprisons things, placing them in a straight jacket of their identity. In advance, it transforms every living body into a corpse, and I might add an involved corpse at that, not allowed to even decompose.” (4) Daphne and Dante’s suicides become exactly this–fixed, stuck and unable to decompose, and the denial of this disallows them from escaping themselves and furthermore removes them from society in general. Being denied death or decomposition disallows these new plants the desire or need to reproduce. If we look at death and decomposition as parts of a plants’ life cycle and necessary in the continuation of life, then without this need or ability, there is also no need to reproduce. Daphne can never be unstuck from its moment.
I realize now that the park I was constructing derives from a similar architecture. My previous work constructed a park where, within its confines, my consciousness, memories, and archive had an area it could play. Although a park, like a garden, constructs itself on difference—from inside to outside, by species, climate, etc., in my mind, with this park I envisioned a return to nature, and further an attempt to engage with what I imagined was a greening of me. Yet both semantically and architecturally, I was still working within constricted movements that came out of the binaries I myself was trying to unfix. Just as a park is constructed from materials we, as humans, both design and insert, this walkthrough my park I was so devoted to, was simply a tour through my context, my “I.” However much I would like to now move on from the park with its paths and partitions, I must also recognize that it was essential to map this landscape, this terrain that I now refer to as context. And it is paramount I remember that my growing desire for vegetality within my practice and thinking is not an ontological one, but instead focuses on epistemology and humility to not offer or suggest a solution, but instead a deviation from our desire for finitude. For without understanding the limits of it, I am not certain I would understand now my need to be unstuck, and find myself back in the middle.
I realize now that I’ve made a mistake––that I briefly mentioned vegetal being or vegetal thinking, but have not yet supplied a definition. Vegetal being differs from planthood, whereas planthood is the formal identification of a being as a plant, its form and biology––vegetal being is something that is shared across all life. Marder defines vegetal being as “that which is mutable, constantly generating itself, regenerating, decaying, and so forth.” (5) In relation to Daphne and the suicides in the Inferno, we can focus on Marder’s use of the word itself. Vegetal being is not that which is dictated, but that which has some form of agency over its life cycle. Without the agency to metamorphosize into or out of a tree, to adapt, decay and change––both these classical examples of metamorphosis demonstrate the erasure, or dying out, of one’s vegetality, one’s agency. Can we ask ourselves what if Daphne had metamorphosized herself? What if she had the agency to change and not be deemed too wild for the garden, or hegemony, that the gods maintained? What if the dark woods of the suiciders could mutate and decay, grow fruit and germinate anew––what if they were allowed to process their own erasure of self, their removal from society through something that was not eternal damnation and the fixedness of absolute ariditas, but instead something mixed, intentional and open to metamorphosizing itself and its parts?
I ask the above questions somewhat selfishly, as these two stories have been, like I said previously, paths for me to navigate my own context. With my own trauma, somewhat parallel experiences to these classical examples, my research focuses on how one can deal with it all, especially from a trauma that beckons one like a moth to suicide. I am lucky, now, to be able to intellectualize and critique past feelings of ostracism, or desires for nonexistence, but it still isn’t always easy. However, plants and more so vegetal thinking give me some hope, not that hope is exactly what I am looking for.
What I can keep going back to is writing and specifically poetry, for that was the tool I was given as a young kid by my therapist. Starting therapy with Judi, a woman in her early sixties who would sit with me, a twelve-year-old, to meditate and read classical western and eastern texts together, was a saving grace. She noticed my interest in poetry and would have me copy classical forms as my way of journaling. And from this beginning, I began writing poetry as a tool to understand, or at least attempt to understand, all the confusion I felt, and to some extent still feel. Reflecting on this, I understand my fascination and frustrations with language, in general, a bit better. I did not stop writing poetry after I stopped therapy at seventeen but instead was able to then explore its possibilities and study its potential. It has been a constant in my life since I was able to begin understanding myself as a subject and not simply an extension of my parents and the context I was born into. So in this sense, I see this tool that Judi taught me as something akin to metamorphosis. One that I have played within the garden, without necessarily the recognition that it brings with it so many possibilities to constantly metamorphosize and access new terrains.
It goes without saying that in the past ten years there has been an urge to see alternatives to our anthropocentric view. A view that carries and algorimitizes deeply rooted intolerances for peoples who fall outside of the racial, sexual, neurological, and ability spectrums of normal as we see epitomized in popular culture, especially television and cinema. We have focused on the cyborg, on the occult, on monsters––models that pair with and de/reconstruct our human bodies and intelligence. However, is this simply a push towards an evolution, or a means to overcome, save ourselves and continue to grow? I think it’s time we focus on decay and the possible germinations that come from the cycle of growth and death. This is not a call to suicide, but an acknowledgment of, yes, our continual growth, but also of our concurrent decay, germination, spread and death. We are not static subjects, and there has to be a change in our thinking and thus in our writing. How can we metamorphosize constantly and fulfill Marder’s call for a vegetal being? I want to trace vegetality to its queer roots, highlighting vegetal thinking in poetry that has germinated and calls for a similar openness to the potentiality that plant thinking suggests.
When we think of rooting, we think of fixing oneself–sometimes as a method of meditation or reconnection with ourselves; however, I want to suggest that rooting in this way is both an insertion and laying of cables to network and connect between things we have separated in our domestication of vegetality as the garden. Contemporary plant science, as Marder notes, recognizes complex communicative systems that plants enact through sensory networks in both their roots and leaves. (6) Through these organs plants are able to communicate and respond simultaneously, responding to threats that even nearby plants recognize. These responses reveal the metamorphic quality of plant life, that if a plant senses drought or environmental threats they are able to dehydrate or even shed leaves as a response. Furthermore as Marder states in his book The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium when he focuses on Hegel’s observations of plant life in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, plants are even able to metamorphize these organs to become other organs, i.e. a leaf turning into a petal.
With this in mind, let us look at this function as emblematic of viriditas, and further as a possible method to unfix the “straight jackets” we can call identity. As Marder states, “viriditas ferments existence by introducing into it a certain nonidentity, a non-self coincidence that gives existence their future in the shape of an other or of others.” (7) In this fermentation, we are in the process of decay and growth simultaneously––and we are not stuck between decay and growth as classical representation of metamorphosis demonstrate, but instead we are more like closer to an infinity that loops back onto itself, negating and redefining itself in each new metamorphosis, death, decomposition and germination. Our human organs are not able to do this of course, but if we take a note from Lacan as he discusses Joyce, then we can see that our viriditas resides in our organ, namely in our language. It is in our usage of this organ, and our manipulation of it that we can connect to our vegetal being, our nonidentity, our fermentation.
We can be seduced into thinking that a push towards vegetal writing is a push towards writing about plants, or writing as plants––but I’d suggest that exactly that urge is what removed hortus from gardinus. In a collaborative text titled, Through Vegetal Being, Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder publish an epistolary of sorts that describes their perspectives on how one can push towards a vegetal being. Whereas Irigaray’s intentions are sincere to augment the conversation from the singular cis-male voice, her argument does not stand the test of time. Irigaray stresses the need for “sexuate difference,” (8) even if her intention is to open up to the other of the other as Marder states above, her insistence on this phrase undercuts who is considered an other itself. She states, “The respect for sexuate difference as a dimension of our bodily identity, which preserves us from being reduced both to a mere anonymous matter after our death and to a neutralized undifferentiated individual during our life.” (9) I do not deny the importance of what she is saying, that embracing difference is key to “community building,” (10) but I must point out that this appears to be a way to coexist within the garden, or at least abide by its pathways. After her section, which fills the first half of the text, Marder quickly responds to her focus on sexuate difference noting the hybridity and indiscernibility of plant sexuality:
“How do you propose to think about the sexuality of plants? What is the relevance to human sexuate difference? What I have in mind is the fluidity, pliability, and plasticity of vegetal sexuality, where many plants are hermaphrodites, others can change from masculine to feminine (and vice versa) in their lifetimes…” (11)
Plants are a multiplicity of growths, a singular that is made up of a multitude where each organ and each part is able to germinate, grow, die and decay both with and separate from that of the plant as a whole. Again I am not suggesting that our sexual organs undergo the same type of metamorphic process, but instead can we think of allowing our language and relations a bit more viriditas? Allowing our selves the ability to identify, pronounce and have agency over our organs as a process of being in the middle, made up of a multiplicity, in communication with our environment, and always carrying the radical potential of change.
Irigaray does make a point towards this logic when she speaks of a need to change our writing, she states: “…perhaps we ought to care about a language that not only alludes to the elements, their potential and their intervention in the generation and the maintenance of life but also, in some way, acts as them.” (12) In this I find her argument most compelling, that if we are to envision ourselves as vegetal beings if we are willing to truly accept a multiplicity both on a micro and macro level, that we must shift our language. I find this most emblematic in the seeds sown by the more radical fractures of the Language school by writers such as Leslie Scalapino or Lyn Hejinian, and of course back to Gertrude Stein. Focusing specifically on Scalapino’s essay “Pattern–and the ‘Simulacral,’” (13) we see the germinations of the more vegetal writing she pursues in her text New Time. Scalapino states:
“Culture is a transformative composite separate from individuals. The quality in the creation expression in the composition has to do with the unique entity, being in balance and moving as it ceases to be identical with itself. This has to do with what occurs now.” (14)
As with most of Scalapino’s writing, there is an insistence on a constant present, an acknowledgment of the middle and its both need and potential to constantly metamorphosize. Her text, New Time is described as a journey through a city, one where walking is writing, and writing is reading. She replaces the speaker’s I with you, she, they––constantly replacing verbs, completely mixing up the grammar to a point in the text where verbs, adjectives, and nouns have all been replaced, negated, and been redefined in her cycle of constant germination, decay, and regrowth. “the mind is action literally,/ not departing from that — being events/ or movement outside,/ which is inside,/ so the mind is collapsing into/ and as action/ — I can’t rest,/ at all now.” (15)
This brings me back to my point of departure, a walk in the park and the text, still untitled, that I’ve been working on now for over two years. Next week I will finally present my own work, for the first time since the pandemic began in 2020, as part of a collaboration with my good friend and drag sister, Lyn Diniz, or Mama Lynch. We’ve come together in our fascination with plants and the ways in which plant life has become a synecdoche for our understanding of our identity, as we both have drifted and found ourselves outside of society’s gardinus. I find plants as the perfect portal to help me siphon my understanding of identity and the potentiality for both queerness and fantasy inherent to virtuality. And as Marder has connected virtuality with vegetality, opening the acronym VR to mean both Vegetal Reality and Virtual Reality, I see my own research find threads to grasp. In our third session of “Starting with Plants” at The New Centre this past October 2021, he described virtuality as, “inexhaustible in its actualizations and implying the possibility to be otherwise (than the moment).” His language seems to run parallel with Scalapino’s discussion in her essay, and for me this collision is exactly where my text and research germinates from.
In our upcoming performance and installation, “Two Plants Are Colliding,” Lyn and I will show that we as humans have this potential to be otherwise through drag. And I must say that when I speak about drag, it is not necessarily the drag you might encounter in a nightclub or on Rupaul’s Drag Race––but something as Jack Smith would say, is flaming and raging. Through our conversations, we have begun to look at drag not only as something we are constantly maintaining and performing but also as a tool or technology. Like Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag, drag is a container for us to sift through, one that allows us to not only transform our organs but also beg others to metamorphosize theirs. We hope that through our use of drag and a writing inspired by the concepts put forward by both Scalapino and Marder’s vegetal being, that we can provide examples of vegetality that already exist and break from our insistence on binaries.
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Notes
1. Marder, July 2021, pp. 64-70.
2. Marder, September 2021.
3. Ovid, 1955, p.50.
4. Marder, September 2021.
5. Marder, July 2021, pp. 64-70.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Irigaray and Marder, 2016, p. 60.
9. Ibid, p. 78.
10. Ibid, p. 71.
11. Ibid, p. 112.
12. Ibid, p. 83.
13. Scalapino, 2013, p. 270-281.
14. Ibid.
15. Scalapino, 1999, p. 71-72.
Selected Bibliography
Dante. Inferno: Canto XIII. Trans. J. & R. Hollander, New York, 2000, pp. 191-200.
Irigaray, L. and Marder, M. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York, Columbia University Press, 2016.
Marder, M. The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York, Columbia University Press, 2014.
Marder, M. “Our Future Is Vegetal.” Robida Magazine, 7, July 2021, pp. 64-70.
Marder, M. “Between the Garden and the Dump: The Crux of Our Situation”, Aarhus University: The Garden & the Dump, September 2021. Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOhonQij2Hg>. Accessed on 28 October, 2021.
Scalapino, L. New Time. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1999, pp. 71-72.
Scalapino,L. ‘Pattern–and the ‘Simulacral’’, in L. Hejinian, and B. Watten (eds.), A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field. Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2013, pp. 270-281.
Ovid. Metamorphosis. Trans. R. Humphires. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1955, pp. 50.