Have you ever noticed that plants do indeed speak? They have discourse. This endive you see in the image I’ve added to the post… Well, it established a language for itself by the haphazard shape of its roots, its tubers force themselves through the earth while expanding there or thither: at the same time earth was also consenting, the earth allowed it to grow through.
This is a statement. An utterance, énoncé as they say in French.
It (the unassuming plant!) narrates something with the serrated leaves growing towards a particular angle or other, generations upon generations of endives shaping themselves slowly by evolution: all the same, yet slightly different in each consecutive iteration. Every endive in the world and all other plants (and by extension the bodies of the beasts and those of the civilized beasts) add something -maybe one, maybe two mute and humble words- to amount into a grand interconnected murmur meandering around the boundless web of becoming.
Roots intermingling under humid soil and fronds racing for sunlight over the canopy
Many musical patterns are put into action in the statement that is the rooting and blossoming of a seed
Here, even the soil has…
a history.
All this came to me after a busy morning. Went to the forest. You could say I was extraordinarily inspired. Couldn’t keep myself from thinking about how this limey piece of earth here has artemisia growing over it and how that lone Pinus sylvestris (our beloved Anatolian pine) seemed to love his spot so much. Remember, there are always loci like those that I just told you. Unlike our ugly, unrecognizable blobs of concrete that are the modern cities without an identity. Right? The sense of belonging, deep rooted earth, becoming-there… Enough, enough, I’ll just quote Deleuze from his Mille Plateaux:
« Furthermore, if we consider the plane of consistency we note that the most disparate of things and signs move upon it: a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message, a crystallization produces a passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter … There is no “like” here … These are electrons in person, veritable black holes, actual organites, authentic sign sequences. It’s just that they have been uprooted from their strata, destratified, decoded, deterritorialized, and this is what makes their proximity and interpenetration in the plane of consistency possible. A silent dance. »