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March 8 - March 9, 2021
The canonical flowers seem to me almost all female—except, that is, for the tulip, perhaps the most masculine of flowers.
Of course, like all of our (Apollonian) efforts to order and categorize nature, this one goes only so far before the (Dionysian) pull of things as they really are begins to take its inevitable toll.
Tulipomania bore all the hallmarks of a medieval carnival, in which, for a brief “orgasmic interim” (in the words of the French historian Le Roy Ladurie), the stable order of society was turned on its head. A carnival is a social ritual of sanctioned craziness and release—a way for a community to temporarily indulge its Dionysian urges.
Our eyes and ears quickly tire of any strict Apollonian order that isn’t shadowed by some hint, some threat, of trespass or waywardness.
The Greeks believed that true beauty (as opposed to mere prettiness) was the offspring of these two opposing tendencies, which they personified in Apollo and Dionysus, their two gods of art.
Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance, when our dreams of order and abandon come together.
With flowers came fruit and seeds, and these, too, remade life on Earth.
Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.
So the flowers begot us, their greatest admirers. In time human desire entered into the natural history of the flower, and the flower did what it has always done: made itself still more beautiful in the eyes of this animal, folding into its very being even the most improbable of our notions and tropes. Now came roses that resembled aroused nymphs, tulip petals in the shape of daggers, peonies bearing the scent of women. We in turn did our part, multiplying the flowers beyond reason, moving their seeds around the planet, writing books to spread their fame and ensure their happiness.
Could that be it—right there, in a flower—the meaning of life?
The forbidden plant and its temptations are older than Eden, go back further even than we do. So too the promise, or threat, that forbidden plants have always made to the creature who would taste them—the promise, that is, of knowledge and the threat of mortality.
Living things have always had to make their way in a wild garden of flowers and vines, of leaves and trees and fungi that hold out not only nourishing things to eat but deadly poisons, too.
The difficulty is that there are plants that do other, more curious things than simply sustain or extinguish life. Some heal; others rouse or calm or quiet the body’s pain. But most remarkable of all, there are plants in the garden that manufacture molecules with the power to change the subjective experience of reality we call consciousness.
Yet it turns out that it is some of the bitter, bad plants that contain the most powerful magic—that can answer our desire to alter the textures and even the contents of our consciousness.
There it is, right in the middle of the word intoxication, hidden in plain sight: toxic. The bright line between food and poison might hold, but not the one between poison and desire.
These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.
The Gothic gardens of England and Italy, for example, always made room for intimations of mortality—by including a dead tree, say, or a melancholy grotto—and the occasional frisson of horror.
Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as small-time alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power.
The swiftness of this change in the weather, the demonizing of a plant that less than twenty years ago was on the cusp of general acceptance, will surely puzzle historians of the future.
To a marijuana grower, Amsterdam in the 1990s was something like what Paris in the 1920s was to a writer: a place where alienated expatriates could go to practice their craft in peace and hook up with a community of kindred souls.
Most of the marijuana smoked in America was grown in Mexico until the mid-1970s, when the Mexican government, at the behest of the United States, began spraying the crop with the herbicide paraquat.
The madness in the marijuana garden is of a different order. Though it too is abundantly watered by money, it remains deeply rooted in the human desire for pleasure—in whatever exactly it is that the chemicals produced in these flowers can do to a person’s conscious experience.
In fact, the human penchant for drugs may be the accidental by-product of two completely different adaptive behaviors. This at least is the theory Steven Pinker proposes in How the Mind Works.
He points out that evolution has endowed the human brain with two (formerly) unrelated faculties: its superior problem-solving abilities and an internal system of chemical rewards, such that when a person does something especially useful or heroic the brain is washed in chemicals that make it feel good.
The relief of pain, a blessing of many psychoactive plants, is only the most obvious example. Plant stimulants, such as coffee, coca, and khat, help people to concentrate and work.
There are psychoactive plants that uncork inhibitions, quicken the sex drive, muffle or fire aggression, and smooth the waters of social life. Still others relieve stress, help people sleep or stay awake, and allow them to withstand misery or boredom.
“Transparent” is a term used to characterize drugs whose effects on consciousness are too subtle to interfere with one’s ability to get through the day and fulfill one’s obligations. Drugs such as coffee, tea, and tobacco in our culture, or coca and khat leaves in others, leave the user’s space-time coordinates untouched.
Our desire for some form of transcendence of ordinary experience expresses itself not only in religion but in other endeavors as well, and these too have probably been more deeply influenced by psychoactive plants than we like to think.
The notion that drugs might function as cultural mutagens occurred to me while reading The Selfish Gene while high on marijuana, which may or may not be an advisable thing to do.
As the sorcerers, shamans, and alchemists who used them understood, psychoactive plants stand on the threshold of matter and spirit, at the point where simple distinctions between the two no longer hold.
Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting—on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive—it’s often said that drugs “distort” normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true—that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.
Spiritual knowledge comes from above or within, but surely not from plants. Christians have a name for someone who believes otherwise: pagan.
There may be no older idea in the world. Friedrich Nietzsche once described Dionysian intoxication as “nature overpowering mind”—nature having her way with us. The Greeks understood that this was not something to be undertaken lightly or too often. Intoxication was a carefully circumscribed ritual for them, never a way to live, because they understood that Dionysus can make angels of us or animals, it all depends.
Agriculture is, by its very nature, brutally reductive, simplifying nature’s incomprehensible complexity to something humanly manageable; it begins, after all, with the simple act of banishing all but a tiny handful of chosen species.
For nature as much as for people, the garden has always been a place to experiment, to try out new hybrids and mutations. Species that never cross in the wild will freely hybridize on land cleared by people.
Yet this new biotechnology has overthrown the old rules governing the relationship of nature and culture in a plant. Domestication has never been a simple one-way process in which our species has controlled others; other species participate only so far as their interests are served, and many plants (such as the oak) simply sit the whole game out. That game is the one Darwin called “artificial selection,”
One way to look at genetic engineering is that it allows a larger portion of human culture and intelligence to be incorporated into the plants themselves.
In the eyes of the political economists, capitalist exchange was a lot like baking, since it represented a way of civilizing anarchic nature—the anarchic nature, that is, of both plants and people.
No one can make a better case for a biotech crop than a potato farmer,
Monoculture is the single most powerful simplification of modern agriculture, the key move in reconfiguring nature as a machine, yet nothing else in agriculture is so poorly fitted to the way nature seems to work.
Monoculture is where the logic of nature collides with the logic of economics; which logic will ultimately prevail can never be in doubt.
