The Force That Through the Green Fuse
On plant-murder, sparrow-rescue, and live ghosts
Proverbs 16:18 Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
Proverbs 16:25 There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.
Bless me, Internet, for I have sinned. Last week I bragged about my orchids: “I have since cut the roots off the round-leafed one on the far right, which were waterlogged beyond revival. I am attempting to regrow new roots by means of damp moss in a tiny plastic-bag greenhouse: I will keep you updated as to progress.” The rootless orchid was convalescing in the sun-room. The guy in the instructional video reckoned six to eight weeks until new roots came. Impatient, I thought more light would encourage things along, so I took to putting it on the living-room windowsill of a morning. That’s dangerous, I thought, because the sun comes on there in the afternoons— but I won’t forget. I will keep a close eye.
I was reading in the chair under the window. Warm syrup. My head got heavy and the wrist of my book-hand wilted. Time stretched and warped. I felt the strangeness of the book-spine and pages between my fingers, then sleep sucked me under. At some point the odd angle of my neck half-woke me, and I slipped out of the chair and onto the floor-cushions. I couldn’t escape the undertow, the druggish nap-state. When I finally dragged myself to the surface, I saw that the plastic bag containing the orchid was in full sun, and had been for some time. No! The plant was hot: not just scorched but hāngī’d.1
It was done, it was irreversibly done, and sick guilt squeezed my heart in a cold fist. I had bragged about it; I had showed photos; I had said I would keep you updated; and worst of all, I knew it was going to happen— the film reel of possible cause and effect I kept seeing in my mind’s eye— and I did it anyway. The next day the orchid was like an accidentally frozen lettuce. Leaves transparent, cell-walls liquefied. I could smell rot. If it had roots, it might regrow leaves. If it had leaves, it might regrow roots. But all an orchid is, is roots and leaves.
Beth, death-philosopher: “Now you will have to write about the metaphysics of death.”
Kev, former farmer: “At least it wasn’t an animal.”
Why did my heart ache so, when I kill plants every day? (I eat lettuce without a thought, I pull weeds; I kill clothes moths, white-tail spiders, and mosquitos with my bare hands.) I felt that it had to do with the way the human mind constantly divides the world into categories (my problem / not my problem). It had to do with the duty of care. I had taken responsibility for the care of this plant— that’s what made its death at my hand murder instead of dinner.
I went to Turtle Therapy to buy their special hoya mix for my sister’s birthday.2 Afterwards I went to see Will in the Guitar Gallery. (Tucked away down the Left Bank, both shops feel other-realmish, like temples or portals: Turtle Therapy is jungly, slightly humid, much like the begonia house at the Botans, with green breathing leaves all around, plant-elf staff, and a small water-lily pond.3 Guitar Gallery is more like a museum: modernist, always cool and dry, the predominant surface golden polished woodgrain. Menfolk come in, to touch and fantasise.4 Will, the priest of the temple,5 is found tinkering with the whammy bar of a pristine electric, its neck on a felt-lined wood-block on the glass counter.)6
There was a small female sparrow trapped above the door. She had fallen down between the shop sign and the glass, but the space was too narrow for her to spread her wings. I said to Will that if we didn’t manage to rescue her, her mummified corpse would haunt him forever. We taped two sticks together, then Will (who is taller than me) dragged the stepladder outside the shop, stretched up, and poked the sticks down the gap while I stood inside saying “More to the left, no, down and across, no, you’re about to poke her.” The gap was deep enough that the sticks made an acute angle: a stepladder rather than a ramp. He came back inside and tapped his fingernails gently on the glass. She fluttered halfway up, then fell back down.
Now that we had taken on the task of rescue, it felt very important that she not die. At stake, a tiny life, no different to all the other sparrows one sees around— but this sparrow was Our Problem. Physics with what’s to hand: I went and broke a longer, stronger stick off a tree. But we needed something to wrap around the stick to make it fill the gap, so the bird couldn’t fall through again. We wrapped brown paper loosely around the stick, and taped it. My idea was that we could kind of scoop the sparrow out by angling the stick up, but it wasn’t me doing the wielding, and the tool wasn’t very manoeuvrable due to its length and the fact Will was working blind, high over his head. Eventually we got the stick perfectly placed— a rough stairway to the light— but the sparrow had exhausted herself with her previous fluttering, and sat there motionless. It was very hot. Will dripped water down to her and some oats he begged from The Oatery opposite, but she didn’t peck them. I climbed up on the stepladder to look closely at her. Her round black eye stared, unseeing, fathomless.
We’d been at it for an hour. I didn’t want to give up, because it was a two-person job, but I had to go and buy things before the shops shut. Sorry. Good luck. I reluctantly left.
Mum told me the Cascades have reopened. There was a rāhui7 on the park for many years because of kauri dieback— Phytophthora agathidicida, an incurable, fatal pathogen that attacks the kauri roots, spread by people’s feet. She seemed joyful to be let back in to the beautiful place. “But this…”
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.8
These remaining kauri are only the ghosts of giants, the runts that were left when bushmen dragged the mighty logs out by river and bullock and engine. Still, in their youth they heard moa booming, provided cover for the giant eagle, knew the tread of lighter feet as war-parties silently slipped through the dapples.
Dead tree. But the epiphytes are still alive, for now; skeleton tree as city in the air. I finally got around to reading Caroline Ross’ latest piece, Make Us Good Wolves, which opens with a photo of an ancient oak, the form echoing Mum’s kauri. Oak of the Clay lived many a day, Or ever Æneas began.9
Ross: “I am definitely not saying that we must root out all these evil things. That thought itself is the strongest of all the pathogens which one can carelessly import, upon the sole of one’s well-travelled boot.”
I was walking up Cuba Street thinking of the sparrow’s plight when I saw a friend from out of town across the road. I called her name. Again. And then again. She held onto me for a long time. We went for emergency icecream. (Blood orange. Strawberry and lime. The folds of her green dress.)
Afterwards I ran into Grace, another out-of-towner. We sat on the wall talking about Ursula Le Guin. The icecream had melted in my cup, orange and pink, and the fierce wind kept trying to spill it onto my grey silk pants. Grace’s special-friend emerged from the record shop and showed us his CDs. Then an old mate of his chanced by, with a wet, white bull terrier, who vigorously scratched herself, spraying water onto the concrete.10
Suddenly someone emerged from the human-stream, someone I once knew well: a youth, with a golden mane. I saw immediately that his face had changed. The roundness of childhood was gone. He passed by, but lingered on the street corner looking back at us. I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me or the dog. I raised my hand, but he didn’t respond.11
A photo in my mind. A boy’s back. His head bent over the piano. Young animal. Peach t-shirt and the column of the neck, a tender place we never see on ourselves. Anatomy of muscle, bone, and skin; the way the vertebrae climb orderly from collar to nape, into the mown grass of the hair. The holy light from the window. The piano, painted with cream house paint, some of its ivory missing, like a gappy mouth. His fingers striking notes out of the imperfect keys. He likes to play the most difficult, most recent piece, without looking at the music.
The feeling of this memory is like petals. Transience of that which cannot be held.
Phalaenopsis are epiphytes and like light on their roots. Would they enjoy living in crystal jars, maybe? On my way home I saw the perfect cut-glass orchid-vessel… broken in five thick pieces in the gutter. I went to scoot on, then thought of children’s feet (it was outside the beach playground), stopped, and carefully picked up the pieces, stacking them inside each other. As I carried them to the bin I could see from the way the light made rainbows in the sharp edges, and the way the pieces sounded when they touched each other, that it was crystal.
The next morning, on the same street corner, the café girl called us inside to see something cool. The darkened storeroom made a camera obscura: small holes in the garage door projecting a movie of the bright day onto a dark wall. Three upside-down images stacked like a totem pole, brightly coloured— blue sky, white houses on the green hill, and the café’s flag, a white hand on red, flapping, waving.12
When I got home from town, Will had sent me these:
Summer is an unWizardly season— antithetical to boots and coats. It’s so hot it’s hard to think straight. It feels like being in a cli-fi novel. Mammals lie in the shade and pant. Plants like it, though. I constructed this, using the moss I mentioned last week; I am hoping for basal fronds.
You shall observe what occurs in your latitude, I in mine.13 The small spider whose web stretches from the Dendrobium kingianum14 orchid to the kitchen window frame caught a green plant-hopper. The hopper, like an animate Spring leaf, was about ten times the size of the tiny dark spider, who was closely attending to it.
Yesterday evening, sitting in the garden reading Teju Cole on Edward Said, I suddenly caught a scent. Turning my head to locate its source— literally following my nose— I saw that hanging over my left shoulder was the lemon verbena in full bloom. It bears tiny flowers with white star-shaped faces and long purple necks, arranged in panicles, and it was animate: over the perfumed stars flitted a silent flock of fawn-patterned moths.15
Steam-cooking in an earth oven
She’s a hoya superfan
I hadn’t paid any attention to this pond (maybe it’s new?) until I went in the other day with two-year-old Bo, who was fascinated by its fish: one black, one gold, and one pearlescent white. “Fish! Fish!”
I fairly often think about this when I’m in there:
Once on a bus I randomly heard a musician loudly praising Will’s guitar-fu
The shape of this block brings Anne Boleyn to mind— her and all those others.
A ritual prohibition of access to a place or resource
Dylan Thomas
Rudyard Kipling
White dogs get itchy
Gets me every time. It stabbed me, but less, like the blade was blunter with the years. There was a time when you and I were friends.
The hand is the logo of the Good Fortune Coffee Company, who gave me the following dumb but possibly apt fortune with my last bag of coffee: The greatest risk is not taking one.
Henry David Thoreau
Grown from a cutting— but it is not a cutting, it is a kind of corm that the plant produces (from between its leaves as well as from its roots) and then drops; research reveals it is called a pseudobulb— anyway, my kitchen orchid is grown from a pseudobulb off the huge potted Kingianum in my Mum’s garden.
At the old house the Kingianum lived inside in a state of semi-hibernation. Here at the new house I put it outside, but it started dropping leaves. So I brought it inside again, where it immediately put out three new shoots.
There’s inconclusion regarding the collective noun for moths. A whisper; a universe; an eclipse. Realistically, does anyone but a poet ever use these words?
The sparrow ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Nice piece Rosie, and phew for the sparrow!