Vegetal Imaginings
This is a page for tidbits that have caught my eye in (sometimes very loose) connection with my dissertation research.
DE ARBORE PENDET
Charles Estienne, De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres, Paris: S. Colinaeus, 1545.
The legend reads: Caluaria auulsa de arbore pendet. Duram matrem ostendit, per qua ita deerrant uenae sursum a iugularibus internis utrinque delatae, quemadmodum supra dictum est. Cuius medium ita funditur ut uides, et ligamentosum est admodum. (“The skull, removed, hangs from a tree. He displays the dura mater, through which thus wander the veins carried up by the internal jugulars on both sides, in the way described above. The middle of it is thus extended as you can see, and is very ligamentous.”)
inverted trees
GREEK PHILOSOPHY:
“As concerning the most sovereign form of soul in us we must conceive that heaven has given it to each man as a guiding genius that part which we say dwells in the summit of our body and lifts us from earth towards our celestial affinity, like a plant whose roots are not in earth, but in the heavens. And this is most true, for it is to the heavens, whence the soul first came to birth, that the divine part attaches the head or root of us and keeps the whole body upright.” —Plato (Timaeus 90A, transl. Cornford)
RUSSIAN ROMANTICISM:
“It is a remarkably pleasant occupation, to lie on one’s back in a forest and look upwards! It seems that you are looking into a bottomless sea, that it is stretching out far and wide below you, that the trees are not rising from the earth but, as if they were the roots of enormous plants, are descending or falling steeply into those lucid, glassy waves, while the leaves on the trees glimmer like emeralds or thicken into a gold-tinted, almost jet-black greenery. Somewhere high, high up, at the very end of a delicate branch, a single leaf stands out motionless against a blue patch of translucent sky, and, beside it, another sways, resembling in its movement the ripplings upon the surface of a fishing reach, as if the movement were of its own making and not caused by the wind. Like magical underwater islands, round white clouds gently float into view and pass by, and then suddenly the whole of this sea, this radiant air, these branches and leaves suffused with sunlight, all of it suddenly begins to stream in the wind, shimmers with a fugitive brilliance, and a fresh, tremulous murmuration arising which is like the endless shallow splashing of oncoming ripples. You lie still and you go on watching: words cannot express the delight and quiet, and how sweet is the feeling that creeps over your heart. You go on watching, and that deep, clear azure brings a smile to your lips as innocent as the azure itself, as innocent as the clouds passing across it, as if in company with them there passes through your mind a slow cavalcade of happy recollections, and it seems to you that all the while your gaze is travelling farther and farther away and drawing all of you with it into that calm, shining infinity, making it impossible for you to tear yourself away from those distant heights, from those distant depths.…” —Turgenev, “Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands” (in Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, transl. R. Freeborn)
COSMOPOLITAN POSTMODERNISM:
FURTHER READING:
Berthoff, Ann E. The Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvell’s Major Poems. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.
Chambers, A. B. “`I Was But an Inverted Tree’: Notes Toward the History of an Idea.” Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1961): 291-99.
bosch’s man tree
“The plainest things are as obscure, as the most confessedly mysterious; and the Plants we tread on, are as much above us, as the Stars and Heavens.”
—Glanvill’s Scepsis Scientifica
The rhetorical appeal of plant metaphors as famously demonstrated by Mr. Rogers:
A study of similar rhetoric in contemporary use would trace much of it back to the “viral remix” of that clip.
