Root Cap

Before Being Wise

Given the persistence of sexual favor, suitable temperatures, & enough sunlight to see by, these sisters, in ample radii from their own locus of increase, will tarry at nearly every floral beckoning  & onto willing bloom feed with antherous enthusiasm in the heat of the Sun the ripening hunger that drives all angiosperms to such provocations of abundance that Plenty, by virtue of plant to animal copulation, conceives appetites as can be said of both poet & passionate lover--- they are made more hungry by what feeds them.

Yet true excess of Spring is appetite. I have seen bees so in love with mustard bloom they burn yellow through the wind--- a cloud of powder swirls & falls off into hushed vortices left by the powerful beating of wings. I have seen them so cloy their hind legs with gold fruit and rake & gather from their scented hairs the trappings of male sex & still continue to seek out & copulate with anther & pistil that I, in my private watch, feed with relish upon their entire lack of satisfaction, and cloy my own desires with envy of their ardent coupling. They are ambitious  of Love's intensity & increase.

Ofttimes as well, they fill their honey crops to a heavy excess the nectar they return with, whereupon, in the  excited  heat of the well-guarded hive, vomit among their sisterhood who suck the ejecta back into their crops only to vomit it out again. This collective incantation of feeding & vacuation continues until the nectar thickens with the pleasures of their hunger. It is then voided into comb, where bee secretions cleave nectorius sucrose into burnished sugars that ripen into aromatic splendors sometimes resonating with the odorous sex of a populous flower.

The energetic public life of the hive gains an important balance in the private endeavors of those who gather the fruit of the spring field. Of the many labors performed in the prosperous community of bees, these women will, through the course of their lives, perform nearly all, including on rare occasion, that of the Queen herself. But it is the foraging for fruitfulness, the gathering of pollen to feed brood comb, the engendering of new seed among the flowers of lowland & mountain, the solidarity of sisterhood revealed in the lasting association with Angiosperms--- all this they do in the last days of their lives.

Consider it instruction, nay wisdom as to how we might advance toward death.

As I grow older (now in my middle life) I find my own appetite grows more keen even as the nature of what feeds its has grown more common. I have difficulty in completing my chores, so drawn away by the curious beauty in the small beings about me. Such public life has become the interest of much of my private meditation.

I am often on my knees.

And that is where a conviction gathers in me--- that as I flourish & begin to ripen beneath this generous Sun, these trivial splendors that I find crowding about me, may, by virtue of their own charity, penetrate & incite in me a sense of such deep association that my heart shall need little else to live out it days but a kind of planet adoration--- though this sate no desire but only serve to quicken & increase my hunger.

The intensities of being alive populate our environment & continue to confound us with their living persistence. They seem ceaseless & certainly a good reason for our sustaining appetites. But as future worlds of flower & bee burgeon & grow, we must not, but give up these endowments of Love & sink our selves into dark pools fed by the ineffable pleasures of the nourishing river of death.

Yet along our way, is there not a wisdom to be grazed & fatten even as we feed upon its small & humble offerings?

Why We Copulate

The shadow cast upon this flower is my own.

They make us pause; drop to a knee & lean into their sex of conjuring fragrances. They make us close our eyes, slacken our vigilance, settle the mind of its many differences--- feel about our loins the very desires they dream of freeing in a flurry of pleasuring bees.

We compress, ferment & distill their allure into essences we use to anoint our flesh so we might attract such beauty as engendered there in those petals of heavy scent.

If beauty radiates from the flower because increase lay in potential at its center, than all commingling that enjoys the splendors of creating can acquire what it makes most vivid: Love, which is a universe gathering together such fruitfulness that it becomes the way all flowers thrive.

Copulate and you may acquire their habits of creation.

The Desire to Copulate

The significance to the center of every flower is creation. It is the very face of imagination. Look into it  & see the endeavors that exceed an infinite Shakespeare. Will upon the ground planting words for a thousand, thousand years will never grow one single nut, nor see to a marriage of Earth, a rearing of child by the Sun, nor the graces of Rain, the joy of Bees, ecstasies of Native Being beneath a green kingdom of Trees.

Every seed to come is the entire past of all flowering plants who have elected this emphasis upon what it means to be Alive.

An Obligation Upon The Future

This is a bee's thrust into the genitalia of angiosperms. I have generated these images with a hand-held microscope, photographing the very "organs of increase"* captured in the previous 3 posts by a Canon S80, (more blunt of sight but richer of pixel) .

The "insect-sight" shown above, looks down into the floral cup (hypanthium). The uncrowded area features the underlying sepal surrounded by two petals flushed with ardour as they join ends about the pistil & stamens. The focus is below the stigma, showing the rise of filaments out of the deep, heated pink that still beckons, though the anthers are largely spent. The subsequent image places the site of Love's reception (the stigma) in focus. Note the several pearls of pollen--- more than mere promise for they ensphere a potency of sperm.

The yellow lobes of haploid sex have unsealed  their moist & sticky beads of pollen. These gametophytes  (usually two nuclei of male chromosomes: one to impregnate the ovule, the other to "feed"  the plant embryo) are part of the extraordinary pursuit of vascular novelty. The process, called cross-fertilization, eschews clonal increase for the uncertainties of inheritance as a consequence of perfect genetic identity. Remarkable, that even at the primitive level of ancestral information conveyed by sexual fusion, (DNA is a repository of preserved instruction made monumental by a handful of nucleotides pressed into memory) Life does not, & cannot repeat itself. This is one of those axioms of freedom--- "biological" matter being a conspicuous testament to an organic truth.

Vascular freedom, ranging within the random distribution of gametes swept through landscapes of insectual domestication, is constrained by such things as limiting factors, plant anatomy & animal behavior. But one must not underestimate the spontaneity of plant reproduction. Like all genuine freedoms, this "bound liberty" is the nexus of creativity, bold experimentation, & willing adaptation. 

Like a variation on the Ensemble Living of Jazz, plant life construes from vascular spontaneity a new emphasis upon the old wisdom.

The peering in upon the site of Ardour below, shows, in focus, the stigma with several grains of pollen-- one of which might be from an old almond tree upon the levy that still has breath & wonder enough to blow its bright horn of blossoms and crowd its hoary limbs with splendid notes of penetration, of reception, of improvisation, and of Love's Increase.

 

 

 

 

 

*King Lear: I, iv, ln 270

The Teaching Art

The floral cup opens into pale pink petals that lick the air with scent. They encircle dual genitalia: the stamen which are the quaking  filaments capped in gold fertility (anther & its liberties: tiny grains of pollen that will cling to a bee's limbs); and the pistil, held fast to center, oozing & ripe with adhesive sex. At its tip, the stigma waits for the shudder of wings; the heated inspection; the rude forcefulness odorous juices incite; the muscular appetite seeking its animal pleasure, until the expectant companion pull free the beguiling glue & without thought to next year's bloom, leave behind one half of one half the world's school. 

The vaginal end of the ovary takes hold of the pollen grain, and thus Sex quickens the dead into what is joined--- endeavoring orders of ancestral importance  pursuing purpose, instruction, speculation & improvement in the newly formed embryo of the old.

All blooms are wanton; welcome is the pollen tube & its twin sperms cells that swell, descend & gain access to the egg of union. By force of insight & endless novelty of an entire universe, every seed seals away a new life quickening in anticipation of its own mansion of earth.

Compelled by mutual persuasion of plant & animal increase, incited by a compenetrant soil, and graced by the complicity of  ocean currents that bloat the belly of heaven with a water to make the world green, all that we create in life begins with these  bold evocations of the Sun.

 

Art of Teaching

It is the promise of a troubled planet that H. sapien's relation to it might one day display such intimacy as evident here between a gorgeous bloom & its tireless lover--- for unlike this animal, we are without Companion; sick with narcissism & blind by disease of arrogance. We are wretched in our ignorance, in our greed & in our extreme squandering; villains & knaves in our fears & biases. We should weep for having lost our way.

But should we mend our wickedness & be so lucky as to find wisdom where we seek intimacy, than the canon of love-making between the bee & the bloom may one day inform the core of our philosophies & perhaps even conceive a new found, earth- like solidarity.

A Winter Tale

Beauty is perfected in the mutable, so why should we abhor the dying animal? Recoil from old age & its companion diseases that bring a monument of life down in a swirl of flies & stench & putrescent flesh? (Or what repulses an aging "boomer" : sagging skin, unfit pate, fat arms & bent backs?)

Shame our soul, this object of eternity?

There has been a lasting sentiment in religious life that recommends we revile the body. Sin acquired through temptation; temptation a consequent of excess desire. The flesh is weak--- we go at it like sops & monkeys. Be free of taint; forbear "pollution" of the natural world.  All in an effort to have us believe that what is best in humankind owes its election to a supernatural being. A God who has lent us the spark, the breath, and the word of Righteous Instruction! As the body putrefies, the soul, by some "artifice of eternity",  takes to wing & leaves corruption behind forever! (And how this sentiment persists, is perhaps even more onerous in our secular preoccupations with taints of all kind: domestic, racial, gender, class, species to kingdom, & nation-state).

But pollution of the fallen bird matters the divine! Corruption, the fertile ground of beauty. The soil beneath our feet,  the supreme expression of an open society--- forever renewed by all the creatures it receives, without prejudice, in their turn toward its wantonness. They lay upon it as we might upon our beds where sleep takes us deep into a common ancestral landscape of pregnant griefs & new-born anticipations.

The welcome we receive in dirt is the intimation of future hope. There our gains in life meet with an unending & ever restless will to create. 

The promise of an illuminated freedom lies in the apprehension of organic truths. Truths that grow out of the ground like great oaks. Their vividness is our liberty; their flourishment our instruction; their fruitfulness the means for our love.  One such truth lies here before us. The creature that is alive in death; that commingles in nether earth & has much to teach us; she, who will animate the children of the sun, who owe all their love to her--- she, the fallen bird is the divine of Nature. She will renew the burgeoning loam of that which lends us the spark, the breath, & the word of natural instruction.

The atomization of her life in death is what makes for the future.