Sleight of Flower
The primal plant (Urpflanze) shall be the most marvelous creature in the world, and nature shall envy me for it. With this model and the key to it one can invent plants ad infinitum that must be consistent, i.e., that could exist even if they do not in fact, and are just picturesque or fanciful shadows, but have instead an inner truth and necessity.
—Goethe [1]
I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.
—Wittgenstein
A rose by any other name, as Juliet tragically learns, might smell like flesh. And among the compelling conclusions to draw — besides, that is, the consequential nature of names in the res publica — might be that flower, word, and body share something fundamental, although not readily apparent. Driven by desire we may well try, like the impassioned Capulet, to wish away the social bond and settle for a verbal lie; yet even at lower temperatures we face the same problematic of naming and its force in creating reality. What’s in a name, what’s its relation to the thing named, and, indeed, what’s the thing itself, its original nature, its prenominal status? — that is, the very thing, the res, before the defining distinction.
Heide Hatry, Spisulae solidissimae insectae (Cut Atlantic surf Clams), 2012. Silver halide print. Stux.
We think of flowers as having a nature, a nature close to the heart of nature itself. Goethe took that notion of fundamental nature seriously, even literally, in that the flower embodies primordial principle in every aspect of its temporal manifestation — the Urpflanze or primal plant phenomenon flowering. Morphologically, to use Goethe’s successful neologism, the leaf flowers as further leaf, which is something he saw with his own eyes. This principle, as it pertains to seeing nature, calls out for a union of imagination and natural process, and it suggests what he calls exact sensorial imagination. [2] The exactness here has to do with one’s ability to hold the whole of the natural metamorphic process in mind, in a sense to mentally embody the living thing by “feeling into” it. It suggests a precision with respect both to the evident thing and the process or play of the thing as living event — an outer event that grows inseparable from one’s inner event, according to the nature of both.
Now, let’s suppose one wishes to enter directly into this creative natural process, as agent of originary incarnation, so to speak, even to the point of evolving the thing previously named and known, but now as a thing without precedent, a new thing with an old name. Is it natural to intervene in nature with originary force? Or is it contra naturam? Or, inquiring further, is it, in Augustine’s phrase, an event contra quam est nota natura, i.e., contrary not to nature as such but to what is known of nature — in short, a sort of miracle? We come quickly upon a basic issue of human “measure,” our place in nature, with ethical and proto-theological reverberations: by what right does one take up such a role in natural process, with consequences for ongoing natural manifestation?
At one extreme of the artificial natural is what could be called the golem dimension, unshaped inanimate matter animated by Hebrew letter-magic, with hubris potential, where man usurps divine privilege. The analogs might be Dr. Frankenstein and monster and, today, genetic engineering (“frankenfish,” etc.) and the emerging varieties of bio-art: the ethics and dangers of creating life from scratch, for either practical or aesthetic purposes. At another extreme is the simulacrum, the variant reality that may, in one view, deceive the eye and even threaten one’s relationship with an “original” or, in another view, reflect upon “reality” in such a way that it releases the hold of precedent and offers a remote axis wherein the sense of a newly possible comes into view. [3]
In the latter view an original is always yet to come.
Goethe said “every new object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception in us.” By such newly opened organs we see what was previously invisible, and we presumably learn that our organs are, like the realities of nature, innumerable beyond naming — like, as Blake tells us, the Ancient Poets’ “enlarged & numerous senses.” And such seeing ever more intensively “opens the doors of perception.”
A corollary would be that every new language event/verbal object, experienced thoroughly (“well contemplated”) and beyond precedent, opens up new language organs, or whatever constitutes the capacity for further verbal (ap)perception in us. And that would be a poetic function where poetry is viewed as that which is capable of evolving language itself. This is the metadimension wherein reflection, feedback, and intention guide language function beyond what it knows it knows.
Word, flower, body. When we observe that a word is not the thing it represents, do we speak a truth that also distorts another level of reality? Is there an actual morphological, even morphogenic, relationship between things designated in nature and language itself, e.g., the flower and the word flower? To the extent that we are nature, we generate language and also participate in the generative language process that is always already there. We live inside the living field that is language. It’s going on all around, as we see more and more vividly through the ever more startling discoveries of ethology as to how intricately, complexly, and elusively animals and plants communicate. [4] It makes the cold hard linguistic view as “science” seem reductive, comparable to the medical view of anatomy based on corpses (dead bones as model for treating breathing bodies!). [5] By contrast a Goethean science sees the representation, the simulacrum, as a two-way threshold between object and mind — two living bodies in living exchange. The eye observing nature is nature observing itself.
Sandro Botticelli, Sant’Agostino nello studio, 1480. Fresco. Wikimedia.
Still from Paul Wegener’s 1920 film Der Golem. Der Standard.
The word flower itself flowers, in a certain sensory perspective. Poetry (art language) in this sense is self-generating language at a higher level of intensity; it feeds on the fact that language is always out of control. There is a lingual wild, and dictionaries are the zoos. One could say that, as human culture has long captured gray wolves and evolved them through intentional (“human natural”) selection into dogs (mankind’s great invention in the natural world), so the same cultural force, as it were, turns wolf words into dog words. Wolf simulacra. And dog words, like actual dogs, are context specific sculptural art acts.
So, bio-art is a practice begun millennia ago, with both practical and aesthetic aims; word art may well come later, yet at some point it’s inseparable from whatever fundamental forces drive human biological morphogenesis. That the morphological method (“metamorphosis”) discovered by Goethe [6] in scientific inquiry applies also to language and thought is extensively evidenced by the late work of Wittgenstein, based upon the principles of morphology and primary phenomena (Urphänomena). [7]
My question is: Are not words as we use them already simulacra? Not simulacra of the things represented but of themselves in their metamorphic nature (Urworte): any word simulates a past meaning (itself a simulation of a past meaning), but now, in this context, this function, gradually loses contact with a model of meaning and moves toward singularity. The notion of primary language (Ursprache, Urwort) implies not an etymology or root language but something like a matrix of meaning variability (axiality), the very capacity for metamorphic expression and for self-identity amidst unlimited further play — and sleight.
Pierre Jean François Turpin, Urpflanze, 1837. Woodcut based on Goethe’s ideas. Wikimedia.
And then there were dogs. And then, the word dog. And now the thought dog word. The boundary between word and thing is getting thin, and we seem on the verge of once again confusing them, just when we thought we’d cured that particular disease of rationality. And of course there’s a certain sleight of word here [Plato’s irritation with poets is rising again to the frontal lobe as we speak]. Well, we can stop here, with word and thing barking at each other.
Or not. Sleight of what? Blame it on the poietic function of language itself, indeed of mind. We keep responding to language as reality, and that is simultaneously a flaw in reasoning and a problematic truth running right through the structure of “reality” (else art were trivial). We fall for what we see and hear, intent perhaps on finding the beloved everywhere. Anything valuable is subject to counterfeit. What I tell you may be a lie or it may lie of its own accord — its non-accord, that is, with you. Birds warn each other of ambient dangers with precise articulations and may then dissimulate: sometimes — like the kleptoparasitic wild fork-tailed drongos of the South African Kalahari — they fake each other out with mimicked alarm calls to steal food when others flee from phony danger, much like the political actions and strategic “fake news” of our time. Sleight of bird cry.
Alberto Giacometti, Taut String (Flower in Danger), 1932. Plaster traces of pencil and metal. Fondation Giacometti.
Goethe regards each fully engaged natural object as a new creation in the act of seeing/knowing. This resonates with literary historian Hugh Kenner’s
Buckminster Fuller adduces a general law: "Heisenberg said that observation alters the phenomenon observed. T.S. Eliot said that studying history alters history. Ezra Pound said that thinking in general alters what is thought about. Pound’s formulation is the most general, and I think it’s the earliest.”
The Pound Era [8]
Sleight of reality. “For the eye altering alters all” (Blake).
Poietic mind works accordingly. And just the thought perceiving/thinking/saying has transformative force leads us to a possible root principle of art: the world itself is changed inside our perception, our creative acts — and inside our very speaking. This is the force of the singular, the very event lived in its moment — something true to its nature, yet which has never been until now.
Goethe’s primal phenomenon (Urphänomen) specifically as plant (Urpflanze) is something seen in an actual moment of intense observation. What presents itself in this process as phenomenon could be called a morpholog (“this model and the key to it”), a living-form template by which the mind, drawn into the core principle, can conceive “plants ad infinitum.” The principle perceived is a generative force. It can make more of itself where what it makes is also always other!
So, how about an art act as transformation by material simulacrum, a meta-iconic change of substance (analog of transubstantiation), by which, literally, the flower is made flesh? [9] Is such an art moment a stepped-down and torqued simulation of Word made flesh? An usurpation by mirroring of primal creative function (setting gods atremble)? (Mirror neurons as entheogenic?) Letting the flower play out primal force through what represents it, the word carrying out the primal word force (Urwort) by way of exact sensorial simulacrum?
Fra Angelico, Annunciation, 1433-34. Tempera on wood. Wikimedia.
The artist’s fleshy flower, especially one finely wrought out of offal like the recent sculptural flowers by German artist Heide Hatry, crosses and cross-pollinates kingdoms — plant and animal. Rather like a golem it creates something monstrous, first in the biological sense of “abnormal in structure,” but inevitably also in extended metaphorics, calling to mind interspecific worlds — Pan, Medusa, Green Man, gryllos (from the many Bosch-imaged terrors), and a range of monstrosities, the stuff of magical dream and also nightmare. Its possible tonalities include the grotesque and the comic, which taken together Baudelaire saw as the highest range of the modern transformative, calling to mind also the “serious joke” of alchemy. [10]
Yet there is a fundamental shift in more than tone from Frankenstein’s monster to what could be considered, at least by implication, Goethe’s monstrous potentiality. A flower of flesh speaks a nature like a new language. The flower, once known for what it is, fleshes further as we speak, and yet flower taking on body speaks as word in an unknown language. Every creation has resonance beyond itself. Our participation in nature is a creative act by which nature knows its further nature, as we know our own. [11]
Or, according to our simulacrum of a missing primordial principle (Urprinzip) of the primacy of word (Urwort), Ontononymous the Particular says:
aligning with primary language principle releases possible worlds
from imprisonment within precedent
and moves toward a further nature
always singular
Heide Hatry, Aures cervorum, linguae gallinarum, antenna barbi (Ears of deer, tongues of chicken, and antennae of barb fish), 2011. Stux.
NOTES
*This piece was written for a collection of essays by many authors relating to the issues raised by artist Heide Hatry’s work for the special edition artist book Not a Rose (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2012), presenting photo documentation of her sculptures made of (discarded) animal organs and shaped as flowers with high verisimilitude.
1. There are multiple editions in English of The Metamorphosis of Plants by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, such as ed. with photos by Gordon L. Miller (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
2. The original translation of Goethe’s “exakte sinnliche Phantasie” was “exact percipient fancy,” charming to the ear today but not immediately clear — a rendering perhaps made famous by the C.F. Atkinson 1926 translation of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918); Goethe’s phrase from The Metamorphosis of Plants, Atkinson says in his Introduction, is “neat” and “untranslatable.” In Goethe’s actual practice it stood for the third in a five stage outer/inner meditation.
3. I am aware of the range of discussion re: “simulacrum” from Plato through Nietzsche (though not his term), Pierre Klossowski, Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, et al., but it is not appropriate to map my discussion onto the history of the term or position my exploration in mainly philosophical terms; the poetics, as it were, of the present thinking has a different center of gravity.
4. See, for instance, Michael Pollen’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2002) and the PBS Nature documentary What Plants Talk About.
5. Anthropomorphism, like teleology, has long been debated in biology, but its value and indeed necessity, especially in ethological study of animal communication, cognition, and intelligence, is now well established; e.g., Frans de Waal: “To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.” “Are We in Anthropodenial?” Discover (July 1997), pp. 50–53. See also Jeremy Narby, Intelligence In Nature. New York: Penguin, 2005.
6. The word morphology is Goethe’s coinage, interpreted variously in different fields, but as the study of the form and structure of organisms its legacy continues notably in the great literary and scientific work On Growth and Form (1917) by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, with many later branches, including molecular biology, which have sometimes embraced Goethe’s discoveries.
7. See, for instance, “Synoptic Views vs. Primal Phenomena: Wittgenstein on Goethe’s Morphology,” Sabine Plaud, in Wittgenstein: Issues and Debates, ed. Jesús Padilla Galvez, Eric Lemaire (Frankfurt am Main: Ontos Verlag, 2002), 31-46.
8. University of California Press, 1973, page 162. Kenner adds: “To think of Pound in that way alters Pound.”
9. These remarks, occasioned in part by Heide Hatry’s work in art flowers, are descriptive, but not evaluative.
10. Charles Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter” [1855], Essence of Laughter and Other Essays, Journals and Letters (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1991). Peter Lamborn Wilson refers to “serious joke” as “alchemical term,” applicable to art, in “Magi-ism,” Alchemy & Inquiry: Philip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli, Terry Winters. Exhibition organized by Raymond Foye and Jennifer McGregor (Wave Hill: April 3rd–June 19th, 2011, Bronx, New York). The likely source is from 1611: Jocus Severus, A Serious Joke, Michael Maier, transl. Darius Klein (Seattle: Ouroboros Press, 2010).
11. I relate this thinking to Blake’s cryptic "Where man is not, nature is barren" — an interdependent relationship toward co-performative evolution.
