Excerpts from Francis Ponge’s Vegetation
(My brief comments are beneath the cut. Excerpts translated by Lee Fahnestock)
What I like still more in mimosas, with their clustering tips, is the impression they give, through their little suns (flower and seed together), of provisioning: that it will all reseed abundantly. Generously.
This is what I like most of all in flowers: paradoxically, their endurance. The impression they give of a power in time, disseminated in space. Their seed-bomb aspect. The movement toward the future this includes and brings to mind. The bomb-about-to-go-off side of them, the awareness of their power, of their seed-charge. This glorious and touching, frail and disarming all at once. The ephemeral bubble aspect, the fireworks of generosity, specific or familial, volleys of possibility, promises of generation …
Vertiginous velocity of roses in ascending course (and of all other boughs and branches), to induce and sporadically produce nodes where the most successful seeds will be enclosed, self-included, where a sheltered life will be contained (cloistered). Hence the ultimate torsion–a line of compromise between desire and awkwardness (due to the velocity of the thrust, the violence of desire) … this torque, set to release later–bloom, we call it–and spring its seed, new swellings, etc.
That is the way most vegetation grows, thrusting to the virtue of velocity, of violence and, to put it plainly, the precipitation of desire, to form there those nodes, inflammations, bursting congestion in which the seeds come to be.
Dervishes whirl like that, and some dancers. So too a tongue moves in the mouth, speech is formed …
And then (here again the asparagus), it is then that wings, that arms, can drop to the sides again, shields and bucklers can be lowered. Yes, that is the time and the way that foliage fades, leaving fruit, globular seeds, suspended in the air–like, the heavens, stars, celestial bodies–those provisions of life (cut off from the previous life that spawned them), those bombs that will go off and disseminate in good time and if need be.
On the one hand the fruit,* on the other (but it’s the same thing) the stars, the heavenly bodies, flasks, globes, sources, balloons of light.
[* In the vegetal world the explosion is before the bomb, the raising of dangers before the plot. The glory there is announcement, annunciation. The flower is the angel with pointed wings, harbinger of sphericity: the fruit.]
It is the provision of future life that burns so intensely, so calmly, radiant and joyful, sure of its power to resow life.
Perhaps light, a secondary quality, is no more than the joy, the gleaming eye, the (phosphorescent) glow of the power to reseed life, the glow of life’s resources, the pride of providing the future.
So the light would be merely a secondary quality. But it does not illuminate. It lightens up what is living at the moment, that is what is in the process of dying: the world stretched out before us, objects in space. A secondary quality of Time.
Time, its flow, its rhythm, would be first. Space and light could only follow, as appearances and secondary qualities. Light being no more than the gleaming eye of time, of Time set into fruit, into stars, provisions of time to come, of life.
The fruit, the astral bodies, those flasks, would simply be nodes of Time, brilliant because of their potency, their joy in being able to resow life.
But the asparagus, finely-cut cedar, spreads its carpets beneath all that, spreads its underlying sheets life a fireman’s safety net to catch–so their fall to earth will be gentle, so they come to earth but gently–the bodies of light’s angels, leaping from the burning building, from the skyscraper, the tower in flames.
And the asparagus spreads its tiered carpets, its superimposed sieves, its protective palms …
The sheets that conceal the earth from angels conceal death from them too and rupture, death and pain. While they also conceal that fall from the earth, the angels’ dazzling fall (sun beams).
Screen the earth from angels, screen angels from the earth; sparing each injury, by sheer dazzling glare or by fracture; and death.
So there is its two-way protection, double-faced, front and back.
Rain is not the only mark that hyphenates the earth and sky for there are other sorts
and so much denser that a breeze
enough to make it tremble
won’t carry off the fabric.
to detach some minor matter
that it subsequently strains to whirl to dust
in the end we recognize
that nothing has been lost.
A closer look reveals one
among a thousand doorways to
a giant laboratory opening before us
bristling with its varied forms of hydraulic apparatus
each far more complex than the simple shafts of rain
as filter syphon retort alembic all in one.
This apparatus is what the rain first meets
before it touches ground
receiving it in a quantity of little bowls
packed in at every level
arranged to spill over from one to the next
down to those at the lowest level
by which at last the earth is directly watered.
This is their way of retarding the shower
of retaining fluids for the good of the soil
once the storm has passed.
They alone possess the power to make the rain forms glisten in the sun
or in other words to display
from the viewpoint of joy
the reasons as scrupulously accepted as they were
precipitately formed in sadness.
Curious occupation, enigmatic characters.
They increase in stature according to the rainfall
but with greater regularity more discretion
and through a sort of momentum
even when the rain is over.
At least we still find water
in the flasks they form and bear with blushing ostentation
which we call their fruit.
of this tapestry in three dimensions which
for other demonstrated properties and
above all for the sort of life that animates it
has been named vegetation …
But I wanted first to press the point that
though the ability to carry out
their synthesis and regenerate unasked
even between the paving at the Sorbonne
relates the vegetal contrivances to the animal
the vagabonds of every breed
nonetheless in many permanent locations
they form a fabric
and this fabric belongs to the world
as a layer of its foundation.
origamiaround
areudirty
germansingergirl
gracieabrams
theartofmadeline
romaincrisis
amandla
kianamaiart
izzy806
