On Louis and Lestat and evening primroses
nothing is ever random in this MF (pun intended) show.
The scene is a park bench. They are sketching a retirement â a trailer park, the desert instead of the forest, a couple of folding chairs, flower boxes. And Louis, who has spent the entire arc of his existence asking questions he already suspects the answer to, asks what blooms at night.
Lestat does not think about it. "Evening primrose," he says, immediately, the way you answer a question you have been quietly holding an answer to for some time.
So let's talk about what he actually named.
Oenothera opens at dusk, fast enough that you can watch it happen â bud to full flower in under a minute, faster than the eye expects a plant to move. It gives off its scent only after the light is gone. It is pollinated by moths. And it is finished by mid-morning. One night per flower. That is not a failure of stamina; it is the whole design. The flower has an entire alternative economy of attention and the sun is simply not in it.
In the Victorian language of flowers, the evening primrose means inconstancy.
Sit with that. The dictionaries also allow silent love and memory, but the primary gloss is faithlessness, and the logic is naked: it opens in the dark, it gives itself to something with wings, it is spent by the time you come looking. Therefore it cannot be trusted. Therefore it is a lover who will not be seen when you would like to see him.
Which is to say the floriographic entry is not really about feeling at all. It is about access, and about what a culture does to a thing that withholds it. The plant is not fickle. It is differently timed. But the lexicon has no word for differently timed, so it reaches for inconstant â and the entire history of Louis and Lestat is, in one light, a two-century prosecution on exactly that charge, conducted in the full glare of an interview, on the record, in the language of the party who wanted to be able to look whenever he liked.
None of its names belong to it. It is not a primrose â primerose, prima rosa, the first rose, the flower of earliest spring, and this one blooms in high summer, after dark, and is not a rose. Oenothera is a dead Greek word Linnaeus lifted off some Mediterranean shrub nobody has ever conclusively identified and fastened onto an American plant Pliny never saw. It arrived in Europe as seed from Virginia in the early 1600s, escaped the botanical garden, and has been colonising the ruderal margins ever since â ballast, railway cuttings, waste ground, the raw edges of infrastructure.
A thing living permanently under a borrowed name, in a country not its own, thriving specifically on ruined ground. I'm not going to insult you by explaining this one.
But he said desert. And in the desert, the primrose that grows is Oenothera deltoides, and I need you to know what the field guides call it.
Devil's Lantern. Lion-in-a-Cage. Birdcage evening primrose â because when the plant dies, its outer stems curl upward and inward and close, and what is left standing in the sand is a cage. It is pollinated by the white-lined sphinx moth. It opens at dusk and it is gone by mid-morning.
In this same episode, Lestat's other dream is birds. He wants to be a birder. He wants to walk out at night and transcribe birdsong. And the flower he names, without hesitation, for the window box outside the trailer where they would finally be left alone, is the one that dies by becoming a birdcage.
And then there is the fact that Lestat is a Sondheim man, and Evening Primrose is a 1966 Sondheim television musical, and its plot is this: people who live hidden inside a department store, who only come alive at night, who have made a whole society out of not being seen â and when the lovers try to leave, they are caught, and turned into mannequins.
He names the flower. They imagine leaving. Minutes later, on that bench, they are struck down from behind.
Last thing. This plant is where biology got the word mutation. De Vries found them in a waste field in 1886 throwing off strange new forms and thought he was watching species arise by sudden leap. He was wrong. The evening primrose has a freak chromosomal architecture that makes it a permanent hybrid â the "new" forms were never new. They were something the plant had been carrying inside itself the entire time, locked, and had finally let out.
Nothing arrives. Something already there is released.
The flower does not fail to bloom. It blooms exactly once, in the dark, for the only creature that ever comes for it, and it is finished by morning.
Call that inconstancy if you want. He didn't.
[I didn't make the GIFs! However made them is an absolute genius and I love them â€ïž]
