the spiritual life of plants
Monday, at USC, was the first of a series of events entitled “The Spiritual Life of Plants.” It was arranged by French/Comp. Lit. professors Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, and
“aims to reunite urgent contemporary conversations around ecology and the built environment with an early modern past — a past in which plants existed both at the limits of being and at the frontier of new forms of knowledge. What might these animated plants have to tell us about the ways in which humans experience, regulate, and are transformed by the non-human beings that surround them? How can we carry these conversations forward into the present and the future?”
The discussion was round-table format, and it was pleasing to see students and professors from all over: Religion, Sociology, History, Comp. Lit., and Physics were represented. The two professors’ presentations pulled together ‘divers’ sources such as Montaigne: On Cruelty, Henri Estienne: La Maison Rustique, and Nathaniel Hawthorne: Rappaccini’s Daughter. Extracts from a preparation packet included Francis Bacon: The New Atlantis, La Mettrie: Man A Plant, Michel Foucault: The Order of Things, and François Delaporte: Nature’s Second Kingdom.
A multitude of interesting/humorous questions arose…”what do plants have to tell us and can we read their language?”…”can we think of plants communicating between themselves as humans communicate?”…”is it relevant or useful to compare plants and humans in terms of form and function?”…”are plants and animals also ‘god’s creatures’ and do they have souls?”…”is our relationship to plants symbiotic in multiple senses: does potato-kind use humans to survive as we do them?” Brought up by Physics’ prof. Johnson, that last question opens up a whole realm of ideas….
…that of plants that communicate and strategize for their own propagation; the idea that humans think themselves fundamentally different from plants rather than all of us as things that exist; function versus thought.
I thought of two interesting connections. The first is Dan Simmons science fictional Ilium and Olympos, both vast and beautiful, which include a “viewable information ecology” that humans can access. Called the nöosphere, it contains all the bio-eco-technological information that exists in the ‘plant world’ which humans had not been able to access. The second are the Metamorphoses of Ovid, in which humans routinely turn into plants…in fact, the appearance of certain plants is attributed to human origins, which is not at all viewed as strange.
related: prof. johnson’s spiritual life of plants post, the actual event at USC
