“What I give to you is all that I have, an open wanting, deep in the layers of my heart. And in return I catch your smile, the greatest gift of all.” ~Tracey Emin
« I feel that plants are alive, very alive, and yet prisoners. They can’t move, they can’t seek shelter, they can’t escape clippers, hatchets, saws. They inspire pity and so I feel they are designated victims – an emblem, perhaps, of all the victims on this planet.
But a precisely opposite feeling is grafted on to my sense of pity. Their expansion worries me. They are prisoners and yet they extend, twist, creep their way in, break the stone. Their roots grow deeper and deeper; they try to send them elsewhere. Maybe it’s that contrast that disorients me; they have in themselves a blind force that doesn’t fit with their cheerful colours, their pleasing scents. At the first opportunity, they manage to get back everything that was taken from them, dissolving the shapes that we have imposed by domesticating them. […]
At times I suspect that I devote myself to plants in this way because I’m afraid of them. But then I should admit I’ve assigned to vegetation a symbolism that applies to any form of life. We appreciate it, we love it – until, bursting the boundaries that our authority has set, it overflows. »
Sylvia Plath reads her poem titled: “November Graveyard" (x)
At the essential landscape stare, stare Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: Whatever lost ghosts flare, Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor Rave on the leash of the starving mind Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.
