Roots and Friendships

My friend Leif sent me a wonderful birthday gift: Molly Peacock's biography of an eighteenth-century woman, Mary Delany, called The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life's Work at 72. This is a delicious book. Here's a piece I love:

"The flowers are portraits of the possibilities of age. They are aged. They can be portraits of sexual intensity--but softened. Softer, and drier, as our sexuality becomes. Yet they also can be simple botany, nearly accurate representations of specimens. They all come out of darkness, intense and vaginal, bright on their black backgrounds as if, had she possessed one, she had shined a flashlight on nine hundred and eighty-five flowers' cunts" (6).

Two pages later, talking about the collages Mary Delany built and called "mosaicks," Peacock says, "The full flower heads with their main flower parts, along with the buds, the vines, the stems, and the leaves, are palpable, but they don't appear exactly as in nature. (For one thing, the root systems aren't shown.) Because of the seeming absence of light, they loom as if they are imaginary. They are more like incredibly vivid memories than representations and are reminiscent of poems in their layerings of lines and in the ways they rhyme their colors" (8).

Root systems aren't shown. I began to imagine pictures of root systems that might loom as if imaginary, that might be reminiscent of poems. Yesterday I had dinner with Laurie, who had bought some sweet little spring turnips, and I asked if I could keep the roots. I'm playing with them, and as I play, I'm thinking about friendship, about aging into our art, about roots and what sustains us, about where our own roots go. I will keep thinking about this for a while.

Friendship. Speaking of Delany's second (satisfying) marriage, Peacock writes, "She had been loved candidly and clear-sightedly, not in a blur of romance but in clarity of observation, with true acceptance" (11). Only the lucky few have this in a love relationship, but many of us are fortunate to have it with our good friends. I have it in friendship, and count myself damn lucky.

Those of you who are near the British Museum can see the mosaicks for yourselves.