🇬🇧 On the pattern in a stand of nettles
142. A stand of nettles grows up on exposed soil along the fence. Here are flickers of sun and effects of shadow. Here is the smell of soil, the air is mild. The colours are yellowish, green, delicate green, almost white.
143. The stand is sligtly rounded with the highest stalks in the middle. The height decreases evenly towards the sides, about one meter at its highest and with a circumference of about three adult pathoms.
144. The stalks are slender, edged and strait, and stand in visible mutual distance, a good hundred of them on subterranean tubers.
145. Wonderful parataxis! The leaves sit in pairs in rising and descending spirals on the upper part of the stalk. Not one leaf touches another. All stalks are turned to avoid all other stalks and leaves across the entire sunfacing surface of the stand in a green, sharp-toothed pattern.
146. This pattern has no exact reptitions, no definite form. It weaves, waves, approaches, deviates, turns, angles and fills out all illuminated space in three dimensions. The stalks sway, a breath of air stirs, but the formation of the leaves is maintained.
147. Remove one leaf, just one, and the unity is destroyed. Everything is fitted in, calibrated and adapted to sunlight and the dispersion daylight. A perfect, serrated harmony.
148. We have no word for the reciprocal, dynamic placement of leaves determined by location, height, aspect, light, landscape and moisture.
149. But we might call it the energy in a collective of plants. We might call it the ability of the stand of nettle to arrange itself spatially in a given place under given conditions.
150. We might call it a manifestation of an organic principle and expression of Zhang Zai’s concept of li, the force that determines the shape and character of all things. We might say, that this li applies also to individuals acting in coordination.
151. We might say, that li creates a complex aesthetic expression that is discernible to us humans.
152. Because we are bound by the ineluctable modality of the visible. Harmony lies in the eye and cannot be conceived in words.
153. I put away language. I remove my clothes and stand naked in front of the nettles. I am not aesthetic, certainly not beautiful, but roughly symmetrical, functional, and dangerous.
154. Now we are equal, the two of us. My skin against your sawteeth, my symmetry against your harmony. My evil against your poison. I hold out my hand. My image. My brother **).
*) Zhang Zai (1022-1077) was a significant Neo-confucian philosopher and metaphysian during the Song Dynasty.
**) In memory of Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), Les Flerus du Mal, 1857.
New in Index Ten Thousand:
Nettles • 142, Stalk • 143, Tuber • 144, Surfacing • 145, Parataxis • 145, Pattern • 146, Harmony • 147, Breath of air • 147, Moisture • 148, Energy: plant collective • 149, Li • 150, Aesthetic • 151, Eye • 152, Symmetry: Homo s.• 153, Evil • 154.
