Dandelion
Ve grow in cracks, ve creep out of crevices, squeeze up between pavestones, wedge into rocks, sink taproots into the soil, spread across meadows, turn green to yellow. Ve drill into the underground, ve undermine the borders, ve fly with the wind.
Ve have followed you since you first began digging holes, since you first began raking the land. Ve encircle you, ve go around you and grow with you.
Ve are elevated as part of culture, decorated as medicinal herb, included on coats of arms, used for healing, loved in play and admired as a seed.
Ve are the best, the only, the strongest memory of a childhood under an open sky, a memory of summer with sun and sweet scents, with thick air and depth of light; a wooden cottage, a flowering meadow and a garden before the fall that never came and the paradise that never was.
Ve are a memory of life before the Umworld came, before industrialisation; untouched, before the disappointment, before the sorrow, before the compulsion, before the imposition of order, before the enforcement of regimes; then, then; a careless, love-seeking, dandelion-plucking, goldsheen-refracting, pappus-blowing, sunsoaking, insect-humming, seed-flying, husk-floating memory of what they call mercy.
Stick, stock, spear.
Sweat, spit, shit.
Piss, piss, piss.
Ha, ha, ha.
Is that you again?
With your knives and pliers, your irons, your poles and daggers, cutters, hackers, slicers, incinerators, poison guns. Armed to the gums of your teeth you go to war in the gardens, on the lawns, in the fields, primed for the killing.
But ve grow on, ve propagate by root, by shoot, ve self-replicate.
Ve are indomitable.
Ve mix the hereditary materials, ve stir the genome, ve clone veself, ve make hundreds of new subspecies, just because ve’re able to and just to fill out a patch or to move over the next hill.
Ve are sovereign survivors. Ve are the raw power of evolution visible to the naked eye.
What do you call ve:
Monkshead, vicar’s pate, doghat.
Garden cabbage, swine cabbage, hare cabbage,
French salad, mole salad.
Fleawort, liceflower, pigsnout.
Trollmilk, devil’s tit, witches’ cow.
Lionstooth, dogtooth, cocktube.
Scabieswort, hangmanswort, snotflower, bogeyleaf.
Piss-in-bed, pestwort, puffball.
Ok. Ve get it.
Want to know what ve call you:
Stinkstalk, stenchstem, forker, lawnsniveller, piss-on-all, pisspartout.
Enough. You see where this is going.
In the great vevolution on the future of um ve celebrate the reproductive strategy. An adversary must be vanquished through overwhelming reproductive force. Ve outgrow them. Ve grow faster than they can exterminate us.
Do not count vos among those who advocate the complete elimination of um. Um should be allowed to remain, in moderation. Um isn’t only dangerous, not only parasitic; ve must acknowledge that um provide certain opportunities to well-growing, fixed beings; ve mention vosselves dandelions as an example.
Hence, ve are in favour undermining activitiy.
Sow discord among the enemy (notice the growth metaphor!) Exploit their labile ideological condition. Incite them against each other. Cultivate (sic!) the divide between economy and ecology. Find allies among them. Do something green. Do something useful for them, be good for the nitrogen balance, be good for bees (um has no understanding of other kinds of insects). Be good for their health (or let them believe so.) Above all, be good at exploiting their sentimentality (like pappus-blowing) and um’s fathomless craving for images of themselves and their own happiness.
Our strength is in the arcalias, in um’s idea of primordial harmony and plenty; the urbliss.
Ve are the vegetal domain’s contribution to the collective unconscious.
Only radical symbols can save them from themselves.
Radical means root. Radical is rooted in roots.
Ok. It’s just a proposal.
Ve do not vote in favour of preserving um per se.
Even though a minimal presence should perhaps be part of the overall picture.
Regardless.
The above text is taken from my eco-fiction Aliff (2021), which may be regarded as a stand-alone prequel to the themes and poems in The Blog of Ten Thousand Things. The text Dandelion appears in the section Phytologoues, which gives voice to 10 selected plants, most if them with millennia of cohabitation with human beings. (Note: Ve and vos are used as personal pronouns for plant voices, corresponding to humans’ use of we and our. Um refers to human beings.