ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
521
of this story takes place (what resonances are contained in the studs,
the joists, and the bowed floor planks of an old house). I could be
a tree-there is.a tree outside this house, an unusual maple whose
bole divides into four trunks only a few hands from the ground,
and whose branches in the leafless winter articulate the noble forms
of the nerve paths of a brain as one might see them in the surgically
drafted plates of one of those sturdy grisly nineteenth-century hand–
books on medical practice. There is even a garden, a most delicate
garden-we are near the sea-and the flowers in summer have that
rare electric vivaciousness which comes from salt air, sandy soil,
and fertilizer laced up over-rich with artificial nectar and mead.
flowers have always been sinister to me when they are lovely–
they seem to shMe the elusive promise of a woman who is beautiful
and whose voice is too perfect-one never knows if she is the avatar
of a dream or some masterwork of treachery, she is so different from
ourselves.
If
I make such a comparison, it is obviously quite unnatural to
me that I should share my existence with a flower, yet I advance the
hypothesis in the interest of being comprehensive, and because the
possibility is perversely appealing: where better could a demon hide
himself than in the vulva of a garden bloom-if some pleasure–
snatcher plucks the stem (have you ever heard
that
cry of pain?) the
ex-flower can poison the house before it withers away. Yes, one does
well to fear plants-once, out of an ill-timed overabundance of energy
and boredom I kicked over a giant mushroom. It was five inches
across the head, and I could have sworn it gave a venomous cry
of rage as death came to it-"You bastard," I heard it say; such a
vile fate for that exceptional mushroom, skull-like in its proportions
and bold in size. I was sorry. Not every mushroom grows with such
lust, and I had violated a process perhaps centuries in the chain.
So
from fear I mention the flower as well as the tree, and while whisper–
ing that vegetative life repels me more than not, I would add my
bow to nature--I could be of the ocean and the sand dunes, that
primal mMriage of the little stones and the vast water-I could be
of them, but I hope not; certain embraces are too monumental and
so become dull. To say that the oceans of the world are but one tear
of God's compassion is a metaphor so excruciatingly empty that the
flatulence of a celibate must have been its first wind. But to believe
