Just think: the world is full of this plant chatter, this invisible glow.
A few weeks ago, I heard a podcast about how plants can feel things. They literally have a physical sense of touch like ours. Do you understand what I’m telling you here? They can feel when you touch them. The breathless journalist described how she was allowed by scientists into their labs. They disclosed their mysterious ways. She witnessed their experiments in which electrodes are hooked up to plants and she could see some readout or watch some gauge of what the plant was feeling. She was instructed to stroke the leaves and as she did so, the monitors or needles or whatever they were lit up or moved or somehow showed, in thrilling real time, how the plant was feeling her touching them.
I thought of every time I ever pinched an ailing leaf off a ficus. I thought of the arborist on my street sawing branches off the tulip tree I stare at out my window every morning. I thought about my neighbor years ago showing me her vegetable plants and I asked her wasn’t she handling them kind of roughly? She scoffed, darting out her foot to kick a tomato. “It don’t feel!” she said. It wobbled for a second, then stilled.
Now my houseplants fill me with dread. I’m going to hurt them.
When I was 17, I played the ingenue in a community theatre production of The Lady’s Not for Burning, by Christopher Fry. Much of this odd little play in verse from the 1940s was a complete headscratcher to both me and our Southern suburban audiences from the 1980s. But I enjoyed the costumes and the novel experience of being artsy with the random collection of judges, housewives, and grocery clerks of which our troupe was composed. My youthful brain did, however, grasp onto and unintentionally memorize one of the monologues delivered by the older female protagonist, Jennet. I have come to think of it as a meditation on human curiosity:
I am interested
In my feelings. I seem to wish to have some importance
In the play of time. If not,
Then sad was my mother’s pain, sad my breath,
Sad the articulation of my bones,
Sad, sad my alacritous web of nerves,
Woefully, woefully sad my wondering brain,
To be shaped and sharpened into such tendrils
Of anticipation, only to feed the swamp of space?
Like the Joni Mitchell lyrics about disappointing romance which I also memorized back then, I did not understand it yet. But I guess there were enough phrases that vibrated inside me—my wondering brain, tendrils of anticipation, the swamp of space—that the words graduated into my long-term memory. From there, they have leaked back into my consciousness repeatedly throughout my life, volatile organic compounds warning me to remember why I’m here. Like Jennet, I have always had my face tilted upward and my ear cocked, expectant of revelations. I want to know all the unknowable things, and to believe there is a place for myself among them. The longing I have felt for this has sometimes seemed to contain a promise of its own fulfillment. Why, as Hamlet says, would I be capable of this wonder if it was just going to fust in me unused? Surely this receptor inside me was proof that a message from the universe was forthcoming.
I know next to nothing about the nitty gritty of botany or science. I have a pedestrian high school familiarity with the basics: something something photosynthesis, something about cells. Something climate change. But I am a true science enthusiast, a right sucker for the green things of the world. I listen to that podcast because the journalist hangs out with scientists and gets to see things like the plants in their labs. But I am no scientist. Math is hard. If a scientist points at a monitor and says, “See those lights? See this readout? These mean that this plant can feel,” well, I believe them. I say, “Wow, that’s amazing,” but I really have no proof they are telling the truth. Technically, what I have is faith. I think most of us basic secular clods are like this. We have faith in Science in the same way a peasant leaning on her hoe in a field in Gascony in 1351 has faith in the Church. Science is our religion, and we are devout, dogmatic, even. Scientists are priests and we let them do what they want.
I learned this from being a mother. When my daughter was still tiny, I started bringing her to museums. I had it in my head that being a parent was mainly just sharing whatever wonder you managed to hang onto from your own childhood. I intended to present all the evidence of life’s incredible strangeness to her. Vitrines full of specimens. Dioramas of ancient peoples. Mummies. Laser shows in planetariums that mapped the universe across the darkness.
I took her to the observatory on top of a mountain in our city.
“This is a famous place,” I told her, “where scientists have studied the stars.”
In the old magnificent room, around the top of all four walls, was a banner with an inscription. I picked her up and held her face close to my mine. I pointed to the words in the banner, and I read them aloud while we slowly rotated to discover the message. It said something along the lines of:
Everything you see around you, everything you have ever seen: forests, animals, your own hands, your daily bread, the face of your beloved, these words you are reading now—all of it was once part of a star.
We stood there with our faces tilted up to the proverb while the western sunshine crashed down to the floor all around us from the high windows. I heard the voices of the crowd in the room, the chatting elders, other mothers with other children, the tour guide and the jostling teenagers. I felt my daughter’s sticky hand palpating my face distractedly and saw from the corner of my eye the slow rotation of her face toward mine.
“Is that true?” she said
“Yes, I guess it is.”
“Part of a star? In the sky?”
I gave her my face and shared my own amazement.
“I guess so!”
“How do you know?”
“It’s science.”
If you asked the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, he would say that my natural curiosity, like the totality of human culture, is merely a defensive strategy against the repressed knowledge of my mortality. If so, it is certainly a dull instrument because I think about death a lot. What is a lot, anyway? Do other people do this and if so, how much? How much is too much? Do some people not think about it enough? What is the optimal number of death thoughts one should strive for? These are all things I might try to get to the bottom of one day because I am curious about them.
Because I can be socially odd, I sometimes preplan conversation topics and questions to use at parties. Once I tried something to the effect of this: “Hi, I’m Nancy. I have a theory that everything we do—careers, hobbies, interests, relationships, sex, religion, the arts—they’re all just something to do between meals. What do you think?” I found it to be a real conversation killer, so maybe Becker is right, and I stumbled directly into the universal human taboo. I understand why. My curiosity does have a fearsome shadow, into which I’ve strayed more than once in my life. I’ve learned to mostly keep one foot out of it, but it’s tricky. You can get lost in there, between those meals.
Becker also said the Western way of steering our children away from questions and thoughts about death bordered on abusive. We implicitly condition them not to ask us questions about it, or express fears about it. We tell them not to be morbid. We think we are doing them a service and maybe we are. But really, aren’t we just leaving them alone in their fear, never letting on that we share it? Of course, we do. How cruel. I might have inflicted this parenting calamity unwittingly on my daughter, too, when she spoke of death. But look, I’d say, at how lovely life is. Look at the star. Look at the tree. Look at your mother who loves you. When really, I was saying, Don’t ask me that again. I will not embrace your shadow.
I have not read the articles about how scientists are working with artificial intelligence to decode animal languages, but here is a partial list from the first page of an old-fashioned web search:
- Artificial Intelligence Could Finally Let Us Talk with Animals (Scientific American)
- What Are Animals Saying? AI May Help Decode Their Languages (National Geographic)
- Groundbreaking Effort Launched to Decode Whale Language (National Geographic)
I’m too afraid of what the animals must be saying. I’m afraid of their genocide poetry. Maybe I have reached the limits of my own curiosity. If so, this is a kind of death. Sad, sad my wondering brain. But perhaps it also has something to do with a result from page three of that web search:
- AI-Generated Nonsense is Leaking into Scientific Journals (Popular Science)
I don’t know if I can muster faith in the new priests.
My daughter is in college now, but in my head, I still talk to the child she was, who is the child that I was, too. I still share my wonder and my faith.
“Plants can talk, too, Ivy. They talk to each other. Is that not astounding?”
“You’re silly, Mama.”
“No really! Plants warn each other about danger. It’s science.”
In 2023, at team of researchers at Saitama University in Japan published a paper sharing their discovery of how injured or damaged plants warn other plants of environmental hazards. When stressed, plants release a mist of volatile organic compounds. These compounds, which contain calcium ions, are rapidly absorbed by surrounding plants, in which they trigger immune responses. To document this communication, the researchers put caterpillars to feed on mustard plants. Nearby were unmunched mustard plants whose cells had been genetically altered to fluoresce green when an influx of calcium ions was detected. Then they could see the healthy plant “read” the chemical warning from the plant with the caterpillars. And they filmed it.
“Here is the video, darling. Do you see? Watch the undulating green light ripple across the leaves of the unharmed plants, disappearing down the stalk. Just think: the world is full of this plant chatter, this invisible glow.”
When I was writing the part of this essay about the Christopher Fry quote, I looked up the text online so I could cut and paste it perfectly into my document. My search term was the opening lines of the monologue: “I am interested / In my feelings. I seem to wish to have some importance / In the play of time.” I got a list of links but at the top of them was the new box where the browser’s integrated AI search tool answered my query. It said:
It’s natural to want to feel valued and important in relationships. Recognizing your feelings and seeking connections where your emotions are acknowledged can help strengthen your self-esteem and overall well-being.
This was followed by a page of links like these:
- Nine Tips for Expressing Feelings (Choosing Therapy)
- 13 Signs You’re Struggling with Emotional Numbness (Loner Wolf)
I closed the page and typed the web address for Internet Archive into my browser. There I found a file containing perfect photographs of each page of the 1950 first edition of The Lady’s Not for Burning from Oxford University Press. This was the edition we used for our rehearsals, which was an old book even then. I flipped to the photo of the cover. It was goldenrod, coffee stained, studded with tiny, printed flame icons. Widening my thumb and finger out on my track pad, I zoomed in until I could count each stitch in the fine linen binding. I leaned forward toward the screen, basking in this comforting material evidence, proof that my memory was real. This, too, is a wonder.
In my dream, I’m on stage in a clumsy archaic costume. The set is a lush green forest of giant mustard plants. There are footlights shining brightly up at me like fallen stars. I can’t see the audience, but I know they are there. I hold a wrapped baby doll, and I jiggle her as I complete my monologue:
What is deep, as love is deep, I’ll have
Deeply. What is good, as love is good
I’ll have well. Then if time and space
Have any purpose, I shall belong to it.
If not…
…the least
I can do is to fill the curled shell of the world
With human deep-sea sound, and hold it to
The ear of God.[1]
As the lights fade, I pluck a sprig of mustard and hold it carefully to my baby’s ear. Then comes applause, and the house lights come up, and everyone moves toward the exits.
[1] Fry, Christopher. The Lady’s Not for Burning. Dramatists Play Service, 1971, p. 45. (Permission to reprint granted by publisher.)
Nancy Bell is a writer and theatre artist living in St. Louis, where she is a professor at Saint Louis University. Their essays and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Shenandoah, North American Review, Flyway Journal, and elsewhere.
Header photo by Steve Buissinne, courtesy Pixabay.
