2nd July 2010
St. Gerards Church, Knowle, Bristol, UK (Gerrard / Dyugu wedding).
Extract from Adaptation by Charlie Kaufman (and Donald Kaufman):
LAROCHE
What’s so wonderful is everyone of these flowers has a specific relationship with the insect that pollinates it. There’s a certain orchid looks exactly like a certain insect. Its double. Its soul mate. And wants nothing more than to make love to it. After the insect flies off, it spots another soul mate flower and makes love to it, thus pollinating it. And neither the flower nor the insect will ever understand the significance of their lovemaking. I mean how could they know because of their little dance the world lives? But it does. By simply doing what they are designed to do, something large and magnificent happens. In this sense they show us how to live, how the only barometer you have is your heart. How when you spot your flower, you can’t let anything get in your way.
Charlie Kaufman is a bit of a hero of mine… so now onto my shadow of writing under his…
It’s hard to see trees as sexual. They’re so alien to us. There’s little humanity to identify. I can imagine Kirk and Spock trying to communicate with something like a tree, as they did with the glowing molten rock monster (in the old Star Trek).
Incidentally – the only thing I remember to make Spock laugh was a singing plant. So to see sex in something we need to project humanity, I guess. Never the less, trees do need to reproduce or do you get male and female trees(?) I think not. If they’re hermaphrodite – they are effectively having sex with itself – with the help of insects. This may be stretching it. I need some expert advice. Call in the Arborist!
Is it more advanced – if I were observing scientifically as an alien, to need 2 parts to create life or for a single entity to hold all it needs to do so. Seems more practical for an all in one solution. Although there wouldn’t be such an effective mixing of genes … So anyway. That woman I met – who had an orgasm clutching a tree – what’s that all about? I don’t imagine it was an attraction thing. You bestiality – what’s the equivalent for plants, Flora and Faunication? – Ha! And what about fidelity? This is where I’ll mention Kahlil Gibran’s ‘Prophet’. He talks about marriage as being like 2 pillars of a temple. Each of them standing separately with the breeze allowed to blow between them, yet holding up the same ‘roof’. I’ll dig out the quote. I’d prefer to think of these pillars as the trunks of 2 trees, with the branches and roots intertwined. The birds and squirrels sharing the space they create together.
By standing together, by being unable to move 2 trees would by default have ultimate fidelity – or not. Another tree could easily be twining into both their branches and roots. I think it’s stretching a sexual nature too far. Trees just carry on I think … keep going – onward and upward. They are competitive without passion or envy, they reproduce or die without fear or joy. This is the kind of thinking we all assume. Trees don’t think or feel. What was that … was it an idea I had years ago or a story I heard? Where there was a machine that could pick up the sound of a tree’s pain – the screams coming from a tree when an axe went into it’s trunk. A horrific thought. Which brings me to my last thought – Anthea mentioned an artist who recorded – who put microphones inside tree trunks and recorded the sound. Must track that person down …
