by Ken Parejko
“Well, anyway, I wanted out of my marriage. So I demanded a divorce. You know, the ship you saw at the harbor which brought Paul?”
“Yes.”
“Felix and Simon were on it, too. They went with him to Rome.”
“But I still don’t understand,” I said, the need to sleep taking over. “Why would Paul hate you?”
“He didn’t, really, because his beliefs didn’t allow him to. Otherwise he would have. He wanted to, I think,” she said, reaching down to scratch her foot. “He preached that gentiles didn’t need to get circumcised to join the new kind of Judaism, and I’d convinced a gentile to be circumcised, then left him. To him I was a harlot. Fornication he called it. When Felix and I walked into his cell, you could see the anger in his blood and hear it stir the bitterness in his voice. To save himself from hatred he’d turn away from us. Once when Felix was out of town I went to his cell, and tried to seduce him.”
I was fading into sleep, but her little confession yanked me back awake.
“I was tired of his bitchy moralizing. I thought I could show him how shallow it was. I brought him his bread and sat to watch him eat. When he was almost done I slipped off my cloak and there I was, naked. He watched me for a moment, then shut his eyes and began praying. I walked over to him, pushed my body into his face. Afterward I slipped into my cloak and left him to his dry bread and drier god.”
I wondered: what did she mean, afterward?
She sighed. “After that,” she noted quietly, with what seemed a touch of pride in her voice, “he preached the wickedness of women.”
If she said anything else, I didn’t hear. I'd fallen asleep. The moon slipped into the westerly sea. While we slept, our bodies making tiny adjustments to each other, the night slipped quietly by. In a few hours the sun returned, peeking out from behind Vesuvius. The earth, as though complaining at having to wake for a new day, shuddered a little. The little moth by the window rose from off the wall and followed the light into another morning.
Day by day my herbarium grew, sprawled across the study, took on a life of its own. Each time I encountered a new plant I added it to the collection. Over time I’d settled into a regular routine, first slipping the flower or leaf between two sheets of papyrus. New paper was too valuable to use for this, so I used discarded books from which I’d cut squares of different sizes. On one side of the sheet I’d write the name of the plant, if I knew it -- for many, I had to make up a name – and the date and place of collection. Then I pressed the specimen under a heavy block of marble for a week or more before moving it to another stack for cataloging.
Classification continued to vex me. The simplest scheme was: grass, herb, shrub or tree. At first that was what I used. But as the collection grew, from dozens to scores and finally hundreds of different plants, it became nearly impossible to find a particular specimen in the collection. The categories were too broad. In Book One of The Enquiry into Plants Theophrastus talked about several classification schemes: classifying plants by odor, or habit, or differences in their seeds, but I found that none of these worked well.
In my Natural History I’d given almost all my attention to plants useful to man. But many in my collection didn’t have a use that I knew of. Polybius’ histories and Theophrastus’ emphasis on the relationship between individuals and their environment had started me thinking. I began one afternoon then worked late into the night to re-sort the entire collection, separating the specimens by habitat. The habitat types I settled on were dry hillside, dry and wet meadow, forest, beach, and a catch-all bin I called ceterus, or “other.” Within these habitat types I separated the herbs from the grasses, shrubs from the trees. I discovered that for most of the plants I had more than one specimen, and noticed too that some were found in more than one -- some even in all -- of the habitat-types. This itself was interesting, and raised new questions: how is it that some plants are generalists, others not? I began to notice slight differences in the horse-tail collected in dry meadows versus dry hillsides. Was this because they were actually different kinds, or from the influence the habitat had on the way they grew? This was not an entirely theoretic question.
Except for the half-dozen frail plants which I’d started in a corner of my own back yard, so far as I knew Cyrenean silphium was extinct. I thought of having a monument built in its name, fashioned after the ubiquitous busts of our heroes, inscribed with its accomplishments, medical and culinary. But there remained in my mind the question of whether Cyrenean silphium was indeed a different kind of plant than the inferior kinds now imported from Media and Parthia, or the same kind, made more potent by the climate, soil and sun of Cyrene. It was like the races of man, each situated in its own environment, which made them what they were. As a student I'd been told that Italy was the most perfect land on earth, and therefore we Romans were destined to rule the other, inferior peoples. While it was possible to Romanize a German or Egyptian, they always remained, below the surface, what they were. Was that also true of plants like silphium? Would Castor's seeds grow into Cyrenian or some other less potent silphium? If only my few fragile plants, grown from his seeds in soil I’d ordered brought from Cyrenaica, would survive, I could answer that question.
My new classification scheme suited me well. Now when I collected a new specimen and wanted to compare it to a plant I might already have, I went straight to the pile of plants collected in a similar habitat.
I'd also begun noting on each specimen whether the plant was native, or exotic. Some were easy. Skirret, for example, which I was battling to exterminate from hillsides along the Bay, was brought down from Germany by Tiberius. But how many of the plants that we now considered native had been introduced at some unknown time and place? As I studied the influence of environment on a species, I was also learning that one species, ours, had an especially profound effect on the landscape. I was more and more alarmed at the growing number of exotics making their way into our landscape. Like the slaves we brought in to farm our fields who then put our own farmers out of work, who then flocked to the city where, instead of being productive members of society they came to rely on the corn dole, which only increased the reliance on slave labor, the alien species were surely having an effect on our native plant communities.
But overall, other than fretting over our plant communities this was a good time for me. The chores of the admiralty had become routine; most days I could carry out my official duties in just a few hours. Meanwhile I invested my enthusiasm in my new project. I’d spent many days in the field, followed by long hours at night pouring over and organizing my finds, and as I did so I grew increasingly intimate with and attached to the Campanian landscape.
In spite of watching my diet I’d continued to put on weight. The dry heat of the summer made my asthma worse, so by the time Drusilla arrived I hadn’t been out in the field collecting for several weeks. But now I could visit the Bay’s different habitats without even going outside.
The several hundred plant specimens scattered around the room were the raw material of my Flora of Campania. What still needed doing was to pull all my notes and observations together into an organized, publishable form.
Last winter while the rain beat incessantly down on the roof and kept me from the byways of the Cape, and because ships did not venture out into the Middle Sea my official duties were not so heavy, I re-read Varro’s Imagines. Marcus Terentius Varro like Vespasian was a native of Sabine country. Varro’s Imagines consist of brief biographies of his seven hundred favorite Greeks and Romans, and uniquely for biographies include a sketch of each person. So then it occurred to me, why not for plants? Why not include a brief description, and a drawing of each plant in my Flora?
So I began studying the specimens in more detail, to better describe them, even making sketches of their leaves and flowers, a skill I'd never imagined myself capable of. A month or so ago while sketching the horse-parsley leaf – it was a common plant, a generalist I had more than one specimen of -- I noticed that
when I lifted the leaves off the paper on which they were pressed, the leaves had left a kind of spectral imprint, a green shadowy image on the paper. Horse-parsley leaves were fine and delicately-cut. The image was quite lovely. I noticed too that the imprint overlay a page from a discarded copy of Virgil’s Georgics. I bent above the page, and squinted to read Virgil’s poignant verses:
“Meanwhile the sweet babes twine round their parents’ necks, the chaste family maintains its purity, the cows hang down their udders full of milk, and the fat kids wrestle together, butting horns on the cheerful green.”
I held the page up to the soft light coming in through the west window, and involuntarily let out a sigh. My opinion on a painting or sculpture was considered by many to be the last word in criticism. Here, it seems, I’d accidentally created an art form. I hung the horse-parsley print on the wall and found myself casually looking through the rest of the collections for other leaves which had left their prints on papyrus. I especially enjoyed the interplay of leaf-form and background text, and found some noteworthy coincidences.
I didn’t have a specimen of Cyrenian silphium. I regretted not having collected a leaf from Castor’s garden, had not located a single plant while in Cyrenaica, and my own plants were much too small and fragile to steal a leaf from. But when one day I opened my specimen of Parthian silphium I was surprised to find the leaf pressed between two pages of an early draft of Book 22 of my Natural History, in which I described silphium as one of nature’s most precious gifts.
By now I had a half-dozen of my favorite plant-poems, as I called them, hung in the study. Somehow Castor’s spirit seemed to hover around them, these plants which the old man had described as only wanting to be. When officials came down from Rome to inspect the fleet or discuss the business of the admiralty I herded them into the study and proudly showed off this growing collection of spectral imprints, undoubtedly adding to my reputation as an eccentric.
One evening I went off to the study, where I could be found in all my free time. Drusilla, with nothing much to do, wandered the house until she found herself standing at the entrance to my room watching me work. I sat at the far side of the room surrounded by the scattered half-dozen candles and oil-lamps I needed for light. My back to her, reading lens in hand, I was busily sketching an oleander flower. She walked in behind me to read one of the plant-poems I’d hung on the wall.
“Why, these are absolutely lovely,” she said.
“What did you say?”
“These plants, on the wall,” she said. “They’re lovely. Did you do these?”
“Yes.”
“But how?”
“Accidentally, really,” I said, not looking up from my sketch. “From pressing them, they leave an insignia.”
“It’s as though you’ve captured an image of the plant’s soul.”
I grunted a light assent. The idea that plants had souls pre-dated Aristotle. But even if a plant had a “soul,” why would its soul look like the plant? I had less and less patience for that kind of use, or misuse actually, of the language. I picked up a delicate blade I’d borrowed from one of the fleet’s surgeons and teased apart the oleander blossom. I studied it with a lens, took pen in hand, and added a detail to the sketch. Drusilla stood behind me quietly watching me work. I was hardly aware of her presence.
Of my many interests of late it was flowers that were most compelling. I was going through my collection one specimen at a time, looking for flowers. Flowers meant different things to different people. In the Natural History I’d listed innumerable cultural traditions in different parts of the world which had grown up around them. Aside from their use as medicines, they represented everything from fertility to hope and joy, divinity and the eternal soul – there it was again. Flower petals were thrown for kings or priests to walk on. Giving a flower to someone was a token of affection. All this was true, but still begged the question of what flowers were really about, to themselves.
As I turned the oleander blossom I tried to see it from the plant’s point of view. Flowers were clearly involved in reproduction; the simplest child knew that when the flower died, it gave birth to the seed, or fruit. But as I stared at the tiny oleander, the blossom took on an added dimension. It was as though I was staring down a deep well. No, I thought, focusing on the flower and my perception of it. Not staring down a well; staring up a well. It was said that if you stand at the bottom of a deep well, in broad daylight, and look up, the sky is dark and you can see the stars.
So the flower, which lay sensually open to my gaze, was the well, through which I had access to its secrets and who knew what else. I grew almost dizzy thinking about it, but it seemed an important truth about the flower. But what kind of truth was this? Did it have to do more with my own mind than with the flower itself? Wasn't it also true that you could stare into a crystal or gem, or the flashing eyes of a lion, and see beyond, into the cosmos around it? If so, then the truth found in that staring was not a flower-truth, but a human -flavored cosmic truth. I had taken a wrong turn.
I wanted to get back to the flower, to leave the wild imaginings behind. I lifted the flower gently, and brought the lens over it. Deep within the bed of its petals stood the reproductive parts. I used the surgical probe to tease it apart. Drusilla slipped closer to see better.
“These,” I said, “these parts that stand up, they play a part in reproduction.” I felt her hands on my shoulders, smelled her as she bent down to look through the reading lens. “I think they’re involved in making the seeds. One of them is different, and that one is like the ovary of an animal. I think that's where the seeds are formed.”
I set the flower down and picked up the pen. I sketched the male part of the flower as best I could, the part dusted with pollen. Through hard practice I’d become much better at drawing, and was quietly proud of that.
“It looks like a stamen,” Drusilla said.
She startled me. While concentrating on drawing, I’d forgotten she was there. “A what?”
“A stamen, the little sprig of thread at the end of a loom’s warp,” she explained. I set the pen down, traveled down the dusty corridors of my mind to childhood at Como. I found the house, entered and ran as I often did to the back room where mother sat busily at a loom weaving quietly away, her hands flying with the shuttle as the cloth grew slowly but inexorably. I peered down at the cloth, and yes, there were little ends of thread sticking up at the ends of the cloth, which did look very much like the flower-part.
I picked the flower up in one hand, the reading lens in the other. “Yes, you’re right.” I set the flower down and using the quill-pen, beside the drawing of the flower wrote: stamen, and drew a short line pointing to the male part. We both stared for a moment at the drawing, on which a truth, however small, had been given a name.
What I was trying to do in my careful study of plants and their parts was tease out the meaning to be found in the plants themselves. I was trying to discover not the why but the how of flowers. How do they grow from the bud? How do they open? How does the pollen impregnate the egg? How from this is the seed made? This was a different kind of knowledge than that cataloged in my Natural History. It was a different kind of truth than the truth of the flower as a well from which the entire cosmos is visible. I was lately fascinated -- my mind was tied into a bundle, like the fasces carried by magistrates as symbols of their power – which is to say my mind was lately bundled into the details of the natural world. And now, what interested me was the natural world not as it was useful to man, or represented some transcendent symbol, but as it was, in itself. I knew both my senses and the theoretical framework I was building from my observations could mislead me. But I also knew that the closer and more carefully I looked the kinder my senses were to me, and the stronger the framework I would build.
I set my pen down to rest my eyes. I felt I was onto something, this new, better way of describing the world. It provided me a kind of refuge from the loss of Vespasian. I’d taken him along
with me once or twice on field trips in nearby hills and fields. The other day I’d found myself in an interesting conversation with him about a plant I’d found when I realized I was talking to myself.
So the time had come to go beyond Theophrastus, who had carried the science of botany as far as he could. It was my turn now. There are many ways to learn from nature, I thought, and I've found a new one.
I felt a moment’s embarrassment for the Natural History; for what I advertised as its twenty thousand facts from the two thousand books I’d read, yet I knew that as wide-ranging as it was, it had almost no depth. How many of the facts, after all, were not facts at all but rumors, mere speculations.
I stared out the window into the dark; but not so dark, because a full moon now lit the Bay beneath me, with its dancing vivid white-caps, and hovered over the mass of Vesuvius, a dominating spectral presence. I'd given thought lately of climbing to its top. Near its top, I'd heard, it is cold and windy even when it is hot here. And there almost nothing grows. And what does grow there, I realized, must be very different from what grows here. And from Germany I remembered the many different plants, and in Spain, Judea and north Africa, where there were so many different palms, some of which I’d brought into my own garden. There was too much in nature to understand. So I'd start small, come to understand her here in Campania, and through that hope to catch a glimpse of the bigger picture. Worrying about the bigger picture, I knew, was a human frailty, which even I was prone to. When you thought about it, it was either ignorance or insanity to imagine that the human mind could encompass the universe. I will worry about the smaller picture, I thought, which is my duty, for if I don’t who will, and let the big picture take care of itself. It has for who knows how long before me and will go on just fine taking care of itself after me.
