Thus Spoke the Plant by Monica Gagliano

Author:Monica Gagliano
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623172442
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2018-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

Two weeks passed. I was in my lab, monitoring peas and setting up mazes, lights, and fans, every single day from the early hours of the morning till late in the afternoon. Technically, the experimental system was working well, and the peas were successfully growing, but their ability to navigate the maze didn’t seem to be influenced by the presence of the fan as the cue that would give them the best chance at finding light. The initial data suggested that about half of the seedlings were growing to the left and half to the right of the maze in a random fashion (50:50). In short, they were failing the test.

Head low and tail between my legs, there I was on a sunny Sunday morning ready to dismantle and pack away the whole setup, dismayed at the outcome. I left the brightness of the outside world and walked into the dim light of the Plant Growth Facilities’ corridor. I opened the door marked “Plant learning in progress. Do not enter.” and entered. The controlled-environment room met me with its computerized wave of coolness, which rolled over my skin until I broke into a shiver. The room absorbed me within its undisturbed darkness, where several pea seedlings were quietly waiting inside their mazes. At the flick of one switch, the tiny blue LED lights mounted on each maze glowed like fireflies in the rich blackness of the space, a space where the confinement of walls had become imperceptible.

I glanced around as my inquisitorial mind started the court-martial. How could I have been so daft? Did I seriously believe that a tree in the Amazon—or, to be precise, the spirit of a tree in the Amazon—had given me instructions (which, to my credit, I had followed to a T) on how to carry out these experiments? All of a sudden, as the internal assault escalated, my eyes stopped searching. My gaze brushed over a little something that, until that moment, had gone unnoticed. There in the dark, I had found what I had been looking for.

We believe we see only because of the presence of light, but it is in the dark that light becomes visible. From the encounter of light and darkness we are born, and with us, the world emerges. Constantly molding the world around us with our gaze, we in turn are molded by the gaze the world presses upon us. Unaware of this interplay of luminosities, we rarely recognize that all we see is seeing us. Rarely do we realize that by virtue of its being all around us, the penetrating gaze of the world sees us, at all times and from all sides, in our multidimensionality. We, however, see the world from a one-sided standpoint only: the frontal view. As in single-point perspective drawing, we make the object of our most immediate gaze look realistic and three-dimensional, while most of the world is distorted and lost away to a vanishing point in an illusory distance.

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