august 2004.

after all this time, i finally went to see the glass flowers. cristina cervone had told me about them when i first moved to cambridge, and i was curious, but at that time i had been too self-possessed, too disoriented and too lethargic, to find out how to get there. if i had even bothered to look it up on a map, i would have realised at once how near it was, but at that time, as a newcomer to a city, the idea of planning a day trip was too exhausting — i imagined bus timetables going into boston and unfolding maps on street corners and getting lost  — i always get lost in american cities, and filed it away under “things to do before i graduate.”

on my way to the yard last week two visitors had stopped me on oxford street to ask for directions to the natural history museum and i apologised that i didn’t know, so sorry, so sorry, and barely a minute later i wheeled and ran after them calling out wait! because for the first time i saw where the museum was and that it was a museum. the harvard museum of natural history was barely 300 metres down the road from perkins hall, where i live, and i have been walking past it, on the opposite side of the road, four days a week, for over three months now, and never realised it was a museum. unlike the fogg it looked like any old harvard building. until then i had never looked at the name above the door. the shock i felt then — it was almost like acquiring first sight — you saw what was really there, and what was really there was a harvard museum right across the road. but there was also the embarrassment - all this time that i thought i was learning about a new city - i was never really looking.

so i went in of course.

because the emphasis is always on “glass,” and because pictures i have found on the web are so tame, even homely, nothing prepared me for what i saw. it took my breath, and i was at once reverent and joyful. i am going to have to go back because the display was impossible to take in all at once. case upon case, row upon row, five, six different kinds of plants in each, so closely pushed together, an eye-scattering mess of magnified stamens and pistules and cross sections — how can one really look? even though its primary purpose is scientific and educational, not aesthetic, shouldn’t they be arranged less like a science room glass case display and more like pieces of art in a museum? each case framing one plant, and so that the viewer can give each the attention it deserves — the way winterson says we have to look at art? (speaking of which, phil fisher is teaching a class called “prolonged attention in paintings and novels” next semester.) i think i will go back after christmas break and go through the exhibition once more, slowly, and then after that stop in once every week and look - really look - at just one case each time. i have years here, and they deserve this attention.

i was turning away at the end of an aisle when a woman turned into mine. isn’t this overwhelming? she said to me. yes, i said, and i walked back down the row with her and pointed to the red maple leaves. it was almost childlike, really. she smiled at me: ah, do they move you too? she turned out to be a forester from vermont, and knew a great deal about trees, and started telling me about red maples and silver maples (i remembered this last night, when von was talking about the silver maple on athens street whose trunk had split dramatically because of the extreme cold.) and somehow we got onto seed dispersal. i started telling her about mahogany seed pods outside my grandmother’s house, and white passion flowers and their crimped coils, winding over fences in old punggol churchyards, and raintrees too, how fern hung from them, and how the flared filaments of the raintree flower were like small pink eruptions. in turn she showed me her copy of rachel carson’s the sense of wonder which has recently been reissued with beautiful photography by nick kelsh. we browse through the photographs together. and i think that is the uniting power of beauty — that when seized by beauty, for a few moments strangers see in the same transformed light — before moving apart again.

we pause at the picture of a fern. i now think it is what i call leather fern, but then neither of us could conjure up a name. but who cares about the name? she says. it’s nice to know, but if you have the sense of wonder and love for the sight - that’s more important? briefly the flippant in me rose up and wanted to quote progo: no! it’s precisely naming, and being known by name, that is important! but of course that would be wilfully misconstruing her. still, names are important. and that is part of the reason i’m going to go back - so that each name may come to register a place in my mind, so that their living botanical counterparts will be known by name. von navigates by the stars this semester, and the night sky is unique to him - “we two remake our world by naming it…” and i shall navigate my harvard years by my flowers.