—

Once upon a time, X was walking along a garden path, carrying a bouquet of flowers.1

“Hey!” The garden keeper boomed. Gesturing towards a sign that read the same words the keeper spoke: “It is forbidden to pick the flowers from the garden.”

“I had them when I came in,” X retorted.

The keeper said nothing.

I have been trying to understand the boundary between tiredness and exhaustion. When one is tired one feels to be at their own limit. One can be so physically tired that one’s leg feels too heavy to take a step, or so mentally tired that a fog suffocates one’s mind and temporarily refuses access.

To be exhausted is to be rendered flightless; but rather than just feeling the heaviness of one’s leg, one opens up new possibilities by collapsing and crawling around on the ground. One falls over. Here one sees the grass from a different perspective. Look at this blade flirt with this dewy wet droplet
.
.
.

What could one find crawling on the ground?

Sometime after this incident a sign appeared at the entrance to the garden:

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ENTER THE GARDEN
CARRYING FLOWERS

When thinking about the difference between tiredness and exhaustion it would be a misunderstanding to think of one as a lesser or more-er version of the other. In fact, tired and exhausted are different in texture. It’s a feeling thing, there are multiple paths.

To follow a path is to become familiar with its behaviour. To lean into and push one’s tongue against the edges of a word or thing is to trace its capabilities and its limits. Often these edges are not sharp or clear. Maybe they are humid, dense, and cumulus in some areas, and closer to a wispy cirrus cloud during strong winds in others.

For a symbol, such as the flower, to be tired could mean a requirement to deviate from the path in order to see (feel) less familiar (emotional) landscapes. It’s possible that this deviation happens while crawling. To crawl is to be exhausted, to crawl is to possibilitate.

The keeper noticed a dramatic decline in the health of the flowerbed. The flowers were being picked more frequently and aggressively and, although if someone was carrying flowers the keeper always knew where they had come from, the flowerbed was suffering.

Change and metamorphosis are the very materials of the garden. The sun and the moon slowly switch positions, the temperature sways, an uneven gradient forms between the seasons, and the apocalypse leans in for a kiss. One grows habits and one makes changes. I recently learnt that the shape of a tree’s foliage is called its habit. A hedge maze requires an intimately attended habit. To form a habit is to create a new path.

Pleaching is a technique where the branches of trees or hedges are interwoven to create a continuous wall of verdure. Branches in close contact may grow together, due to a natural phenomenon called inosculation. A thick, impenetrable boundary is formed.

So the keeper replaced the sign at the entrance to the garden with a new sign that read:

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ENTER THE GARDEN
WITHOUT CARRYING FLOWERS

This was an ingenious measure as the visitors, hands already busy with their own elaborate bouquets, were hardly likely to think of picking any others.

—

Through the gate at the entrance to the garden, one notices disembodied hands planting, beholding, and picking flowers. The sky is thick with a repeated floral motif and determines the mood of the landscape. Somewhere else, X holds a barely decipherable bouquet behind her back as she looms over O. Flowers are built up, rubbed back, reflected. Curlicues are dizzying dead ends and flowers chase their tails, pruned into the hedge of a maze to create spaces of both shelter and entrapment. One notices their boundaries, one inhabits their boundaries.

X begins to transplant her flowers into the ground, she crawls around, thoughtfully rearranging the existing flowerbed and observing what new compositions emerge. 

—Clare Longley

1 Jean Paulhan and Michael Syrotinski, The Flowers or Tarbes or, Terror in Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 81. Text in italics is an interpretation of a story that occurs in Paulhan’s book.