notes from The Botany of Desire

pg 17;
Like a shimmering equal sign, the word sweetness denoted a reality commensureate with human desire: it stood for fullfillment.

pg 37
the Greeks regarded Dionysus as the antithesis of Apollo, god of clear boundaries, order, and light, of mans firm control over nature. Dionysian revelry melts every Apollian line. By worshipping Dionysus and getting drunk on his wine, the Athenians temporarity returned to nature, to a time when, as the classicist Jane Harrison writes, "man is still to his won thinking brother of plants and animals," The odd, escatic worship of Dionysus, which needed no temple, always took place outside the city, returning religion to the weeds where it had begun.
Dionysus brought wild plants into the house of civilization (as the god of propogation, cultivation, apple trees), but by the same token his own untamed presence reminded people of the untamed nature on which that house always rests, somewhat unsteadily.


pg 105
The tulip is a flower that draws some of the most exquisite lines in nature, and then, in spazms of extravagance, blithely oversteps them. On the same principle, syncopation enlivens a regular, four-four mesure of music, enjambment of the stately line iambic pentameter. So here is a third constituent of beauty to add to the desiderata offered to us by the flower: first came contrast, then pattern (or form), and finally variation.
Great art is born when Apollion form and Dionysian ecstacy are held in balance, ehen our dreams of order and abandon come together.

pg 143
[If someone wrote a book on the natural history of world religion] it would force us to rethink the relation of metter and spirit~ specifically, plant matter and human spirituality. For it would tell how a select group of psychoactive plants and fungi were present at the creation of several of the worlds religions.
the power of plants to transcend the here and now and insuce ecstacy - to take them elsewhere. Ethnobotonists call them entheogens, meaning the god within.

In the same way the human desire for beauty and sweetness introduced into the world a new survival strategy for the plants that could gratify it, the human hunger for transcendence created new opportunituies for another group of plants, No entheogenic plant or fungus ever set out to make molecules for the express purpose of inspiring visions in humans - combating pests is the more likely motive. But the moment humans discovered what these molecules could do for them this wholly inadvertent magic, the plants that made them suddenly had a brilliant new way to prosper. and drom that moment on this is exactly what the plants with the strongest magic did.


pg163
"Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by," Neitsche begins an 1876 essay called "The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life".... a moving and occasionally hilarious paean to the virtues of forgetting, which he maintains is a prerequisite to human happiness, mental health and action.
What Neitzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence - a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, muscian, dancers, mystics, meditatiors, and the devout in prayer. Something very like it can occur during sex too, or while under the influence of certain drugs. It is a state that depends for its effect on losing oneself in the moment, usually by training powerful, depthless concentration on One Big Thing. (Or, in Eastern tradition, One Big Nothing.) If you imagine conscioiusness as a kind of lens through which we percieve the world, the drastic contricting of its field of vision seems to heighten the vividness of whatever remains in the circle of perception, while everything else (including our awareness of the lens itself) falls away.


Awakening to this present instant, a Zen master has written, we realize the infinite is in the finite of each instant.

Yet we cant get there from here without first forgetting.

pg 166
"Nature always wears the color of the spirit," Emerson wrote, by which he meant we never see the world plainly, only through the filter of prior concepts or metaphors. ("Colors," in classical rhetoric, are tropes.)

pg 167
Or that exceptionally delicious spoonful of vanilla ice cream - ice cream! - parting the drab curtains of the quotidian to reveal, what? = the heartrendingly sweet significance of cream, yes, bearing us all thw way back to the breast. Not to mention the never-before-adequately-appreciated wonder of: vanilla! How astonishing is it that we happen to inhabit a universe in which this quality of vanilla-ness, - this bean! - happens to reside?? How easily could it have been otherwise, and just where would we be, where would chocolate be? without that singular irreplaceable note, that middle C on the Scale of Archetypal Flavors? (Paging Dr. Plato!) For the first time in your journey on this planet you ae fully appreciating Vanilla in all its italicized and caoitalized significance. Until, that is, the next epiphany comes along ( kiwis, chairs, breeze) and the one about ice cream is blown away like a leaf on the breeze of free association.
...They may well be banal, but that doesnt mean they arent also at the same time profound.
Marijauna dissolves this apperent contradiction by making us temporarily forget most of the baggage we usually bring to perception, our aquired sense of familiarity and banality. For what is a sense of banality but a defense against the overwhelming (or at least whelming) power of fresh experience?

*Banality depends on memory; as do irony and abstraction and boredom; three other defences the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.



pg 245

"this is the assembly of life that it took a billion years to evolve," the biologist E.O.Wilson has written, speaking of biodiverstiy. "It has eaten the storms - folded then into its genes - and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady." To risk this multiplicity is to risk unstring the world.