Ann Lauinger

I grew up in Manhattan and loved it. My childhood acquaintance with nature was, to say the least, circumscribed. Apart from seventh-grade science classes in Central Park where we learned to identify the leaves of various trees, the only thing I knew first-hand about plants was that gingko trees smelled awful. On our occasional family vacations outside the city, I found the silence ominous; alone in some rustic bed, the soft noise of a moth bumbling into my bedside lamp filled me with Hitchcockian terror.

I’m not sure when or how these fears disappeared; probably I simply came to spend less time in the concrete jungle and more time in places where nature had not been driven out. I fell in love first with wildflowers and then with mushrooms and then with the whole non-human scene from sky to soil. Complementarily, I seem to have spent a lot of time wondering about the strange phenomenon of human consciousness, which, despite its many creative glories, I’ve come to think of as a freakish and maladaptive organ. What puzzles me endlessly is the relation between the enormously complex and rich array of earth’s inhabitants, which so compel my attention and inform my perceptions, and those same, necessarily subjective, perceptions.

It seems important to recognize the independence of natural things from any meaning I might impose on them. Yet it’s not just Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy” that constitutes imposition; metaphors also impose—but then too, doesn’t the very act of perception? It seems impossible that I could “see,” say, the magnolia tree outside my window purely in and of itself. Assuming I could achieve such a pure and unmoored cascade of sensations, would that be knowing? Poetry is where I play-wrestle with ideas like this, and where I find myself in varying relations with the trees, plants, and flowers that always arrest and enchant me. I’m sure there’s a scientific (and, I fear, disturbing) explanation for the second flowering of my magnolia. Yet it’s the beauty and strangeness of our fellow creatures, their calm imperviousness to the buzzing of my consciousness with its perceptions, emotions, and inventions that, for me, forms one of the deep consolations of being human.