I wonder if, when Freud was doing lines of cocaine, he'd taken the time to look in the mirror at himself. There must have been one nearby, though I can't be sure. I wonder if Freud would have been struck by the odd visual projection of reality he was witnessing – one in which reality was reversed, the other in which reality took on different textualities and meanings. Mirrors and cocaine, working together to distort reality. Of course, Freud had other obsessions. Maybe he just kept running lines until he tripped on his naked subconscious.
* * *
There was a time when people believed in my golden radiance. When my sunshine locks, gave a sense of home to those that have traveled so far. Still, today, for as long as I can remember, children of all persuasions greedily smile at me. Rub their snotty hot noses in the cluster of my gold dust pollen, like flightless huge lumbering bumblebees. As usual, they will pluck me from the earth to wear as crowns. I anoint immature queens. Give them the glow of mature beauty and regal riches. Soon I will become the baby though, in a morbid sort of game.
"Mama had a baby and its head popped off!"
Zing. There goes my head. Before I've had a chance to sprout my own babies and cast them to the wind. I'm sure their parents have put them up to it. Ruthless bastards.
* * *
Trying to understand mirrors is like walking backwards, it isn't hard – it's just awkward. When I first started shaving the strange stubble unevenly peppering my face, I found left, wasn't left, and right, definitely wasn't right. I've got razor scars to prove it. I had put blind trust in the mirrors depiction of reality and was betrayed. Bamboozled. Mirrors give us images that must be consciously manipulated in our mind to fit our own understanding of the kinetic space around us. Everything is an act of reading and interpreting.
I can't afford cocaine. Both in the monetary sense and also in the attempting-to-avoid-drug abuse sense. So I turn my addictive personality towards dandelions. Seems like rather an odd choice – dandelions. Nothing special. A common yellow flower that frantically blooms earlier than most. Always in the act of doing something. Opening in the morning to the light and closing with the coming of darkness. Dandelions open their yellow eyes to greet the day and lazily shut them as twilight sets in – perhaps we are just following the dandelions lead.
Throughout this waking and sleeping, its yellow flower head is in the process of converting and storing energy – constantly and incessantly. The servitude of all plants and animals are at the whims of morphing energy from one state to the next. Dandelions' are all about expediency though, they do their biological dance of energy and reproduction in bursts of ecstatic quickies, and more often then not, only with themselves.
Each of the dandelions florets or petals that form the flower head, are coupled with feathery whiskers surrounding the base called pappus, as well as a teardrop shaped ovary – the fruit of the flower carrying the children that will eventually take flight with the pappus as a wind catcher and parachute. Every petal is eventually accompanied by a slender duck tongue looking growth called an anther tube. This phallic protrusion will erect an extension called a style, which is doused heavily in pollen. Bees and butterflies, lured by the dandelions' bitter sweet juices, will be rubbed gently by these anther tubes, facilitating the fertilization of nearby dandelions that these bees and butterflies lovingly fumbled upon.
Often, this process of fertilization doesn't work out for dandelions. So. They have sex with themselves. If this is the case, the anther tube splits at the top forming the universal symbol of fertility and curls upon itself. Slowly and delicately, the curling of the anther tube gently rubs its own pollen on the inside of its tubes – it looks like the undressing of a unnaturally long and invisible banana. A striptease and complicated love-making process, whose only pleasure seems to be in creating curvy succulent shapes, much like the artsy shapes of bodies tumbling over each other in cool smooth sheets.
Following these rituals of fertilization the dandelion tightly closes upon itself. A tired and defeated sleep. The feathery pappus goes through a growth spurt and forces the petals out of the womb of its paint brush shaped head. The petals dry up and wilt to a brown, eventually falling to the ground in little clumps. Once petite, giddy, and yellow, these petals resemble little of its short life of charmed youthful beauty. In short order, the leathery spear-shaped leaves that enclose the pappus and ovary fruit arch back, almost painfully. When all of these enclosing leaves spread open, a spherical blow ball of fluffy pappus with the nut-looking ovary connected to them, is revealed. It's like a fluffy parachute factory. The prickly ovary fruits protrude precariously out of the dandelion's clock – the bald honeycomb looking surface that used to be its flower base, but is now a young paratrooper launching pad meant to spur them on to fight the cyclical war of survival and continuation.
Like the rich and powerful, the dandelions let others fight their evolutionary survival war. The wind carries the brunt of the burden. Luckily the dandelion fruits are tiny and light, of little consequence for even the lightest of breezes. Dogs, hares, and other mid-sized animals undoubtedly bump and trample over these blow balls knocking them into flight and scattering them wide. After landing in a suitable spot – ranging from an open lawn to a crack in some cement – the ovary breaks from its fluffy pappus parachute and begins the process over again.
Late October. All the dandelions are dead. More precisely, the flowers and leaves of dandelions are all but gone, while their long tap roots await next summer's warmth and sunshine. Angry quick-footed winds pretend to violently ripe off my cabin roof. Rain drops the size of small grapes are beating the aluminum drum of war. I smile. What would Freud say about a field of dandelions shamelessly masturbating and fighting such a cyclical war of survival? Perhaps he would have had more to say about me than about dandelions – his obsession was with people. Just once, I wish he would have sucked down his cocaine and riffed on dandelions.
Plants have so much to say. So much to teach us. If we would only take the time to reflect upon them. Surround them with our mirrors.
* * *
Still, there is a bit of love and fascination in this twisted theater. If I've managed to weather the mower and countless decapitations, I'll prepare my seedlings for flight, and those meddling primates, will make wishes with my children.
Oh. The secrets I could tell you! The whimsical fantasies that my own seed borne upon the wind and sprouted from. There are the girl's wishes for kisses and a princess castle. The little boy's simple wish for kisses. Not much more it seems. He'll forget soon enough. There is the woman who always talks to herself. Her hot breath casts hopes towards escaping and flying into the sky, to be planted anew, fresh and cheery.
* * *
"Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces." - Sigmund Freud
I can't sleep. Juneau rain relentlessly scatters itself against the cabin roof in rhythm with the wind. Restless drowsy tossing and turning. Wanting sleep. Bleeding for it. It escapes me. So. I think of dandelions and mirrors. Somehow I've wedded them in my mind. Seems to me, that dandelions and mirrors share something of the sense of familiarity or commonality. We don't often question a mirror's ability to reflect reality and we rarely scrutinize the common weed that dandelions have become. Each reflects and projects an ended discussion of sorts – mirrors do this and dandelions are that. Next topic.
Back home, there used to be a long skinny mirror on the living room wall. In my drowsy state of consciousness, listening to the wind and rain, I imagined breaking that mirror in two by kicking it near the center. The flimsy wall buckles a bit and the mirror breaks, not cleanly, but nevertheless into two separate pieces. If this wasn't pretend, my mother would have certainly killed me.
I take the two pieces of mirror outside to our shabby lawn, where a multitude of dandelion congregationalists are singing praises to the midnight sun. Hopefully people are not watching me in this half conscious dream. By placing the mirror pieces in a tepee arrangement with the dandelion center stage, an interesting manipulation of its own portrait is created. In each side of the mirror tepee walls is a seemingly infinite layered image of the dandelion and the surrounding grass. Over and over again. This is a manifestation of the metaphor I've been seeking.
Each succeeding image of the dandelion is a representation for its various states of existence. One is the dandelion that medieval scholars ascribed the Greek name Taraxacum to, deriving from the words meaning disorder and remedy. Another image, perhaps several of them, are those dandelions that the puritans brought over from the old world to the new as a healing agent. Still another image of this dandelion speaks to its various cross-cultural name which refers to the dandelion's diretic powers. Thus, the Italians, Spanish and contemporary French speakers draw on the dandelion's propensity in facilitating urinating in bed or the yellowness of its flower in resembling piss (perhaps this is why so few bouquets of dandelion flowers are exchanged between lovers). There is the portrait of one dandelion which was commanded by God to the Israelites to eat as a bitter herb when coming out of Egypt during the passover. Some of the dandelion's images represent its use as a mosquito repellent or the Russians' use of it in creating a natural rubber substance from its bitter creamy substance inside its stem. Finally, there is my pretty, masturbating, gossiping, angry dandelion and a host of other's I've yet to discover.
I lay down on my back with my head next to the dandelion, looking into the mirrors. I now exist in the infinite illusions and representations along with the dandelion. We exist together in layers of history, of artful prose and poetry, of countless summer afternoons of play and fancy. Freud would likely comment on my pleasurable illusions, perhaps my fixation on the dandelion's sexual whims – maybe I suffer from some sort of sexually repressed past where my family abused me with dandelions? I chuckle at this thought - it brings me back to my autumn cabin with the rain still making its lonely music.
It occurs to me that my illusions will never collide with reality, since every infinite layer of reality is an illusion I command with my perceptions. I am the agent of my own understandings, the images that surround me, the voices of dandelions I imagine whispering in springtime fields.
I hear Freud at the table doing another line of cocaine. A groggy and low voice asks, “How does this power make you feel?”
I look down from my small loft at the table below. No one is there.
“Illusions are all I have. The possibilities are exhilarating. Like a drug.”
* * *
Silly woman doesn't know the first thing about being a dandelion. To be simple, happy, and austerely pretty, while all the while being torn between love and hate is a cruel punishment. She will put my yellow petals in her hair, jealous as all hell, forgetting herself. Ignorance is bliss I suppose.
There is the lazy man, fancying himself a poet, or a writer, they are all the same. He'll blow slow, heart wrenchingly plucking each seed to be picked up by the breeze. He is lost in his own dream and creation, trying to paint a picture to write crappy lines of poetry or shallow prose with. He loves the sound of his own voice and words - not mine. Narcissism is his game. There is a certain beauty in it.
* * *
During the early stages of spring, young leafy shoots curiously sprout from the ground. They look little like the plants they will become. They more resemble green alien-looking spatulas. In time, these spatulas will grow into the toothy leaves that form a circular pattern called a rosette. It is thought that the toothyness of these leaves have lent itself to the common name that the dandelion has been given. The original French name dent de lion refers to the teeth of a lion – an imposing analogy and quite contrary to the dandelions association with urine.
My mother tried making sweet dandelion honey out of its early luscious spring blossoms once. She'd gotten the idea from some new-aged-quasi-hippie natural cooking show. She must've missed a step. When I took a lick of the stuff, it was very much reminiscent in texture and flavor of a medical balm that one would put on shallow lacerations or pained cracked lips. The jar of bitter honey went untouched, meanwhile, dandelion flowers happily, perhaps mischievously, soaked up the summer sun.
Somewhere someone enjoyed sweet dandelion honey.
* * *
But, really, I've never been loved for my looks. I've always been a means to an end. A tool of sorts. I don't complain much, it's made me a world-wide traveler. You'll find me everywhere, smiling at you. History has had a fairly wicked way with me though. All at once, I am a healer, a delectable food, a poor substitute for the high strung coffee bean. Still further, a weed! Me! A god forsaken weed. And they wonder why their wishes never come true. Confounding. Ungrateful. Paradoxical, species they are.
Today, children still playfully abuse me and the ignorant banish me, while those that think of me at all kindly, eventually fry me up, bake me, or toss me in a salad to nibble on young luscious bodies of my leafs.
Life is nasty, brutish, and short.
* * *
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