I don’t need flowers. I can live without this city’s red, yellow, redandyellow tulips, without the extravagant waste of chrysanthemums and the compact aggressiveness of jasmine. Lawns could be stripped of their insistent dandelions and kindergarten sunflowers, the grocery stores of their seductively sombre orchids and plastic-scented roses and I’d be fine. Mostly. There’d be that initial pang as the aftershock of cherry blossoms was ripped out, that flighty, cheery pink eradicated, but I’d get over it.
It’d be a world without the self-contained confidence of flowers, their arrogance at sprouting, uncalled for, from stalks that bend under their own weight, largely hidden between leaves that pan into umbrellas of green shadows.
But I’d manage.
What I need, with all the due emphasis of aching italics, what I could not manage without is green. Just green. All green, all the multitudes of greens. Granted, I would need a backdrop of blue and brown and I’d need yellow suffused into invisible white, but those things are merely the canvas, covered over, forgotten, fundamental and insignificant. What I would see, shadowing and lacing the blue the yellow the brown, would be green.
The whitened waves of rippling grass, the sullen greys of unwilling evergreens, the yellowed brightness of some trees and the unabashed primary shine of others, these things I cannot do without. I find enough colour in everyday green to sustain me. Green drenched after afternoon rains, winking with the remains of dawn wetness, stark with high summer parchment dryness. Green in shadows upon shadows of green, in interlocking strands of green, in thick and spiky outgrowths of greens. Smooth and rough, soft and stiff, slight and forbidding, all the nuances of green.
Just green. I am in love with green. Unremarkable, common green, spilling into wealths of life around me, even here in the city. Creeping between unforgiving brick, pushing out between uncompromising tile, streaking across dusty lots. Again and again, green under unseeing feet and then reaching high where eyes cannot reach.
Green, all I need is green.
You can keep your exuberance of flowers, your photogenic outgrowths, your romanticised scents and wasted pollen. I have the lifeblood.
I like this. Because it’s somewhat absurd that the speaker would want to eradicate flowers from the world–flowers in the eyes of the rest of us are beautiful and indespensable. So what is it about the speaker that makes her want to wipe out something beautiful from the world? A jealousy of that beauty? A disdain that something can grow into this without any effort on the part of itself? Englighten us.
By: Asmaa on May 17, 2007
at 12:35 pm
heh, I’m not calling for a moratorium on flowers or anything, it’s just about …. priorities.
why not you tell me why flowers are indispensable? if you can’t, I’ll consider this round won and the war over.
By: fathima on May 18, 2007
at 11:50 pm
i am a little jealous, that you wrote this.
your summer came earlier than green here, it is only the past week which holds this outspringing, this profusion. that one might fall into, disappear within green.
By: biqbal on June 3, 2007
at 5:26 am
but you see, basit, why there is hope even in the city? yes, we don’t have the single-mindedness of the green of your rural, but we do have green, here in the greyness. it’s tough in some places and gentrified in others. it’s maybe not as “wild” or as “natural” as yours. it’s like pigeons, i suppose, darting fearless and sordid between the balcony railings: something dismissible, perpetually denigrated, always fighting. but it’s there: and i love the green. i love the city, i couldn’t handle the incessant grey. this green keeps me sane.
By: fathima on June 3, 2007
at 7:24 pm
i have never denied that there is some hope in the city. i do believe this as well. yesterday i pulled up at a traffic light and watched an old man cross the road in a jaunty hat, swinging and twirling his cane. when he got to the other side he bent to pick up some garbage that people’d thrown into the ditch and then disappeared behind a fence. that cannot happen in the countryside. but calling “my” rural ’single-minded’, i think, isn’t necessary and is a little snide, because then you can call your city cosmopolitan and urbane despite its sometime flaws. the green of the city is necessarily sequestered and mediated by concrete, and throws up the image of something ‘always denigrated, always fighting’ – but that role (of /being/ denigrated and fighting) is necessary for its own existence.
By: biqbal on June 4, 2007
at 9:00 pm
oh.
i didn’t mean to call you single-minded, just the … whole-heartedness of rural green. i mean, it’s /all/ green. that’s what i meant by single-minded.
but it sounded snide, yes. and i think it still does. and i am, actually, trying not to be snide. but that’s an ongoing struggle.
and also, yes, while i didn’t mean to glorify the fighting in reaction to denigration, i think now that i mentioned that aspect of citygreen specifically because i am very much caught up (and i’m not saying this is a good thing) in an(/the) awareness of my own life as being exactly that. so that, when i was writing this, i was at some level writing about myself. so i guess you could say this is something like pathetic fallacy: i forced a disinterested nature into my own frame of reference.
but also, we could talk about modes of green. (yes, it’s true. i am an academic-taxidermist.) because i think rural green is different from urban green, perhaps not so much in their essential beings, but in the way they are perceived. issues of authenticity, of respite, of battle (and against whom).
..
i need also to think, somewhere else, about my identity as a city-dweller and which came first, the city or me.
By: fathima on June 7, 2007
at 12:33 am
[...] we are word-children of the eleventh hour. eschatons overlap behind us, they loom large and dark, and are drowned by the clouds of mosquitoes. there is also talk of green. [...]
By: days like these « the trees wait to be taken on June 7, 2007
at 1:05 am
eh, i didn’t mean to come across as snarky either, in using the word snide. i think it also has something to do with popular imagery of toronto as being cosmopolitan in outlook while alberta is generally understood as single-mindedly red-neck’d.
we all construct pathetic fallacies, then. project frames of reference.
if i can be solipsistic for a minute (assuming, right, that i’m never such otherwise), i wrote about blogging, today, but reading it again i think what i am trying to say is just that i am tired, ‘done’, sick of words, sick of my own words and others’ words, sick of the maddeningly exuberant and self-congratulatory projecting that we all (and by that i mean me.) enact. on one of your posts you and laura were commenting on internal dialogue, and adnan asked something about the audience, and i don’t quite remember the rest, but i think the 060607 could be in response to that.
anyways. frames of reference. we extrapolate ourselves into the weather.
i do think rural green is different from urban green. as a partial aside, do you know who’s written about The Lawn (/or other public greenspace)? because i’m sure someone has, and it would be fascinating to trace it in terms of Constructing The Urban or in terms of colonized aesthetic sensibilities, or such.
By: biqbal on June 7, 2007
at 1:36 am
- and oh. that was not clear. was trying above, in talking about own-writing, to make the connexion between the ways we write ourselves into things, like you writing yourself into urban green.
(21 books on anabaptism identity and peasant rebellions to skim, nine and a half pages to write, and 24 hours left. hum.
By: biqbal on June 7, 2007
at 1:46 am