Künstlerroman:

I killed more sensitive plants than I care to mention when I was a child and only because I could never stop myself from running my fingers over their tiny fern-like leaves whenever I caught them open in my window sill and so maybe they just didn’t get enough light because they were always curled up into themselves when I was near and my fingers were out or maybe it was because they were just touched too much and sometimes every living thing just needs a little time in solitude or maybe it was that I didn’t give them enough water or too much or maybe they are just difficult plants to keep but anyway one by one the sensitive plants I had in my window sill all died. And every time I went back to my grandparent’s place in Goodwood and we’d pass the nursery I’d heave my hand sweaty pennies up to the counter and cart another victim out to the car with its tiny stalks bobbing in the sunshine over the gravel parking lot and then I’d carry it home in my lap, touching the leaves and watching them scrunch up in horror and then uncurl and I’d touch them again and they’d scrunch up in horror.

Goodwood was the world to me in those days, and not just because I got the sensitive plants there, but the ten acres my grandparents had, and the house on it designed board by board by my grandfather to be exactly the place he always wanted to live, was more than enough to contain me and the machinations of my mind when I wanted to go one on one with nature. There were three small pinewoods planted in the dirty thirties and now the long shady rows of conifers with their brown needle beds loomed over me as I crept along the soft prickly ground between the chickadee’s songs and the terrified toads and the woods gave way to long stretches of grass here and there and an apple orchard that I never got to see come to maturity and the old oak tree under which my parents married and then at the very far end of the property, over a rusted cow fence with its ancient wires still twisting up out of the mud was the conservation area; my passage into it marked by an abandoned car with an old curved roof that someone must have abandoned forty years before and now nothing was left by oxidized metal and animal shit stabbing up out of the grass and beyond this the deep woods with scattered stretches of fallen leaf piles studded with odd coloured mushrooms and moss covered rocks as daunting as mountains when I climbed over them and now and then if I was careful and quiet enough a deer would pass me silently, suddenly putting up its head and bounding away into the underbrush as it caught my scent on the wind.

And now’s its all gone, as far as I know, and on one side the old farmer, who used to bring us fresh eggs and who put up a big billboard in is back field, overlooking the highway, to let everybody know that Jesus was the truth and the way, and on one side the old farmer, whose fields full of corn used to tilt up over my grandparent’s land, is gone now and whatever he made in this life is covered over by a subdivision and it’s filled with commuters and flat screen televisions and manicured streets and on the other side it’s the same and beyond that there’s a gravel pit and you can probably hear the trucks constantly grinding gravel up out of the soil and carting it away to wherever gravel is most needed and so now and, as far as I know, everything is gone but I know each one of us who knew the place is still trying to hold onto it in one way or another and in some ways we’re building new dream worlds and in other ways the past is still slowing our steps like we were always trying to walk forward in heavy mud and not tip.

And eventually I gave up on sensitive plants and I moved on to other things but then a funny thing happened to me one time while I was traveling in Southern India. I stayed for two months or three months or more at this village in the South, up in the mountains and one day (it was Christmas day in fact, 1992) a man who lived there, Ravichandran decided to take me with him on a trip. We switched busses a few times and waited for hours in different stations and I remember I was singing Christmas carols on the bus and everyone was looking at me like a madman because no one had any idea about Christmas and they didn’t care about it and at one bus station I remember that at one moment while Ravichandran was off at the toilets or some such thing there was a woman who came up to the window of the bus and I thought she was going to beg but instead she presented her child to me, a child of no more than four or five years old, as I was looking down at them from out of the open bars of the bus window and she lay her child down on the red mud and the child put a piece of wood over his belly and then the mother counted to three and stepped up on the piece of wood on the child’s belly and then stood there playing a tiny tin drum with a pair of broken sticks and singing a slightly unpleasant folk melody. Under the mother’s feet the child grimaced, clearly in some amount of pain. The mother then moved onto the next part of the show, stepping back and forth over the child’s belly while performing some kind of dance and after a few agonizing minutes the show was over and the mother put her cupped hand up to the window, asking to be paid for the show and I refused. It was the worst performance I have ever seen.

After this, in the evening time, we arrived at the place we were destined to go. The last part of the trip was through a stunning and at the same time nerve-rackingly twisted climb up through the jungle on our rickety bus with great and primeval slashes cut out of the earth on one side full to the brim with countless treetops and above us on the other side rose further cliff faces and we kept climbing and climbing through out the darkening day with oncoming traffic swerving round us on the thin road and film music blasting continuously on the buses loudspeaker. Look here, said Ravichandran, do you see this spot? One time ten elephants died here all at once, and he pointed to a high cliff on the other side of the canyon. They were walking along the cliff’s edge, and holding each other’s tails, or so I was told, and thus when one slipped they all lost they footing and down they went. Their corpses are still down there under the broken trees, he told me.

And finally we came to the hill station where we planned to stay and we had just settled in for tea when an ex lover of Ravichandran’s arrived and she was the last person in the world he wanted to see and her husband, who had travelled with her, was the next last and we all got drunk and tried to forget about it and they tried to make me do a little song and dance routine and I refused because I found it humiliating that they laughed at me and then when I went in my room I found that there was a lizard in there that must have been four feet long and chased it all around the room trying to get it out the door and I swung at it with a broom and it bounded up the sides of the walls and fell back down again like a terrified spider trapped in a bathtub with the water rising and finally it found the door and bounded out into the purple dusk and, why were you attacking that lizard? Ravichandran asked me. I wanted it out. Well it is one of the most poisonous animals in India, he said. And after all this, with everyone feeling tense, we all went to bed angry, and the general sense was that the day had been a complete disaster.

The, the next day, with the sun just making its way over the tops of the green hills I stepped out from my room and walked barefoot across the still dewy ground with the air crisp and blanket wrapped around my shoulders. When I looked down at the earth I realised that the entire ground was over grown with sensitive plants, they grew here wild, and they spread flat in ever direction and when I looked behind me I saw that the plants had closed up in the shape of my footprints, recording my passage forward in time and as I stood watching the plants slowly opened up again to the sun and with that my footsteps vanished.