The way in which he wanted to know these things was not in the way of satisfying curiosity or correcting ignorance; he wanted to know them to possess them, and he wanted to possess them in a way that must have been a surprise to him. His ideas kept not so much changing as evolving; he wanted to prove the world was round, even to know with certainty that the world was round, that it did not come to an abrupt end at a sharp cliff from which one could fall into nothing. And then after the world was proved round, this round world should belong to his patrons, the King and Queen of Spain. And then, finding himself at the other side of the globe and far away from his patrons, he loses himself, for it becomes clear that the person who really can name the thing gives it a life, a reality, that it did not have before. His patrons are in Spain, looking at the balance sheet: if they invest so much, will his journey yield a return to make the investment worthwhile? But he—I am still speaking of Columbus—is in the presence of something else.
His task is easier than he thought it would be, his task is harder than he could have imagined. If only he had really reached Japan or China—for to him places like that already had an established narrative. It was not a narrative these places had established themselves; it was a narrative someone like him had invented, Marco Polo, for instance. But this world, China or Japan, in the same area of the world to him, had an order and the order offered comfort, the recognizable is always so comforting. But this new place, what was it? Sometimes he thought it was just like Seville, Spain; sometimes it was like Seville, only more so; sometimes it was more beautiful than Seville. Mostly it was “marvelous,” and this word “marvelous” is the word he uses again and again, and when he uses it, what the reader (and that is what I have been, a reader of this account of a journey, and the account is by Columbus himself) can feel, can hear, can see, is a great person whose small soul has been sundered by something unexpected. And yet the unexpected turns out to be the most ordinary thing: people, the sky, the sun, the land, the water surrounding the land, the things growing on the land.
What were the things growing on the land? I pause for this. What were the things growing on that land and why do I pause for this?
I come from a place called Antigua. I shall speak of it as if I had never heard of it before, I shall speak of it as if no one has ever heard of it before, I shall speak of it as if it is just new. In the writings, in anything representing a record of the imagination of Christopher Columbus, I cannot find any expectation of a place like this. It is a small lump of insignificance, green, green, green, and green again. Let me describe this landscape again: it is green, and unmistakably so; another person who had a more specific interest, a painter, might say, It is a green that often verges on blue, it is a green that is often modified by reds and yellows and even other more intense or other shades of green. To me, it is green and green and green again. I have no interest other than this immediate and urgent one: the landscape is green. For it is on this green landscape that suddenly I and the people who look like me make an appearance.
I, me, the person writing now, started to think of all this while really focused on something and someone else altogether. I was standing in my garden; my garden is in a place called Vermont; it is in a village situated in a place called Vermont. From the point of view of growing things—that is, from the gardener’s point of view—Vermont is vastly different from that other place I am native to, Antigua. But while standing in that place, Vermont, I think about the place I am from, Antigua. Christopher Columbus never saw Vermont at all, it never entered his imagination. He saw Antigua, I believe on a weekday, but if not, then it would have been on a Sunday, for in this life there would have been only weekdays or Sundays, but he never set foot on it, he only came across it while passing by. My world, then, the only world I might have known if circumstances had not intervened, entered human imagination—the human imagination that I am familiar with, the one that dominates the world in which I live—as a footnote to someone just passing by. By the time Christopher Columbus got to the place where I am from, the place which forms the foundation of the person writing this, he was exhausted, he was sick of the whole thing, he longed for his old home, or longed just to sit still and enjoy the first few things he had come upon; the first few things he had come upon were a lot. The first few things he had come upon were named after things prominent in his thinking, his sponsors especially; when he came to the place I am from, he had been reduced to memorializing a place of worship; the place I am from is named after a church. This church might have been an important church to Christopher Columbus, but churches were not important, originally, to people who look like me. And if people who look like me have an inheritance, part of this inheritance involves this confusion of intent: we were on his mind when he set out from his point of embarkation (for him, too, there is no origin, he originates from Italy, he sails from Spain, and this is the beginning of another now-traditional American narrative, point of origin and point of embarkation): “Here is something I have never seen before, I especially like it because it has no precedent, but it is frightening because it has no precedent, and so to make it less frightening I will frame it in terms of the thing I know; I know a church, I know the name of the church; even if I do not like or know the people connected to this, the church, it is more familiar to me, this church, than the very ground I am standing on; the ground has changed, but the church, which is in my mind, remains the same.”
I, the person writing this now, close the quotation marks. Up to this point I (and those who look like me) am not yet a part of this narrative. I can observe these events—a man sets sail with three ships, and after many, many days on the ocean finds new lands whose existence he had never even heard of before, and then, finding in these new lands people and their things, people and things he had never heard of before, he empties the land of these people. It is when the land is completely empty that I and the people who look like me begin to make an appearance, the food I eat begins to make an appearance, the trees I will see each day come from far away and begin to make an appearance; the sky is as it always was, the sun is as it always was, the water surrounding the land on which I am just making an appearance is as it always was, but these are the only things that are left from before that man sailing with his three ships reached the land on which I eventually make my appearance.
When did I begin to ask all this? When did I begin to think of all this and in just this way? What is history? Is it a theory? I no longer live in the place where I and those that look like me first made an appearance. I live in another place. It has another narrative. Its narrative, too, can start with that man sailing on his ships for days and days, for that man sailing on his ships for days and days is the source of many narratives, he was like a deity in the simplicity of his beliefs, in the simplicity of his actions; just listen to the straightforward way many volumes featuring this man sailing on his ships begin: “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two … In fourteen hundred and ninety-two.” But it was while standing in this other place that has a narrative mostly different from the narrative of the place in which I make an appearance that I began to think of this.
One day, while looking at the things that lay at my feet, I was having an argument with myself over the names I should use when referring to the things that lay before me. These things were plants. The plants, all of them—and there were hundreds—had two names: they had a common name, that is, a name assigned to them by people for whom these plants have value, and then they had a proper name, or a Latin name, a name assigned to them by an agreed-on group of botanists. For a long time I resisted using the proper names of the things that lay before me. I believed that it was an affectation to say Eupatorium when you could say joe-pye weed, and I would only say joe-pye weed. The botanists are from the same part of the world as the man who sailed on the three ships, the man who started the narrative from which I trace my beginning. And in a way, too, the botanists are like that man who sailed on the ships: they emptied worlds of their names;
they emptied the worlds of things animal, vegetable, and mineral of their names and replaced these names with names pleasing to them; these names are pleasing to them because they are reasonable; reason is a pleasure to them.
Carolus Linnaeus was born on the twenty-third of May 1707, somewhere in Sweden. (I know where, but I like the high-handedness of not saying so.) His father’s name was Nils Ingemarson, his family were farmers. Apparently in Sweden then, surnames were uncommon among ordinary people, and so a farmer would add “son” to his name, or he was called after the farm on which he lived. Nils Ingemarson became a Lutheran minister, and on doing so he wanted to have a proper surname, not just a name with “son” attached to it. On his family farm grew a linden tree. It had grown there for generations and had come to be regarded with reverence among neighboring farmers; people believed that misfortune would fall on you if you harmed this tree in any way. This linden tree was so well regarded that people passing by used to pick twigs that had dropped from it and carefully place them at the base of the tree. Nils Ingemarson took his surname from this tree, Linnaeus is the Latinized form of the Swedish word lind. Other branches of this family who also needed a surname drew inspiration from this tree; some took the name Tiliander, the Latin word for linden is tilia; and then some others who also needed a surname took the name Lindelius from the Swedish word lind, which means linden.
Carolus Linnaeus’s father had a garden; I do not know what his mother had. His father loved growing things in this garden and would point them out to the young Carolus, but when the young Carolus could not remember the names of the plants, his father gave him a scolding and told him he would not tell him the names of any more plants. (Is this story true? How could it not be?) He grew up not far from a forest filled with beech, a forest with pine, a grove filled with oaks, meadows. His father had a collection of rare plants in his garden (but what would be rare to him and in that place I do not know). At the time Linnaeus was born, Sweden, this small country that I now think of as filled with well-meaning and benign people, interested mainly in the well-being of children and the well-being of the unfortunate, no matter their age, was the ruler of an empire; but the remains of it are visible now only in the architecture of the main squares of the capitals of places like Estonia. And so what to make of all this, the small detail that is the linden tree, the large expanse of the Swedish empire, and a small boy whose father was a Lutheran pastor? At the beginning of this narrative, the narrative that is Linnaeus, I have not yet made an appearance, the Swedes are not overly implicated in the Atlantic slave trade, not because they did not want to be but only because they weren’t allowed to be, other people were better at it than they.
He was called “the little botanist” because he would neglect his studies and go out looking at flowers; if even then he had already showed an interest in naming and classifying plants, or the ability to do so, this fact is not in any account of his life that I have come across. He went to university at Uppsala, he studied there with Olof Rudbeck. I can pause at this name, Rudbeck, and say rudbeckia, and say, I do not like rudbeckia, I never have it in my garden, but then I remember that a particularly stately, beautiful yellow flower, Rudbeckia nitida, grows in a corner of my field garden. Linnaeus met Anders Celsius (the Celsius scale of temperature measurement), who was so taken with Linnaeus’s knowledge of botany that he gave Linnaeus free lodging in his house. Linnaeus became one of the youngest lecturers at his university. He went to Lapland and collected plants and insects native to that region of the world; he wrote and published an account of it called Flora Lapponica. In Lapland he acquired a set of clothing that people native to that region of the world wore on festive occasions; I have seen a picture of him dressed in these clothes, the caption under the picture says that he is wearing his Lapland costume. Suddenly I am made a little uneasy, for just when is it that other people’s clothes become your costume. But I am not too uneasy, I haven’t really entered this narrative yet, though I shall soon; in any case, I do not know the Laplanders, they live too far away, they do not look like me.
I enter the picture only when Linnaeus takes a boat to Holland. He becomes the doctor of an obviously neurotic man (obvious only to me, I arbitrarily deem him so; no account of him I have ever come across has described him so) named George Clifford. George Clifford is often described as a rich merchant banker—just like that, a rich merchant banker—and this description often seems to say that a rich merchant banker is merely a type of person one could be, an ordinary type of person, anyone could be that. And now how to go on, for on hearing that George Clifford was a rich merchant in the eighteenth century, I am sure I have become a part of the narrative of the binomial system of plant nomenclature.
George Clifford had glasshouses full of vegetable materials from all over the world. This is what Linnaeus wrote of them:
I was greatly amazed when I entered the greenhouses, full as they were of so many plants that a son of the North must feel bewitched, and wonder to what strange quarter of the globe he had been transported. In the first house were cultivated an abundance of flowers from southern Europe, plants from Spain, the South of France, Italy, Sicily and the isles of Greece. In the second were treasures from Asia, such as Poincianas, cocoanut and other palms, etc; in the third, Africa’s strangely shaped, not to say misshapen plants, such as the numerous forms of Aloe and Mesembryanthemum families, carnivorous flowers, Euphorbias, Crassula and Proteas species, and so on. And finally in the fourth greenhouse were grown the charming inhabitants of America and the rest of the New World; large masses of Cactus varieties, orchids, cruciferea, yams, magnolias, tulip-trees, calabash trees, cassias, acacias, tamarinds, pepper-plants, Anona, manicinilla, cucurbitaceous trees and many other, and surrounded by these, plantains, the most stately of all the world’s plants, the most beauteous Hernandia, silver gleaming species of Protea and camphor trees. When I then entered the positively royal residence and the extremely instructive museum, whose collections no less spoke in their owner’s praise, I, a stranger, felt completely enraptured, as I had never before seen its like. My heart-felt wish was that I might lend a helping hand with its management.
In almost every account of an event that has taken place sometime in the last five hundred years there is always a moment when I feel like placing an asterisk somewhere in its text and at the end of the official story making my own addition. This chapter in the history of botany is such a moment. But where shall I begin? George Clifford is interesting—shall I look at him? He long ago entered my narrative, I now feel I must enter his. What could it possibly mean to be a merchant banker in the eighteenth century? He is sometimes described as making his fortune in spices. Only once have I come across an account of him that says he was a director of the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch East India Company would not have been involved in the Atlantic trade in human cargo from Africa, but human cargo from Africa was a part of world trade. To read a brief account of the Dutch East India trading company in my very old encyclopedia is not unlike reading the label on an old can of paint. The entry mentions dates, the names of Dutch governors or people acting in the Dutch interest; it mentions trade routes, places, commodities, incidents of war between the Dutch and other European people, it never mentions the people who lived in the area of the Dutch trading factories, places like Ceylon, Java, the Cape of Good Hope are emptied of their people as the landscape itself was emptied of the things they were familiar with, the things that Linnaeus found in George Clifford’s greenhouse.
“If one does not know the names, one’s knowledge of things is useless.” It was in George Clifford’s greenhouse that Linnaeus gave some things names. The Adam-like quality of this effort was not lost on him. “We revere the Creator’s omnipotence,” he says, meaning, I think, that he understood he had not made the things he was describing, he was only giving them names. And even as a relationship exists between George Clifford’s activity in the world, the world as it starts out on ships leaving the seaports of the Netherlands, t
raversing the earth’s seas, touching on the world’s peoples and the places they are in, the things that have meant something to them being renamed, and a whole new set of narratives imposed on them, narratives that place them at a disadvantage in relationship to George Clifford and his fellow Dutch—even as I can say all this in one breath or in one large volume, does not an invisible thread, a thread that no deep breath or large volume can contain, reach between Carolus Linnaeus, his father’s desire to give himself a distinguished name, the name then coming from a tree, the linden tree, a tree whose existence was regarded as out of the ordinary, and his invention of a system of naming that even I am forced to use?
The invention of this system has been a good thing. Its narrative would begin in this way: In the beginning, the vegetable kingdom was chaos, people everywhere called the same things by a name that made sense to them, not by a name arrived at by an objective standard. But who has an interest in an objective standard? Who needs one? It makes me ask again, What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me? Should I call it history? And if so, what should history mean to someone who looks like me? Should it be an idea; should it be an open wound, each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again, over and over, or is it a long moment that begins anew each day since 1492?
PART III
A LETTER TO DAN HINKLEY AND ROBERT JONES, THE PROPRIETORS OF HERONSWOOD NURSERY
6 March 1996
Dear Dan and Robert,
I am back at home from my million-mile tour. If there was any justice to these things, I would get so rich that I would never have to do it again. But there is no justice and there never will be, so there. It was wonderful to see you both, though, and then to see Dan in California. My purchases from Western Hills Nursery in Occidental, California, returned with me all safe and sound. I felt very sorry for them being locked up in a box as I made my way from one luxurious hotel to the next, but I just pretended they were in the post office. I heard about Dan’s purchases at the Strybing Arboretum the next day; they were that noticeable. I am only sad that I wasn’t there to witness it. To see a top desirer (is there such a word?) of flora in action is quite fun, I think.
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