JULY 11, MONDAY

RHIZOMES

My neighbor down the street, Gwen Diehn, is an artist. She taught in the art department at Warren Wilson College and published a number of Lark Books on using drawings in journal writing. Since retiring she has continued to draw and in the last couple of years has been drawing the plants that she finds around her house and in the woods below the street that we both live on. I found out about her books and bought the first one, Rhizome, which has her pen and ink and watercolor drawings of common plants, weeds and splotches on trees, that I have never paid attention to.

Yesterday she gave a talk on the release of her second book, Rhizome Too. Siri, my Apple voice directed assistant, who apparently reads all my email, knew I was going and told me when to leave and directed me to where I was going, 191 Lyman Street in the River Arts District of Asheville. Siri gave me voice directions to 191 Lyman Street, and finally told me that I was there, a huge wall of a warehouse with no doors. I walked around looking for 191 and couldn‘t find it, when I finally asked at an open door and then was guided by a friendly woman. Apparently the entire huge warehouse is 191 Lyman with 60 art studios inside. Siri wasn‘t as helpful as she pretended to be. She had read my email but couldn‘t tell me where the message was for me to look further for the studio number and I couldn‘t find the message within my hundreds of emails. It was a text message. Finally I did find it and got to the presentation half way through.

I thought this was going to be a discussion of how Gwen drew and painted and why. But, instead it was a discussion of rhizomes.

“Rhizome (in botany)—an underground, horizontal stem that in some ways functions like a root in that it anchors the plant to the ground, it takes up water from the soil, it stores nutrients and food made by photosythesis; but a rhizome can also send up shoots that can develop into new plants, and it can also send down roots. It has no beginning or end point, and it ceaselessly seeks to establish new connections.“

And all of a sudden I was being introduced to a huge under ground world of fungi and lichens and bacteria and mycelium and algae and slime molds, of course not understanding a thing.

At some point Gwen mentioned a book that the ten of us there should read. The only word that I caught of the title was “entangled.” I wrote to Gwen later to ask for the title of the book but then discovered on my own, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake that had such good reviews that I bought it at the Amazon Kindle store and began reading it.

I only got through 35 pages before bedtime, but that was enough to open my eyes to the extremely complicated interconnected life of rhizomes and plants and insects and other forms of life including all of the bacteria and fungi and algae within and on me.

At 35 pages I, of course, can’t summarize the book. All I can summarize at this point is my astonishment at this strange new world and the fact that Gwen and this book are already undercutting many of my assumptions about life on earth and about how I perceive my own body. I will probably write more about this as I discover more. But in the meantime I recommend to anyone who reads this to buy Rhizome and Rhizome Too by Gwen Diehn on Amazon and, I’m sure, bookstores everywhere. And I would also suggest that you take with caution advice from Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa.