TREELOGY. Saying it with plastic

On my first day in Munich a little more than two months ago, I dragged myself to a café for some food. Shops and supermarkets were closed, except this tiny café in Steinstrasse. It had only four tables. I wouldn’t have remembered them had it not been for the distinct flower arrangements in tiny vases on each table. I’d earlier seen small beaker-like bottles filled with unique flower arrangements tied to the black iron grille gate. Though tired and sleepy, I couldn’t not have noticed them — there was something restrained in their beauty, not the flamboyance that one usually associates with flowers, the kind of showiness that works for possible pollinators.

Once back in my flat, I told my friend this, and how it struck me that this genre of still life could only have originated from a culture and setting such as this, of Europe plucking the unexpected and exaggerated beauty of summer for the dark interiors of their houses, where the yellows in particular brought a kind of incandescence that cost less than burning lamps and candles. As I was talking to him, a collage of the flowers I’d seen in vases in paintings by Europeans and the flower arrangement in the café blinked like a camera shutter in my mind. I feel uneasy about flowers in vases, and the uneasiness is not just moralistic. Let me put it this way: I’m visually more uncomfortable with flowers in a vase than a fish head in a bowl of moong dal. While I understand and appreciate the art of flower arrangements that exist across cultures, I am visually as resistant to it as I am, say, of the tattoo. That’s a terrible analogy. Perhaps.

Quite by coincidence, it being evening and peak Facebook-posting hour in India, I saw a photo of a drawing room in a small town in Bengal. My eyes caught the sight of flowers in a vase. I didn’t notice the people in it (I didn’t know them), nor the furniture. But the blue flowers in a brass vase were something else. I zoomed into the photo, and there it was, the answer to why I hadn’t seen the blossoms before in a garden. The flowers were plastic.

Now, if real flowers in vases make me uneasy, plastic flowers make me awkward. It’s not the adult awareness of the material’s toxicity but perhaps the awkwardness of imitation. Uneasiness is always difficult to understand — why, for instance, was I close to feeling scandalised at the sight of plastic flowers used to worship the Goddess Kali? And later, though on not so large a scale, the discomfort of watching women wear plastic flowers in their hair. These are all biases, but I’m interested in where these come from. Soft replicas of animals that fill nurseries and childhoods are often more welcome than real animals — by this I mean that the eyes do not find these imitations as lacking beauty and grace, even though they might turn into the comic. The change in material, from skin and flesh to cloth and sponge, succeeds in tempering down their imagined fierceness. Cloth brings in kindness like swaddling clothes bring the grace of life to a naked newborn babe.

What happens with the peculiar case of plastic flowers then? The first and most obvious difference is the loss of softness — even plastic grass, when produced in a factory, and presented to us as door mats, hurt the underside of our feet with their sharp tips. Real grass ends tickle, plastic grass ends bruise.

I think plastic changes the language of flowers — death and the impermanence of life give our lives grace. Immortality is beautiful as a concept, but not in any kind of material incarnation. The tiresomeness of the unchanging is exhausting even as speculation — you only need to go so far as to imagine being an infant all your life. Hardness, permanence, their unchanging nature, freedom from death — these are the characteristics of plastic flowers. It’s possible that plastic flowers make me uneasy because they stand for the antithesis of life, and of flowers as I’ve known them. Do poets write about plastic flowers differently? Reading Evelyn Reilly’s Styrofoam , a collection of poems about plastic, I find one that pays homage to Wordsworth’s daffodils as it were. It’s called ‘Daffodil.Gondola.Polystyrene’ — the lack of space between words separated by a dot, the ubiquitous dot of our dot-com lives, makes me breathe slightly faster. How different is this world from “a host of golden daffodils”. There is no music in plastic, and neither in the poem. Think of these two lines:

“Chlorophyll . daffodil . poly-fil…/Then cloud.daffodil.grass.phloem.foam …”

The wandering like a lonely cloud is gone — nothing can move in this line, not the cloud, not the daffodils. The rhymes fill me with sadness, but without the natural grace of sadness — daffodil, poly-fil, the loss of chlorophyll. Plastic flowers know neither rhyme nor blank verse. Its chosen punctuation is the full stop. That is where everything ends, I’ve heard.

Sumana Roy

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree

Twitter: @SumanaSiliguri

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