Tulips

Bodies, madness, and the image of god.

I know. I showed up all look at me! big announcement! I quit yoga and I’m a writer now! Then I disappeared for a month. I know. I’m sorry. Sorry about that. Come. I’m back; join me for coffee.

Yes; just so. So.

I didn’t really go anywhere of course. I still wander from one room to the other, chewing on an apple. Minneapolis is still cold and dark. It still snows. Every morning: oh god, how will we survive? Every morning: scowls. This morning G put on a yellow hat. It reminded me of the man in the Curious George books. G wears colors; I tend to touch them. We each do what we must.

I’ve been busy re-writing my contribution for Theo Wildcroft’s upcoming book. She had asked me to write on critical thought in yoga. I was to be published alongside folks I consider luminaries. This was a big thing, an honor really, for my career as yoga teacher.

I wrote it and I emailed it in, turned back to whatever novel I was reading. It was probably Proust. Because it’s always Proust.

But that was ages ago. Six months is ages, now. We feel time differently, don’t we? Six months ago I hadn’t hit the point of quitting. Now that I have quit, I don’t feel okay with my piece sitting on her desk like that.

What business do I have doing a thing - even something rather a big deal or good for my career - if I’d since ended the career and no longer technically do the thing?

Mewing a little, I asked if she still wanted me to participate. She did. She is actually a little excited by the twist in plot, what honesty and integrity LEAVING teaching might have to say about the industry.

I told her I’d have to re-write the piece entirely. That’s what I’ve been doing, off screen. It’s mostly done at this point, some minor edits back and forth, but done being the thing I have to attend to.

Now we can talk about other things.

I propose to start with tulips.

Still Life of Flowers, 1614, National Gallery, Ambrosius Brosschaert the Elder

Minneapolis has had its coldest April in decades, with frequent snow. The forecast this morning suggested we shouldn’t expect things to warm up until May.

May! I cussed, forehead wrinkling at the yard through the sliding glass door. I pulled my sleeves over my hands and crossed my arms. I’m not sure I’m designed for Minnesota winter. That doesn’t make sense, Swedish genes and all, but I swear it’s true. I sometimes imagine going to Sweden in the winter. I wonder what it’s like to only have four hours of daylight. I’d like to see midsummer, too; what happens to you when you see the sun at midnight? But I’ve never gone. I’m just a Minnesota Swede, and winter is hard for me. I get churlish by December. As each week passes I slouch a little more and I speak a little less. My voice comes out a little higher than I mean it to be. I crawl through February. Like on my knees.

I start looking forward to March right around Christmas. I want to say after Christmas, but I’d be lying. Early December, that first stretch of subzero weeks, and I’m baby stepping myself through most of my responsibilities. March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb! I start saying. I don’t know if it’s a Christian thing or just a midwestern farming one, and I’m neither Christian nor farmer but I am adjacent in my way, and I blow the dust right off that thing and polish it hard every single year. The edge of desperation isn’t far off from stupidity; lambs and lions and folk sayings. I chant that stupid phrase like its hot gossip; invoke it like a friend who owes me a favor. Lambs sound holy when your skin has gone past gray. Moss and grass and pansies. Fuckin heaven.

Several years ago I was given a pot of dirt for Christmas. Just wait, the giver said: there will be tulips. I placed the pot on the table and watched closely. Sure enough, first grapey hyacinth, then narcissus and paper whites and then, like a drag queen on a Sunday morning, ruffled orange tulips with heads the size of a fist and a thick black smear over the eyes.

Oh I just loved them.

So. Forcing bulbs has become something I do every winter. I think of it like a time piece, a calendar. One of those watches or clocks you have to wind, or calendars that require you to tear off pages. I mean there’s an element of participation involved. I’m unsure about the exact relationship between my actions and spring’s coming. I doubt there is a dependent relationship there; that’s not my point. My point is along the how to survive, edge: if a green thing can move dirt, we’ll be okay. I keep my eyes on them. Their growth must mean some true thing about reality in general.

You can get these pots of dirt from a grocery store. I’ve also found them at Target. This year I got one at Home Depot as Gunnar was finding the exact right size of tiny metal thing from the drawers of similar tiny metal things. When we leave the store, I take the pot of dirt home on my lap rather than sticking it in the trunk. Big crescendos playing in my head. da da daaaaam, then the timpani glimmer. At home I lean over them like votives. I thrum my fingers. I wait and hold my breath. When they start shooting, I smell them several times a day. I believe they are keeping me alive.

Tulips are bulbs. After they’ve blasted, you can cut them back and remove the bulbs from the dirt. You’re supposed to stick them in a paper bag or other ‘dry, dark and cool place’. Cellars are perfect, if you have access to one. The following fall, you can choose: either stick them in the ground and next spring they will resurrect, spiting the last glassy snow and muckity muck with a lick of red; or, if you prefer, you can store bulbs in that dry, dark, cool place until you stick them in new potted dirt in the fall.

This is called ‘potting up’, and I gather it’s to be done on a golden day in October. I gather you’ll feel a wholesomeness and smell flannel. Drink hot cider or a stouty beer.

If you’ve potted your bulbs for forcing, they winter in the cold, dark, dry place. You water the bulbs occasionally, like prisoners you keep chained up in the basement. In not quite spring, you bring the pot indoors or upstairs. Once exposed to the light of day, the bulbs will be ‘forced’ to bloom. To shouting green slander that will make you yourself get a little dippy.

I haven’t got a cellar. Nor have I got any patience. I can’t be thinking about October afternoons in April for fucks sake: I simply lack the requisite faith. So I don’t do it the way they recommend. The way I do it is I buy a pot of dirt when I start to get depressed. Then, when my flowers have bloomed and gone, I chop everything off, down to the base. Then I stick the whole pot of dirt on the front porch. I pass them every day getting the mail. When the ground eventually unfreezes, I dig holes in the front garden and stick the bulbs in them.

I’ve been blindly sticking bulbs in the ground for five years now. Come actual spring, the front of the house is ringed with rogue and random blooms. I figure after ten or fifteen years our yard will look something like Mardi Gras. Something libidinous and sacred.

I am not going to lie; this year was harder than usual. Maybe it was harder because we were in the second winter of pandemic. Not lockdown but not not lockdown, either; another category of loneliness. I know there have been colder winters. I know there have been more brutal freezes. But this year was hard. This year I’ve gone through three pots of dirt, bloom, ruin and decay and I’m still desperate. I’m still standing at the back door holding my elbows, arguing with the sky.

I hang on red, I suppose. In the winter, the cardinal. When he’s there I put my forehead on the window and an oval of forehead skin flattens to the glass. It feels like my blood lurches to the birdy red, hullo hullo! As if he cared. I don’t think he does. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying the world does something to me, not vice versa. My hormonal swing can be tipped by smell, color, texture. Also rhythms and humidities. In January I hang on the cardinal and then come March the petals of a forced tulip. In summer, strawberries. I mean come on: how much more tawdry can you get? But innocent, too: sugar from the ground. Crystallized sunshine. Come fall, it’s all the leaves. I swear the red of a maple hooks directly into the blood vessels. We all throw ourselves into one last dance.

Then I quit trying to be good at things and just try to get up in the morning.

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As a child, I called them Two Lips. I liked the idea of flowers having mouths. It’s profoundly satisfying to talk about “bodies” of water, bodies of knowledge, bodies of work. We speak of veins of rock and the limbs of trees and the heart of the matter.

No one corrected me for a long time, since tulips and two lips are aurally indistinguishable. I’m not sure anyone ever did correct me; maybe I just learned to read. But I liked the idea of flowers having mouths and the idea never really left. Flowers are still fleshy.

There is a correspondence between lips and lower things. Labia, latinate and lower, come to mind of course. Sex sensuality of the face, and sex sensuality of the hidden. But there is a whole murky middle that isn’t quite so literal or mirrored. The old trope about speaking from the heart, for example.

In an embryological sense, we do speak from the heart. All of the systemic and organic structures of the body began as a dripping; an elongating pull that eventually became a curling. A pendulance that became an up and a down, a head and a tail, a right and a left. Our gut and our brain elongated this way, as did our bones. Think of such things as bones as one tissue that only later separated, as liquids bead, so that we have two hundred bones but they all remember each other. Our musculature is much the same: a single muscle that elongates with motion, that then folds in and out of its self. Webbing pokes through to make the pith. And the heart: at first it was a ruby crown, with primitive blood islands hanging below. The heart formed two mirrored tubes. The two tubes merged. A flow began. But all this while the heart remained above the head, above the brain, in front of the oriface of the mouth and face. The right and left sides of the heart joined in front of our mouth before dropping into the chest, leaving the mouth up there like a wound. We undulated ourselves into having a head at all, leaving a cupid’s bow and a lower pout even as the heart sank.