white anemones by the front door

Like so many people, I am thinking about technology in our lives. Lots of it is good, of course. I’ve had my share of medical tests in fancy machines that are probably more reliable than yarrow sticks or mouse entrails (though we see a fair amount of the latter due to our hunting cat Winter). But the notion of machines being sentient, that artificial intelligence is somehow desirable, that we form emotional relationships with our gadgets? These considerations are pretty far from the world I live in and the things I love. I don’t believe there are ghosts in the machines, souls, correlatives for our bodies, our logic, our reasoning, all of which are entwined with one another, our history, our genes.

This morning, doing some early watering before my swim, I saw the white anemones in bloom by the front door. There are many myths associated with anemones. The word means daughter of the wind, the wind-flower. A young maiden, Anemone, fell in love with Zephyr, a wind god, but he was married and his wife turned the girl into a flower. Another wind god fell in love with her but she wasn’t interested and he took revenge by blowing her petals to nothing. Another story tells us that Aphrodite mourned the death of Adonis, weeping over his beautiful body which had been gored by a boar and was bleeding profusely. She cursed love and flowers sprang from the blood. (I have the deep pink and purple anemones too which perhaps illustrate this myth more fulsomely.)

Stories of white flowers fill my imagination, my memory. In my own hoard, the white peonies that grew in the garden of a house we lived in temporarily and which were always filled with ants. The morning glory I noticed on fences as we drove to the Nicola Valley to camp with our young children, the notes I made on that trip, and how the flower and the notes returned me to writing, giving me the gift of a lyrical essay, “Morning Glory”, leading me to a form that has given me a new chapter in the book of my life. Thumbelina’s prince who comes to her out of a white flower. Snow White. The beautiful late 16th c. “Have you seen but a white lily grow“, lyrics by Ben Jonson and melody by lutenist Robert Johnson, a song I tried to learn when I took voice lessons:

Have you seen but a bright lily grow
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall of snow
Before the soil hath smutched it?

I can’t imagine a machine putting these together, even in a paragraph as I have done, because they’re things I hold in my memory, and love, but maybe I’m wrong. And you know something? I can’t imagine not wanting to do the work myself. I’m a writer. My work is to generate text. It’s work I take seriously and feel a huge responsibility to do it well. As I said above, the AI considerations are pretty far from the world I inhabit daily, though as I also said, I value machines for their usefulness, their efficiency, their ability to do particular things well and efficiently.

After Odysseus has encountered his mother in Hades, after other women have gathered around him, he says, “Here was great loveliness of ghosts!” This is a phrase that I read first at age 18 and never forgot. I return to the Odyssey over and over, usually in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation because it was the first I read and so the stories came to me through his long beautiful lines, though I’ve read and loved Emily Wilson’s translation too, for other reasons. And what happens a little later in the poem? Odysseus meets his old friend Achilleus. He tries to assure his friend that he won’t be forgotten:

 

We ranked you with immortals in your lifetime,
we Argives did, and here your power is royal
among the dead men’s shades. Think, then, Akhilleus:
you need not be so pained by death.

Of course Achilleus is quick to tell him that he’d rather be a farm hand among the living than a lord among the dead. And after some more sad talk, Odysseus becomes quiet, because Achilleus “had gone off striding the field of asphodel.” Asphodel, the plant of the underworld, where Persephone is often depicted in garlands of its white flowers. It is a flower not only of death but also of commemoration. Those in Hades are surrounded by meadows of it. A great loveliness of ghosts.

 

Have you felt the wool of beaver,
Or swan’s down ever?
Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the brier,
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she!

All these things, all the white flowers, the bud of the brier, the dog roses by my bedroom window in bloom right now, the white anemones by the front door, and each of them living, part of my imagination, my memory, and daily I am grateful for them.