Flowers of Flesh Jules Michelet

FLOWERS OF FLESH

From La Mer by Jules Michelet, 1861 Translated by Matthew Redman

Across the belly of the globe, in the amniotic waters of the Line and along its volcanic floor, the Sea teems such a superabundance of life that she cannot, it would seem, equalise her creations. Life supersedes the vegetal by dint of sheer vivacity. Her offspring emerge already on the rung of animal completeness.

But these animals boast queer botanical curlicues, bear the splendid trappings of a glossy and exuberant flora. Survey the vast seascape and you will declare it a tangle of plants, flowers and shrubs – from familiar shapes and colours such words spring to mind. And yet the plants move; the shrubs are saturnine; the flowers shiver with a nascent sensitivity, as they grope towards a substantial Will.

Charming oscillation! Graceful ambivalence! Astride the frontier-line that separates the kingdoms of plant and animal, the soul, as if in the midst of a fantastic féerie, witnesses its own primordial awakening. It is the pale dawn glow and the sudden roseate genesis. Bursts of colour, vitreous and nacreous by turns, herald the night’s dream and the ripening day of thought.

Thought! Dare we speak its name? No. A dream this remains, a vision. But it is of the sort which brightens imperceptibly, like the waking dreams of morning […]

Darwin observes that “our earthly fields and forests are empty and barren as deserts compared to those which line the seabed.” And indeed, all who traverse the glassy waters of the

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Indies are struck by the phantasmal wonders at their depths. An especial enchantment lies in the singular exchange between plants and animals of their natural traits and appearance. Soft and gelatinous plants, their rounded organs resembling neither stem nor leaf but rather living, supple flesh, appear intent on deception, that we might mistake them for animals. The real animals, on the other hand, strive for a perfect planthood. Thus each kingdom wholly imitates the other. Some possess the nigh-eternal fastness of the tree, others blossom and wilt like the flower; observe the sea anemone, pale and pink-petalled like a marguerite, or else the very likeness of a crimson aster (were land asters adorned with spots of azure!): at the moment of childbirth, upon bearing a daughter anemone from her corolla, she will melt away exhausted before your eyes. More varied still is that veritable Proteus of the seas, the alcyon, which may take any form or colour that it please. It may be plant, it may be fruit; it may spread like a fan, or prosper into a bushy copse, or depress itself, becoming like a dainty flowerbed.

Lean over the gunwale and glimpse the reefs and coral banks: the quilted deep heaves into view. It is a lurid sea-meadow, its hills and valleys green with tubipores and astraeans, white-dotted with globular fungia, historiated with little mazes of meandrines. Velvet green cariophyllids, the tips of their calcite branches clouding into orange, entice their nutriment, drifting motes and atoms, with gentle wafts of their golden stamens.

At the upper reaches of this sunken world, rising many feet tall as if to offer shade from the sun, majestic gorgonians, fibrously swaying like willow, or palm, or liana, and flanked by the dwarf trees of the Isididae, form a forest. The plumaria spreads its vine-like tendrils from tree to tree, entwining them in its thin, light-dappled branches.

The scene charms and perturbs us; it is a fey vision. Viewed through the prisms of seawater, that dense and fluid fata morgana, the colours of the reef are bestowed fleeting tinges, a molten mobility, a fickle shimmer, a hesitation, a doubt.