Anushka Jasraj speculates about everyday encounters with plants, psychoanalysis, and varied experiences of time during crises.

Part of What Time Tells, an ongoing series on time and the problems we face today. Published in conjunction with Countering Time, AAA’s exhibition about archival time and the idea of afterlives.

1. You have travelled a long way and now you feel stuck.

I receive Plant A from a nursery in another city. A medicinal plant known for healing skin ailments. The plant arrives in a state of distress; dehydrated. So many of its leaves already beginning to wither. I send a picture of Plant A to a friend with a green thumb who says the plant will survive. Are you sure? I ask. I study the plant every morning for signs of improvement. I take photographs every few days, trying to gauge whether the leaves look more perky.

2. You feel restricted.

I have to attune myself to the messages that Plant A transmits. I check the weather reports, I look at the news headlines, I study Plant A for signs of progress. Something begins to happen, under such close observation. An unconscious, non-verbal communication. Plant A needs more space. She needs to be transplanted into a larger container where her roots will have more space. Small tendrils emerge from her stem, tentatively searching the surroundings. This is how her desire functions, in a kind of reaching, shaping herself around her objects.

3. You are always uncertain about the arrival of a new season.

I like how the poet Arundhathi Subramaniam speaks of waiting as an active state, as a dynamic idleness. Waiting for a thought to think itself with the arrival of the right words. Finding the right form. And then writing or speaking those words, especially addressing a specific other, can be like choosing an irreversible path. What is known cannot be undone.

4. You shed your leaves and sprout new ones with a hopefulness that never gets depleted.

Plant A makes calculations about her survival in the same way as humans. A risk-benefit analysis. She must intuit whether the environment is conducive to her flourishing. The risk of reaching towards sunlight, growing new leaves to receive warmth. She must trust her environment. She must trust that enough water will remain available for her desires to flourish. Although Plant A must also anticipate the repetition of seasons, the unexpected rise and drop in temperatures. The mostly predictable dusk, which varies ever so slightly each evening.

For all the pejorative connotations of the repetition compulsion, I don’t think psychoanalysis gives enough credit to the fertile space opened up by some repetitions. By an obsessive consistency and commitment against that which seems futile. The poet James Schuyler writes:

in repetition, change:
a continuity, the what
of which you are a part.

The watering of a plant. The fifteen surya namaskars each morning. An occasional modification. Fifty minutes of trying to find a way out, of waiting for an interpretation to intervene.

5. You wish my words could provide all the nourishment you need.

Human cognition cannot really apprehend the language of plants. Ancient Greeks ascribed meaning to the sound of leaves rustling in the wind. They received these sounds as a secret communication from the trees. We assume plants do not have an unconscious, but they display signs of memory such as when sunflowers turn towards the east, in anticipation of sunrise.

6. You do not have an interior psychic space from which to dream.

Speaking to plants has been a common practice with various theories as to its benefits for both plant and human. Some say it’s the carbon dioxide in our exhalations, while other research suggests that the sound vibrations created by human speech is beneficial to plant growth. There are no scientific studies that indicate whether my words produce meaning for Plant A, whether my reverie affects the direction in which the tendrils move.

7. Your silence absorbs me and transforms my exhalations.

Luce Irigaray: “The vegetal world speaks a language without words, which, as terms, both exhaust meaning and paralyse it. Plants talk without articulating and naming—as life does.”

What is it then, to address a plant with speech?

^{Image: Courtesy of the writer.}

8. You are in a vegetative state.

Plants appear still, unmoving except when a strong enough breeze causes the branches to shake. But in time lapse videos, plants can be seen to move as they grow, seek support, and follow the direction of light.

9. You prefer the repetitive certainty of the day’s rhythms in summer.

A routine provides a sense of being held together. A structure. The repetitions can be soothing because I can imagine I know what is coming next. Children love hearing the same stories repeatedly because they already know the ending. The flower turns into a fruit. The branches go bare again in winter.

10. You exist within an ecosystem of desire, loss, repetition.

A few months after writing “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud wrote a lesser-known essay titled “On Transience.” In it, he describes a springtime walk in the countryside with a “taciturn” poet-friend. I understand this kind of reticence: where words are used sparsely because they might intrude upon an experience. The poet eventually confesses to feeling a pre-emptive sense of melancholy in observing their surroundings. He found himself unable to enjoy the beauty of spring; already perturbed by the impermanence of it all. Freud on the other hand argues that transience, the ephemerality of a flower, is what gives things their value.

11. You have an insatiable hunger for sunlight.

Roland Barthes says waiting is enchantment and delirium. Vilém Flusser says waiting, in the context of letters, is a religious category because it means hoping. In March, I became fixated upon an apple tree. I carefully observed the branches each morning for new blossoms, wondering how many would turn to fruit in the coming months. As long as a storm did not sweep them away before June.

12. You hope I won’t get tired of waiting for you to transform.

I like being early to places because I prefer being the one doing the waiting. There is often an implicit hierarchy when one waits for someone else: for the arrival of a message from a crush, for a silence to be broken after a fight, for the time of a session, for test results, news from a doctor, the changing of seasons, the hopeful growth of an idea, a relationship, a sprouting seed. Waiting in traffic, waiting for a visa application, waiting for the predicted arrival of intense spells of rainfall. Often I enjoy dreaming, drifting, in moments between. In waiting rooms, time moves differently. It slows down.

13. You are driven to take more risks when the environment is unstable.

I love the unsustainable intensity of a rainy day in July, a conversation with someone who breathes new life into your perspectives, a piece of music that intoxicates. Other intensities create anxiety such as when you are destabilised by illness, a fallen tree, a news event that plays on loop.

14. You are impatient for revitalisation but you surrender yourself to waiting.

Plant B will blossom once every seven years, and even then the flowers wilt within two weeks. Botany enthusiasts travel long distances to see Plant B when she is in full bloom. Does Plant B experience herself as lacking during the years when she produces no flowers? As merely waiting to fulfil her potential. An event that will arrive and dissipate with an unsustainable intensity.

15. I often feel that I am repeating myself when I address you.

According to the psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar, resilience is an underappreciated quality, which receives sparse mention in early psychoanalytic glossaries. Although Freud suggested that most creatures have an “instinct towards recovery,” he never elaborated on this instinct, choosing instead to focus on the death drive. Resilience is different from repetition in that it aims towards recovery; to keep moving forward despite adversity. Plants can regenerate after a trauma. Perennial plants grow back, year after year. Resilience and regeneration is the life cycle of most vegetal beings when they have to accommodate changes in weather patterns.

16. You are mute, immobile, but the spread of your leaves tells the story of your thinking.

Plant A gradually revives, makes it through a wet season, a brief tornado, a sweltering heat. She grows around the other plants, getting to know her surroundings, expanding her roots and moving upwards.

17. You know each season spontaneously comes to an end. You try to keep prepared.

There is a process by which plants recall the feeling of winter so as to begin shedding their leaves. Just like for humans, the anticipation of loss stirs up memories of past experiences. A long, awkward silence in the final minutes of a session when I do not want to open up anything new. The quiet pause while putting on my shoes at the door. The waiting for next time.

Anushka Jasraj is a writer based in Mumbai. She holds a BFA in film production from NYU, and an MFA in creative writing from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also received a degree in gender studies. She was a regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Asia in both 2012 and 2017. Her recent work explores the impact of technology on memory and intimacy.