Where the Wildthings Still Are

From  1979 until 1993 at 3:05 PM, I had a philodendron on my furthest South bookshelf in my office. Until then, the tendrils reached across all the bookshelves to the Northernmost one 26 feet away. At that moment, a tornado crashed a perhaps 50 foot Beech Tree through the ceiling ... After recovering from damage and shock, I repotted the parts of my plant that with two Sensavaria had been growing across and partially hiding the framed certificates and diplomas and a picture of Freud.

 I renamed her Mathilda. She was a wild woman but a gem who continued to remind me about how messy life was ... how more complicated she was than all my theories and all of Horatio's. A few months ago, Mathilda, herself (Lord knows! she was balding), became too straggly and I replaced her with one of her yet-to-be-named children. Right now, she lives on the Northernmost bookshelf and is beginning her now only 19 foot trek to the South. The other 7 feet? After the tornado hit, some re-architecturing was done turning the last 7 feet into a more convenient waiting room bathroom.

 I should say that while I appreciated Wild Woman Mathilda and cared for her weekly, she was never to be tamed. At one point, she had wrapped herself around a 4 foot fluorescent bulb and strangled it, causing it to explode in the midst of a meeting. "Teeming life" is an expression we use in English. I use it to describe my azaleas enemy, the honeysuckle, that I once wrote about. I thought of it when my youngest child 30 years ago had a sleepover with her friends, though "teaming life" may have been an apt description, as well..

We human beings build models that seek or, at least, pretend to tame the complexities of that teeming life. We then are prone to believing that our models adequately represent all of life. It was Freud, der alte Hexenmeister from Vienna, who liked to comment that madness was the inability to separate the Word or Symbol from the Thing, Itself ... the Model from Reality .... what the General Systems Theory folk (like Bertalanffy) called the need to distinguish the Map from the Territory.

We humanfolk don't like that. I want my 3" toy Corgi-car model of my 1968 Citroen DS 21 to take me to the grocery store. If I believe it does, I'm in trouble, in whatever Quarter of
Life I am Playing.

My brother once cited Goethe, though I don't recall from where: Grey, my friewnd, is all theory ... but Green? the evergrowing Tree of Life. I should give the Old Guy a call, today..