DECADENCE AND REBIRTH
NOTES FROM A WOUNDED GARDEN
An essay by Sandra Ramos
Translated by Cristina León
(I). CREATION
AND THERE IS (HALOGEN) LIGHT
“At the beginning of time there was no dust.”
Sheila Heti, Pure Colour
The Viridian universe aspires to reflect the beauty of a contingent physical environment, resulting from the alternating action of creation and destruction. There is something about Hamlet’s ambiguous and ruined world that feels familiar to me: that sense of being on the edge of something. There is also the fact that Ophelia, one of Shakespeare’s most studied and performed female characters, has been considered a precedent for ecofeminism, which strives to understand this wounded world from the intersection of gender, race, and environmental degradation.
I look at a reproduction of the famous Ophelia by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. Millais paints her surrounded by greenery, already lifeless, drowned after falling into the water while trying to hang garlands of flowers on the branches of a tree. In Shakespeare’s work, this episode is not explicitly represented; we know of it through the words of Queen Gertrude, who does not hesitate to compare Ophelia submerged in the weeping brook to a creature much more connected to marine nature, the mermaid: “Her clothes spread wide, And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up; Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element.” Ophelia’s garments, once close to her skin, abandoned the form of her body and mutated to end up decomposing, becoming part of something else.
This Ophelia is a kind of evanescent, translucent mermaid, ready to be one with nature. I wonder what a contemporary Ophelia would look like. The first thing that comes into my mind is that nowadays all water contains plastic: a polluted stream; Ophelia and the waste. Perhaps in the fictional image I try to evoke, plants would also eventually make their way, exuberant and tentacular, surrounding the young woman’s body and incessantly releasing oxygen into our poisoned atmosphere. On this occasion, the delicate flowers of the garland arranged around Ophelia’s chest could be found in decomposition, to remind us that they are transitory, capable of metamorphosing into fruits that zealously protect the seed of what is to come, or dying to decompose and continue creating more life. What garments would this Ophelia wear and under what conditions would they have been produced? Would they also swell and, becoming increasingly heavy, seal her fateful destiny?
What strikes me about Ophelia’s character is that she uses vegetation to communicate with a reality that refuses to acknowledge her. From her fragility, she uses the symbolism of flowers to try to influence others. Ecologist Suzanne Simard has researched how trees communicate through an underground network of fungi. While discussions warning of extinction — both personal and collective — abound, the plant kingdom continues its ancient dialogue. Ophelia listened to this conversation between beings to the point of becoming its interlocutor, a lover of life at all levels that compose it.
Fascinated, I continue to contemplate Millais’ reproduction, and I can’t help but connect Ophelia with one of the photographs by Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. In it, her body appears covered with flowers in an open grave dug into the earth. Where does the human body end and non-human bodies begin? Here and now, both women seem to want to remind us that we inhabit liminal spaces, between life and death, between the pure and the impure.
“Then in happens. Through what was perfect a carboned rubble sifts us —tangled rebar, torn fences, scrambled, sheet metal, oxidized and spiking, breaking the sand like it’s my own skin. I feel the junk of it all in my body —a rising wild. I can’t stop the happening. The rusting is in me.”
Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem.
“I was covered by time and history.”
Ana Mendieta
(II). DECADENCE
THE WOUNDED NATURE
Our Baroque ancestors did not need to experience the wounded nature after the industrial revolution to place the fleetingness of life at the center of their concerns. In painting, the genre vanitas became popular, a type of still life that aimed to reflect the ephemeral nature of our existence. Amidst symbols like skulls and candles, Baroque artists did not cease to paint overripe fruits and flowers with wrinkled or fallen petals. Decaying nature. The rotting fruits of a still-life painting confront us with the question of our past. The past is a ghost, something that once was, but is now absent. And yet, its traces are everywhere. Ophelia’s ghost could wander through the urban ruins, industrial landscapes, and desertified areas of our present, mute witnesses to the ecological crisis for which the fashion industry is also responsible.
Decadence is a way in which human beings interpret our relationship with the passage of time. Its origin comes from the Latin word decadere, to fall. When we label something as decadent, a whole constellation of concepts seems to follow: exhaustion, decline, failure, wear. According to the biblical account, human mortality begins with the fall, the original sin: tasting a decaying, perishable fruit. For once, this human perception of temporality echoes biological time. Everything that is born is inevitably tied to its decay. What is natural decomposes and returns to its origin, but cyclical decline also awaits what is manufactured. Memories, sediments and pollution accumulate.
“Will we remember from where we’ve come? The water.
And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other?
Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?”
Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
(III). DREAM IN GREEN
A WORLD IN GENTLE DECAY
Before me, the water in a vase becomes murky. It looks like a De Heem still life. When cut, flower stems release organic compounds that serve as food for the bacteria present in the water. The death of the flowers accelerates, while life continues to pulse in the water. The notions of beginning and end blur. We approach the past as if it were clear water, seeking a brightness, an extra vitality we now believe we lack. We dream in green, of a pristine, pure nature. I can say my flowers have transformed. Softening, yellowing, withering, bursting, opening, wrinkling, decomposing is also being alive. We strive to direct our gaze elsewhere, away from excess, from what smells of an end, but I also find beauty, transcendence and meaning in the melancholic contemplation of the decay of the living. Can we learn to live in a wounded world? Decline and growth are complementary ecological forces. Perhaps there is a way to resist decadence.
(IV). REBIRTH
“Regeneration is still possible. We are compost.”
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
“And one day the dream of every cell is to become cells, and millions of them participate in this: our respiration.”
Maricela Guerrero, The Dream of Every Cell
Ophelia becomes one with nature, hiding her body in stagnant waters covered with flowers. Symbiosis is a relationship of identity, where one takes the form of the Universe and knows itself to be porous, a place of metamorphosis. Contemplating the decomposition of a world that communicates through mycelia — velvet-like fungal structures — brings the emergence of hope. A shy, playful, clumsy, and trembling hope, that involves the horizontal recognition of life at all levels that compose it: cells, plants, animals, minerals. The Earth is a wounded garden that continues to bear fruit.