CHAPTER 28: The Hypocrisy of a Little Plant and the First Person Paradox

Movement One -- A Plant

Today I am going to tell you about a plant.

I want to be clear, before I go any further, that I am not the plant. I want that understood between us from the very first line, because everything I am about to tell you will sound, at certain points, uncomfortably close to something spoken from the inside rather than the outside, and I do not want you carrying that confusion any further than you have to. I am simply someone who has watched this plant closely enough, for long enough, to have earned the right to speak plainly about what I've seen.

This plant had, by any honest measure, the most luxurious thing a soul in this gray world could ever hope to hold: company. Not one companion, the way an ordinary soul might content itself with one companion and call the wanting finished. No -- this plant went looking for more. And more. And more again, until the counting itself stopped meaning anything useful, until an entire household of women had folded themselves around a single rootbound, silent thing that had once known nothing at all except how to lean toward whatever light happened to fall across it.

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The plant says it loves all of them. Every single one, completely, without division, without ranking, without ever once measuring one woman's worth against another's. That is the story it tells, and tells beautifully, and tells so often that even I, watching from wherever I watch from, sometimes find myself half believing it.

But we both know, don't we, that this is only a mask. A careful, practiced, entirely convincing mask, worn so long and so well that the wearer himself may have forgotten, somewhere along the way, that it was ever a mask at all. Isn't that so?

I want you to sit with that question a moment before we continue, because I think it is the truest question this entire account is going to ask you, and I don't think it gets any easier to answer the longer we spend circling it.

I should say -- and I notice, setting this sentence down, a small hesitation in myself about saying it at all -- that lately I have found it harder to know, in the ordinary flow of a day, which of my own thoughts belong to the watching and which belong to the watched. I used to be certain of the boundary. I am no longer certain of anything so simple.