I stow entries for a number of reasons. Chief among them are sloth and irresoluteness. Sometimes, though, I find myself composing an entry which cannot conceivably interest a reader, perhaps because the subject is so extremely pigeonholed and tedious that it could only be pursued by an autistic. Some entries are just stupid.
But on Sunday, I found that behavior that is ordinarily boring may become captivating by turning attention to the mania which causes it.
The previous Wednesday, I purchased a South African succulent known as Stapelia gigantea. I selected a plant with a large, diamond-shaped flower bud redolent of a Chinese paper lantern, knowing well that the bud would not emit light, but the dank stench of carrion. I noted, however, that like the Chinese lantern, which is known to attract throngs of children, the bloom would attract a swarm of iridescent flies.
I placed the Stapelia in my solarium, and left the house for the better part of two days, checking in every morning to see if the “egg” had “hatched”. I received a phone call on Thursday night confirming a bloom.
“The egg has hatched. It is very beautiful.”
“But does it smell like rotting flesh?”
“It is stinky, but you have to put your nose inside of it.”
I remembered reading earlier that the traits of S. gigantea have been called “highly variable”, and I realized that my sought after stink had been drowned in the sea of genetic variance. I was so disappointed. U.S.S. Stapelia floundered in my murky memory, to decay in some chasm like a rusty trombone.
Yet as everyone knows, there is much in the seas: they tend to hide disturbing oddities under a poker face of familiarity. Seas will take the crustiest and most interesting denizens of any realm into their welcoming arms, because no practical amount of filth can poison them, save for tons of phosphorus leached from leaky poo plants and storm drains.
The same holds for the sea of genes, which has given us those fruits of the race: Corky and Caligula. Novel phenotypes are hidden in a jumbled sea of genotypes! They wait, intensely frustrated, for an outlet of self-expression! And sometimes they are not even noticed.
* * *
On Sunday morning, I caught the cat squeezing a hirsute octopus, digging with its claws for squeaks of pain to oil the wheel of play.
This is not the first time the cat has dragged in an exotic animal, I thought. But this is more novel than the time the cat brought a baby opossum into the house, which the dog summarily scooped into his mouth and swallowed, I thought.
I seized the hairy mollusk from the cat, which hissed at me in fury.
“I’m going to drop an anvil on you. Get out of here before I put you on a rotisserie.”
And it did, with every ounce of defiance one would expect from a fat, swaggering yellow cat.
(Miraculously I was able to drive myself off the spit before the cat had a chance to light the fuel in his great earthen pit.)
I turned my attention to the octopus once again. I will now admit that it was a complete shock to me, that the “octopus” was not a sea creature at all, but something much more mundane. It was the shriveled bloom of the aforementioned Stapelia, which had fallen from the plant and into the playground of the fat cat.
Without thinking at all, I began to pet the flower eagerly. I found its surface pleasantly fuzzy and mammalian, but regretfully unpleasant to the sight, because it resembled the purple-veined noses of the elderly with its lavender bands and jutting hairs.
I resolved, then, to close my eyes, and explore its exotic surface with my fingertips.
After several minutes of such exploration and without conscious effort, I began to draw analogies between the surface of the flower and the organs of the human body. I noticed, particularly, that the ridges on the flower’s external surface were much like human wrinkles.
And then with my fingers, I breached a sort of canal holding a mass of black pollen, all of which, I found, had been jumbled up into a kind of button surrounded by a mane of erectile hairs.
At this moment, it occurred to me that to only indulge my sense of touch was to indulge myself insufficiently and to limit myself unnecessarily. I then took it upon myself to insert my nose into the canal.
The scent entered my nostrils and, dare I say, extruded a memory from some part of my brain. It was a memory of a text which concerned itself with the “irresistiblity of a piece of rancid cheese”, and while its source escaped me, I thought immediately of that agreeable character, Président de Curval.
After exhaling (and perhaps in a state of intoxication) I thought, You, fine flower, do not resemble an octopus at all, but a languid starfish. I will call you Curval’s starfish. In time you will wither away, and I will build you a tomb. You can be sure I will never forget you. And you, dear starfish, I hope you will never forget me.
For a moment, possessed by Curval’s spirit, I reasoned that if to touch but not smell was an excessive restriction, then to indulge only the tactile and olfactory organs was to do great injustice to my other senses. I resolved, again, to indulge those senses.
And in the passion of enjoyment, it occurred to me that such order, such an agreeable correspondence between my senses and the sensual properties of this flower could never in any probability spring from the Darwinian sea our scientists have postulated.
On the contrary, the beauty of this complementary union could only have been created by a great Demiurge; an Intelligent Creator.
