Plowing the Dark

10

The Jungle Room feels strangely familiar.

Your eye recognizes the place at once, although it has never been there. Or say your eye has been there, long ago. Back before childhood's childhood. Before your eye was even an eye. And say that you've toted this spurge around inside ever since, a keepsake of long-abandoned cover.

Origins converge in the Jungle Room. Choose your myth of preference: the garden banishment, the wayward chromosome. Either way, this green is a return engagement. Nostalgia sprawls from the overgrown nooks. Life leverages every cranny. Moonlit creepers spread a welcome mat. The pennant of mangrove branches announces Old Home Week.

Fronds appear with all the shocking clarity of fronds. Perhaps they began as metaphors. But now they grow into the species they once only represented. The Jungle Room creeps steadily toward arboretum: taxonomy without the formaldehyde, ripe fruit without the fall.

Something yearns to return to first vegetation, only this time at a cool remove. The body wants back in its abandoned nest, but now free to come and go, like a shameless tourist, without the fatal danger of travel, free to name the lush sprawl of this place from the safe vantage of a divan.

Here is the shape of reforestation, eons in germinating. Till this novel test patch, more flexible than the original starter bed. Speed the green revolution. Onto the teak's living trunk, graft a woody emblem. Fuse the fact of the branch to its depiction. Join stump and symbol into a single thing, a tree you can walk around, prune, replicate. The tree you came down from. The one you'd happily climb up again.

This is the aim of all bootstrapping: to lift the first curse and make dreams real. Here you can shed your wood skeleton and travel at will through groves of pure notion. Here you can gather up the pieces of something that shattered once, long ago, in childhood's childhood. Here you can reassemble all lost growth, and even back it up onto magnetic tape.

Through the Jungle Room, birds wing at liberty. Define a feather when condemned to the wind. Say how the shaft tapers, straining to be weightless. Describe what the vanes do on the air, how they luff and ruffle and flute, how the barbs somersault on the downward curve of their resisting ride. Specify the flight in full, and you have those jungle fliers. Fix the thing's rules, and you slough off the tyrannical thing. Mere birdness alone yields birds on demand. Whole flocks pepper the canopy, from out of description.

Ingenuity plays among these leaves. A snake slithers from the undergrowth, dappled by the moon that traces it. Mock ribs propel the python forward, muscles accurate down to a single strand. The pseudo-snakeskin glistens as you gaze, your sight renewed. But this time, the serpent takes no one in. You do not wholly buy this slithering bill of goods. This simulation cannot bruise your heel.

Still the Jungle Room swells, as awful as its template. For there may be no return, no quarter, no resting place behind these renderings. These leaves hide nothing but the signs of hunger. Even the myth of elemental loss somehow misses the point. It may not be in you, ever, to believe in a home of your own devising. The tree may not grow that can trick both heart and limbs.