Letter to the Dancing Plants

Research and creative writing about the “Dancing Plant”, a plant which mysterious movements are not yet understandable to humans.

"Dear Dancing Plants,

I am writing to remember our (sur)realistic encounters,
Dancing Seeds, with whom I am cohabiting.
Dancing Plant inhabiting the Butterfly House, in the Botanical Garden of Amsterdam,
Dancing Plants living faraway, in your native home, Bengale.
You all, who I might have encountered during daytime, daydreams or slumber.

Two months before I started to research about you, part of this inquiry appeared to me through the dream of my friend Mauricio. He told me, “your plants were dancing… dancing in your bedroom while you were asleep. You couldn’t see them. They freed themselves from their pots and danced together.” We laughed about what we found at the time surrealist, without knowing about your existence. Back then, I already understood the different relationship Mauricio has with plants — he, who worked as a ranger in the Amazon forest. He probably developed a more intimate relationship with plants than me, who have nearly always lived separated from the wild, in cities. Somehow, I felt like the plants told me something through him. Or were you, Dancing Plant, the one somehow establishing a connection with us?

In her book Thus Spoke the Plant, biologist Monica Gagliano describes how plants communicate with her through dreams, even though she has never met them yet and despite the miles of distance. When I discovered you in the Atlas de Botanique Poétique, ‘Dancing Plant’, I could not believe the existence of a plant which could generate movements to the rhythm of music. I thought that it was merely a figure of speech, an expression or a metaphor. I confronted myself to the limit that taxonomy and language impose on our conception of things:‘because this is a plant, it can’t dance’. As Cyril Dion says, a French poet, “to name, to put words on something, […] is to interpose a concept between us and our experience with a living being [my own translation]”. You undone my preconception of plants by breaking down the taxonomic boundary. In biology, taxonomy is the naming and classification of beings in terms of species, categorizing them according to some criterias. This categorisation also tends to differentiate (and separate) one ‘type’ of beings from another - plants from animals, animals from humans. Aristotle, in De Anima, distinguishes plants from animals for they would be ‘inanimate’, which, according to him, is proof that they have no sensation. It is interesting to stay here with the word ‘inanimate’ coming from the latin ‘anima’ that means ‘life, breath’, but also ‘spirit, soul’. The physical movements of a being seem to be associated with the movements of its soul, its ‘emotions’. The word e–motion itself contains a notion of movement, and indeed, in biology, they are characterized by changes in appearance, visible or audible acts (screams, escapes or attacks) and upheavals inside the body. Furthermore, Aristotle distinguishes the ‘active’ moves of animals and the ‘passive’ one of plants – thus, these supposedly passive movements would be the reason why plants don’t have a ‘soul’, a ‘will’ of action. Whereas for Plato, plants would not be endowed with ‘intelligence’ or ‘opinion’, and thus, cannot move. Aristotle believed that plants do not move by themselves, because one cannot distinguish between a motor part and a moved part. The mystery, the invisible mechanism, the inexplicable movements of plants when they root into the ground or when they grow their leaves, was enough to state their absence of ‘will’ and ‘intelligence’. Or should I say, within the Aristotelian hylemorphic scheme according to which the essence of a being is inherent to its physical form, the thought stopped at the limits of the human perception, taking for granted that only what humans can see exists; an anthropocentric perspective which has a long-lasting echoes on Western science and philosophy. In Plant-Thinking, a Philosophy of a Vegetal Life, the phenomenologist and philosopher Michael Marder go further saying that Aristotle reduce plants to “even less than a thing” that would have “no feeling”, which justifies it being utilized for “higher human ends” of exploitation.

But your visible movements, Dancing Plant, attract curiosity. You are contradicting Aristotle's consideration of plants as still ‘objects’ devoid of ‘sensitivity’ and ‘will’. Indeed your name seems to suggest your ability to ‘dance’. Dancing is the human act of moving one’s body rhythmically, usually to music, as a form of entertainment and social gathering. How come that you have such a name? Is it really possible to assume that you are in search of ‘social interaction’, a form of ‘pleasure’? Francis Hallé, who encountered you in China, describes in his Atlas de Botanique Poétique how your movements indeed create a social gathering around the interactions between your plant-being and the local population. A little drawing depicts you, thriving lush bush, circled by humans playing music for you to ‘dance’. The movement of their bodies, the sound of their clapping hands, the melodies of their singing voices echoing in you, reveal usually invisible resonances through vibrating motions. Your dance-like movements, visible at a human scale of time, follow the rhythm of the music. Humanplant, entering in resonance, almost seem to ‘improvise’ together. As I write these words, I am aware that they can provoke anthropomorphic echoes in some ears. Nevertheless, I am thinking above all of the mere physics that occurs when two bodies come into resonance, in which the vibration of one causes the own activity - the own vibration - of the other. However, this definition is inspired by the concept of resonance by Hartmut Rosa, whereby this physical phenomenon triggers the formation of an emotional relationship between two beings. Is there a link between your physical motion and e→motions? Are you contradicting the Aristotelian idea from which plants have no feelings, no affect? No one knows… No one really knows if your rhythmic movements are related to music, high-pitch frequency, light, temperature, touch or other physical phenomenon; yet, they are certainly linked with your sensitivity to the environment and ability to ‘listen’. […]"

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