Things That Repeat Themselves

This day ends in the kind of holiday where I feel knotted up in—remind me again who is the parasite and who the host? Hell-bind, strangleweed, beggarweed. A lot of people, no plants, no sky, in a small room where we tell each other how we are happy to be together.

Hairweed, goldthread, devil’s-guts. A flowerless, leafless parasite of a vine, she transmits chemical signals across the bodies of the plants as she colonizes them. With each plunge of her little leaching knives, she whispers the news from one end of herself to the other. How frightening to imagine other beings living through you, how you’d have to hear their voices in your own mind as they absorb you into them. But it happens all the time—gut bacteria, microbes, pregnancy, cancer, the means of production, whatever it is that calls itself a right-to-life movement. I am constantly hearing the echo of something someone once said to me.

Many ritual events are designed to elevate the sensation that being alive in this world doesn’t really matter. One way to describe such gatherings, which I read about in a book of theories on ritual, trying to find a way to justify myself, is that they are performances of a “mute interplay of complex strategies within a field structured by engagements of power.” Witch’s hair, bindweed, dodder, “the arena for prescribed sequences of repetitive movements of the body that simultaneously constitute the body, the person, and the macro- and micronetworks of power.” What I really hate is that when we pretend to like each other, we call that nice.

Apropos of nothing, my grandmother told me about the four little girls that she knows are hallucinations caused by the atrophy of her optic nerve but who nevertheless are quite real to her. It is strange: they are starting to grow up. The little one who was a baby has begun to crawl and will be walking soon. The eldest is getting to be a trouble-maker.

She seems delighted by them but knows enough about this wing of her nursing home not to say too much. I’m the person in the family who asks to hear more. There is a narrative among them about the kind of person I am, and asking about hallucinations fits right into it. My grandmother had four sisters. My grandmother raised four sons. My grandmother had a number of miscarriages, and she imagined these to be the daughters she longed for; then later came four granddaughters. I ask her if she sees a ritual significance in the shape of these visions. She said she was sad to learn the girls were not angels sent to keep her company.

For a long time this baneful vine was written off as an evolutionary dead end, a lonely genus among the plant taxonomies, but then phylogenetics revealed pull-down, love vine, hailweed to be a member of the morning-glory family. Morning glories are poisonous enough to kill a person, but it is worth noting they can also become a kind of sweet potato.

My grandmother doesn’t always remember who I am. I say, “Kate, Grandma, Kate.” And she says, “Oh, Kate—she always was a bossy one.” Which is not something I am particularly surprised to hear, having been called that by others many times before. But that she thought so too had been a secret of hers, and I wish she had been allowed to keep it.

This purple flower, this sweet tuber, the truth of what we are separately and together, I hear the news of my circumstances coming back to me, across a great distance. Like a filament of dawn, Cuscuta reflexa knits herself across the green field, a circle closed and tightening.

Read more from Issue 18.2.