Camille Georgeson Usher

for the bee held in the flower’s arms

Printed in the publication for MOMENTA Biennale de l’image 2021

For the Bee Held in the Flower’s Arms

by Camille Georgeson-Usher

What, if not art, would be the place to re-visualize this world outside of what it is now? What, if not literature, might allow our imaginations to pretend even for one moment that it is real? I imagine the future world in many forms and on multiple levels of abstract detail, so precise yet also vague. The future world that I imagine, places humans outside of this place that we have dug ourselves into, it extends a possibility otherwise to the current reality. Where nature devours the synthetic, wraps into and around itself and ourselves, creating seemingly impossible ecosystems. The patriarchy is demolished, and a process of undoing and unlearning unfolds into a wakedness that holds us tenderly.

...

My eyes are tired. Body aches. Insides want to spill out over the ground. Every day is the same, in my house, staring at the screen, answering another email.

The monotony of it all 

The assumption that time is flexible. But time is not flexible, it is only lost, and the next minute will not be longer than the last. This is a sad way to greet you and for you to enter into this future imaginary that I will present to you, so perhaps you’ll let me start another way.

I often imagine myself in a futurity built on components of abstractions that never seem to come together, which build a world so intriguing that I keep imagining around it in the strange space of my mind. Sometimes this future is exacerbated by its confusion, but most of the time it allows just enough to pass through for me to see a possibility otherwise for how it could influence new ways to exist in the world.

...

It was early in the chaos; people were barricading their homes so no one would breach their fortifications to steal the toilet paper they had hoarded. No one was outside, or that’s the way it felt. Toronto, was—might I say—quiet ... I realized, as I had a seemingly endless number of hours to think about things, anything, that I think I continue to live in cities because it allows me to hide what I have taken for my lack of uniqueness among the millions. But when the world coiled into itself, to go outside was to expose oneself. My perceived sense of invisibility showed itself as something else entirely from what I can only assume has been my desire to hide myself. Throughout these months I woke up early, before the sun, to run through the ravines in the dark. In the early days I was alone out there, accompanied by only a few cars on the road, perhaps one other person exercising; relative silence in a city of this size. But as the weeks melted on and the people stayed inside, the coyotes who live along the ravines started to come out more frequently. Owls became more vocal and hunted further into the daylight. Plants began to push their way through concrete, making tiny erosions—then larger erosions. Fences fell under the pressure of overgrown branches. The sharpness of urbanity began to blur as nature crossed the unmanned borders.

There was one dark morning along the ravine that I noticed something moving next to me, quickly, through the bushes. I kept moving at the same pace, not wanting to show fear, but I was watching, and they were watching me. The coyote was not preparing to attack me; they were travelling their hunting path, coincidentally alongside me at the same time that I happened to also be there. When I stopped, I heard the scurrying continue as the coyote carried along their way to find an unsuspecting rodent for their next meal. Then deeper sounds began to reveal themselves. I imagined my ears responding in the same way that one’s eyes adjust to darkness. Tuning themselves. Perhaps this was my ears adjusting to the quiet for the first time in years. The city has its way of paving over intricate modules of difference; to me, the city paints us as a blurry mess so that we can never listen too closely or we might give away its secrets, which continue to oppress all of us. Even the white man himself. My ears now could hear bubbles from under the surface of mud starting to quietly open and release, night creatures shuffling in branches, insects chewing through bark; then, the appearance of sun changed the sky one tone lighter and all was lost, making way for new sounds. I had been thinking about a conversation I had had the previous year about the death of a tree. It is wild to imagine how many ways trees might die and everything that they have to overcome just to see a ray of sun as they compete with their siblings. When you look at a tree that has died from insect infestations, under the bark are incredible markings that trace where the insects took its life. But in this conversation, this person reminded me of how, although it is sad and potentially overwhelming to imagine the slow progression of a tree’s death, the insects aren’t necessarily thinking about killing this tree. They’re just hungry and wanting to survive as they’ve always known how to, perhaps like any of us. My ears then returned to their usual muffled state as I again became aware of the nearby highway that I had tuned out for a brief moment, so I put my headphones back on and kept moving.

When I returned to my house, I came through the tilted gate that opens to my old backyard, where I no longer live, to analyze the state of my garden. In it I had many herbs, as one does; four types of ferns, which remind me of being home on the west coast; a variety of wildflowers; and three different kinds of squash plants. Squash, the plant that has fed people for thousands of years on this land, was sprawling over everything, making it difficult to walk across the yard. Climbing over the fence into my neighbour’s yard, covering my sad attempt at a lawn, coiling around nearby plants. I often wonder about the route that this plant (and other plants) has taken, how seeds have been passed on or given as gifts as people travelled across lands. Like birds, and the wind, people have helped plants relocate (although in some cases this was misguided and dangerous to local ecosystems). 

I wondered about this squash’s ancestors

There was a buzzing inside one of the squash’s closed flowers and I came to see that there was a bee trapped inside the flower’s petals, I gently opened one of the petals for the bee to fly away and felt, for a moment, lighter, or that the air wasn’t as polluted.

Within this flower that trapped the bee, I saw a tunnel that would suck me into it, where I would become a molecular strand of energy that is used by trees to communicate. In these highways of translation between rooted nations, beings emerge, unformed if they should desire, but tangible in multiple realms of reality. There is no one way to exist in this world, or, these worlds. These worlds are surrounded by water, as they technically are water. Water bodies form on all sides as if unaffected by gravity, but they can expand as wide as oceans should they so desire, or shrink to become the puddle that sneaks into your shoe. On the water are spotted masses of matter, or land perhaps, surrounded by a dust or fog that comes in and out of the water depending on its mood. Looking more closely, one might see that these lands are eating cities whole. Devouring thirty-storey towers using tentacles of green, but what emerges is something new, something more interesting than how we’ve been numbed or how we’ve allowed ourselves to become okay with capitalism’s tricky ways. Although what we (“we” being the current generation alive today) have always known as the compilation of urban space seemed so permanent, it is being absorbed by this bizarre world. The world does not entirely erase the capital skeletons, it leaves a few hints of what once was, but most of the old buildings have become trees and have birthed forests. For years I wondered alone, moving through vastness, listening to the trees communicate. Then I met someone else in this world, a person, I saw them on one of the islands and swam over to them. We spoke about how we have come to exist in this new space. They told me that they saw Buckingham Palace turn into one of the islands on its own, we both laughed, then they also told me that new species had emerged on this island and they prefer to be left alone, so we agreed to leave them alone. Some water that had been circling the island that we both found ourselves on circled its way into the sky, leaving us misted by its decay.

Over the years, we met others, we saw the outlines of chaos blur into these new landscapes that began to regenerate themselves, we saw animals re-emerge and re-form relationships, toxins were redistributed to their base chemical compounds. We saw a world absorbed and another unfold. I initially felt alone, but then saw that I’ve never been alone, this world has always surrounded me, and I remembered the bee trapped, or simply held, within the petals of the flower that brought me here.

...

Where are all the people, you might ask. They are wherever you want them to be. That’s not for me to decide. In this world, might we allow ourselves to imagine, even briefly, that we live somewhere built in tenderness and respect between all beings. A world that does not need to pretend, that transforms simply because it can. That seems impossible, but perhaps it is only impossible if we cannot imagine it.