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Show 16. an apparatus for registering the growth of an ascending plant stem during each of the twenty-four hours. . . . A fine needle, threaded with the long hair of a fellow studentess, when attached to the plant, made the record faithfully upon a paper disk marked to indicate minute spaces with great exactness, while the rustic clock ticked the minutes and hours away. What are we to think of the machine, Muir's making it, and Jeanne Carr's praise? Granted that it was a fine and delicate work, but it was part and parcel with that obsession about time and measurement. A vine harnessed to a clock and pen. In times of dearth, William Blake once commented, take out line and measure. Perhaps she was encouraged because this device at least did not say that all flesh was grass, did not measure death, but instead reminded one of ascending life. But like all the rest of Muir's machines, it reduced the living flow of Natural life to rule and order. She must have suspected that Muir himself was harnessed and confined like the vine growing near the window of his room. Certainly he came to know something about the difference between wild and cultivated plants some years later, and knew too that the pattern of his own life bore a striking resemblance to their lives. In a passage of his Walk journal, which he later blotted out, he said, Some plants take on themselves the forms & habits of society & civilization quite readily, but generally speaking soon return to primitive simplicity of life |
