All Flesh Is Grass—Isaiah said that in the Old Testament. Christina Rossetti took those words and made them her own in a poem; the transitory and limited nature of human life in the face of an omnipresent God. This particular night I sit at my desk listening to a choral composition titled All Flesh is Grass by the composer Chris Massa who wrote the music after reading Rossetti’s poem. He talks about how writing is like excavating a fossil paraphrasing Stephen King from On Writing (2000). Meanwhile, the accompanying YouTube video shows me a brightly lit image of parrot green dew-jeweled grass. Massa’s melody, Dickinson’s poem, and Isaiah’s statement at once invoke the ancient connection of humans to grasslands.
There was a clubhouse in front of the tiny quarter where we lived. It was surrounded by lush manicured lawns on both sides of the building. Autumn dawn in Uttar Pradesh was filled with floating wisps of mist above the green expanse until the sky cracked open, the gardener came with his bulging bag of tools and attached the hose to the taps, and by the time I was off to school, I could hear the mower slashing across the grass bed like a misfired car and the air smelled of grass, sun, and dew. In the evening, we would run across the damp grass playing badminton; I was never any good at it hence the girls used to make me sit on the proverbial bench; I spent many hours sitting on the grass, the thin, tough leaves digging in my bums and by sundown, I had played three games, and my thighs were red and itchy and my mood positively rebellious for not being included in the upper echelon of teenage girlhood.
When I moved to the city, I missed that prickly sensation under my feet stepping on the viridian green and the reverberation of the soil when I was doing butterfly strokes lying on the school ground with my best friend or when we all played football after an April shower and bloodied our knees toppling over each other. I missed grass when I landed in a place where there was nothing but closely spaced concrete matchboxes sticking out of the land like a scene from dystopia in some treeless terrain. The harmony disappeared overnight as I navigated to make sense of the smoke and dizziness of rush traffic. The untold connection with nature faded away for some time.
This connection was the central thread for poets and authors alike throughout history. What were those lines by the great American transcendentalist Walt Whitman?
“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.” (Song of Myself, Part 52, editions: 1855-1892)
The grass is an invitation for regeneration, a home to birth and death, a cycle of life. Whitman commits himself to the earth he so loves and beseeches the reader to look for his words in every blade of glass. His transformation is complete and yet he lives on. I remember these lines every time I see the painting Ophelia (1851-52) by John Everett Millais. At first glance, it is the verdant bright green in the foreground that captures your attention. A second later, you realize Ophelia’s floating body with the garland of flowers and the green grass is almost embalming her. Death surrounded by nature almost becomes comforting as Ophelia’s skin glows and she raises her hand perhaps as an offering or prayer with bright red poppies floating in the muddy brook. Poppies mean death and peace, while grass means humility and resourcefulness in Victorian flower language. Forever under our bootsoles and yet remarkably resilient. For the pre-Raphaelites, the realism of depicting grasses and wildflowers was significant to their devotion to nature. Whitman’s lines and the pre-Raphaelite art movement found a common thread of the continuity of life in every form.
In his book What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in my Life (2020) Mark Doty ponders upon Whitman’s preoccupation and meditation on grass. In the sixth section of Song of Myself, Whitman writes,
“A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; / How could I answer the child?. . . . I do not know / what it is any more than he.”
The child is not asking about the verdant green blades as he is about the very nature of things. What is anyone or anything in its form? The blades of grass are a metaphor for the nature and unity of all things in the universe. Elsewhere, Whitman compares a leaf of grass to the journey-work of the stars, at once earthly and yet holy enough to reach not quite heaven, but that transcendental realm beyond the earth.
The other American transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau met Whitman in 1856 accompanied by Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott. He too found grace and acceptance in the grass. He writes in Walden (1854),
A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring.
Thoreau’s religion was nature, grass perhaps its deity. Such eloquence calls us to embrace the power of seasons and renewal. That afternoon in 1856 at Walt Whitman’s house on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn he gave Thoreau a copy of the second edition of Leaves of Grass, which contained 20 new poems. One was a poet and the other, an essayist. Two men with widely different temperaments and yet moved by the beauty of the land. When I read Walden these days, the transcendent greenery reminds me of The Summer Day (1990) by Mary Oliver. She writes how she doesn’t know what a prayer is but she does know how to pay attention, fall into the grass, kneel down, and stroll through fields. She has been doing this all day- be idle and blessed. Oliver ends the poem by asking what her readers want to do with their “one wild and precious life”.
One of the gentlest and most prolific nature writers of our time brings the lush fields as a bed to contemplate life’s purpose. A clarion call or a gentle communion? I will always remember the first time I saw Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. The opening shot is a closeup of a hand gently caressing golden wheat. You can almost sense the life throbbing in the golden strands fluttering against each other. The scene quickly changes to General Maximus Decimus Meridius who stares against a bleak, grey, lifeless backdrop. A few moments later, the audience realizes Maximus is looking at a razed battlefield in Germania. I felt he was thinking about his purpose too at that moment. I still let my fingers linger against leaves as Crowe did. That memory remains like a faint fingerprint. Communing with the silent lives of leaves.
I knelt, strolled, and idled in the summer grass as a child. Summers were long and free of shadows. But autumn was never far behind. The fields changed hues as September approached. The fields were awash with waves of white fluffy grass known as Kaashphool in Bengali or scientifically christened as Saccharum spontaneum. Native to the Indian subcontinent, the cottony white grass is the symbol of the beginning of autumn and the festival of Durga Puja for Bengalis. They mostly grow near riverine or canal beds and are a rare sight in urban areas these days. But drive a few kilometers outside the city and witness the sun setting like a molten orange popsicle behind the cotton white Kaashphool. This image was immortalized in Pather Panchali (1955), Satyajit Ray’s movie about Apu and Durga, where the siblings run towards an approaching train through the dense reeds of Kaashphool to witness the engine hurtling past them. Even now watching the invasive Kaashphool grow against the sunset brings me back home. Home is that earth where the white reeds grow as the seasons change and are not demarcated by borders. Grass has no boundaries. Our ancestors witnessed these scenes thousands of years ago and now we do too. But less and less. At what cost? Kaashphool is invasive but who characterized the attribute of invasiveness to plants who inherited this land long before we were born?
The term weed comes from the Old English ‘weod’ and Anglo-Saxon ‘wiod’ meaning any herb, grass, or weed. Another comparable term bane is used in dogbane or wolfsbane/wolfbane where bane means any plant capable of destroying life. The other term is wort which later denoted any plant, herb, or root. Interestingly, weed is not a botanical term but a cultural one and has changed its colors over the history of the planet. It represents our ever-changing relationship with plants. It marks transitions in our modes of agriculture and forestry. It depicts the wrath of colonialism and imperial conquests. Here comes Ralph Waldo Emerson with his speech, The Fortune of the Republic given at the Old South Church in Boston in 1878; he says this about weeds:
“Our modern wealth stands on a few staples, and the interest nations took in our war was exasperated by the importance of the cotton trade. And what is cotton? One plant out of some two hundred thousand known to the botanist, vastly the larger part of which are reckoned weeds. What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered, every one of the two hundred thousand probably yet to be of utility in the arts.”
For Emerson, a weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. Whereas Emerson’s friend, Thoreau, compares weeds with wasted time and Shakespeare refers to weed as an invasive idea that bears no fruitful results in Love’s Labour’s Lost. But some poets and authors attributed positive notes to these plants. Gertrude Hall personally identifies with weeds in her poem To a Weed (1896). She calls herself a weed in a playful manner. A weed that didn’t grow from seed and has a dream to breathe and bloom in the garden. Hall almost makes the reader empathize with both the weed and perhaps her own desires. The sun never scorns and the flies are glad to rest upon it. It is only the gardeners who are annoyed at weeds.
Identifying oneself as a weed might come across as strange to farmers in the tropics. Here, a detour in the natural history of weeds provides an interesting perspective on how these grasses have been both helpful and harmful throughout human history. Smallholder farmers throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America are familiar with the long, narrow leaves of a weed called “yellow nutsedge” (Cyperus esculentus). There is another type of nutsedge called the “tiger nut” or chufa cultivated for the juice extracted from the tubers or nuts. These two varieties diverged genetically but not enough to form entirely different species. The tiger nuts were cultivated and the weedy ones became a curse.
Nutsedges were well-known in the ancient world. For one variety to become the perfect weed, human intervention was necessary. In ancient northern Africa, the chufas were selected for their tubers and the non-tuberous nutsedges were hoed and discarded. As it happens plants that do not make tubers expend all their energy in flowering and producing seeds. Hence, the weedy nutsedges started proliferating alongside the chufa. By twelve thousand or more years ago, the yellow nutsedge had adapted itself to both tropical and temperate climates. Arab merchants sailing from Egypt passed both types of nutsedges across the Mediterranean into Spain and southward into Africa. Emerson’s weed, the plants whose virtue has not yet been discovered, makes sense in the long history of this planet. We are forever in an entwined relationship with grasses around us whether we witness it in our lifetimes or not.
Till now, I have appraised the aesthetic and transcendental value of grasses in literary works. We have seen the ambiguity that comes with the subtle ecological differences between grasses and weeds. But there is another corner of the literary landscape that features grasses and grasslands- the horror and the supernatural. This might sound unusual and far-fetched but for someone who has read her fair share of horror fiction and devoured horror movies, I make a case for the uncanny effect a grassland can have on us.
Grasses taller than humans. Endless green ribbons unfurled towards a periwinkle sky as the wind blew over the field. The air smells of a distant burning crop. Ripples move across the green expanse. You can hear the grass whispering with one another. The leaves are so thick you would think twice to step forward inside the dense thicket. Is that a scarecrow sticking out in the distant hazy horizon?
The atmosphere of grasslands and cornfields has held a long-time fascination in storytelling. Among all subgenres of fiction, none is more intense than the horror stories set in the American South and the Midwest. During my college years, I developed a taste for small-town horror novels from the 80s. Having grown up in a small town, I was drawn to the beauty and quiet mysteries that come with rural living in these books. Again and again, I saw scenes unfolding in grassy landscapes, away from the hustle-bustle of the city, against the dipping sun in twilight. The authors may have shared my nostalgic memories, but they discovered the sinister and mystical nature of the land in these books as well.
And Ray Bradbury holds the mantle to create some of the most musical and hypnotic stories set against the backdrop of Halloween. Prose shimmering with October colours, cornstalks, and purple sunsets with carnivals popping up on fields and the moonlight hugging small towns while the crisp cool wind blows over grasslands. Bradbury’s book The Halloween Tree (1972) follows a group of eight boys out on a Halloween night trick-or-treating. They come across a Halloween tree near a haunted house. The countless carved pumpkins on that tree come alive with candles burning inside their gutted mouths and Bradbury makes the setting vibrant with,
“The candles flickered and flared. The wind crooned in, the wind crooned out the pumpkin mouths, tuning the song:
The leaves have burned to gold and red
The grass is brown, the old year dead,
But hang the harvest high, Oh see!
The candle constellations on the Halloween Tree!”
This reminds me of the countless October evenings I went cycling with my friends along fields of wild grasses. Against the bright orange sun, the boys in our group would dare us to visit the unknown graves in the fields surrounded by long grasses. Bats swooped over our heads and we stood at the edge of the road deciding whether to step in the grass or not. The graves among the grass stood like sentinels to our teenage games. Similar October adventures in Bradbury’s other books feature grasslands and their changing colors and moods beckoning readers to a long-lost time when playful escapades were real and tactile. Reading these lines makes the reader almost stretch their hands and touch the smooth and rough blades of grass. In The October Country, a 1955 book of macabre short stories, Bradbury writes in one of these stories titled Jack-in-the-box,
“It was a sweet long time in the deep grass of the garden where they idled most deliciously, sipping huge cupfuls of apple cider with their elbows on crimson silk cushions, their shoes kicked off, their toes bedded in sour dandelions, sweet clover.”
Sounds similar to my October adventures, but with a twist. We enjoyed orange popsicles and samosas in brown paper bags while lounging on the lush lawns. Do you recall the trips to fairs when we were children? Those melas on with the Ferris wheel and sweet shops spread across grassy lands. The wide expanse of the sky above us. Brightly lit shops stretch as far as the eyes can see in the fairgrounds, where nature and magic converge. “Well, the carnival train was crouched there now in the autumn grass on the old spur near the Woods and the boys crept and lay down under a bush, waiting,” Bradbury writes in Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). But, my favourite magical arrival on grassland in fiction is written by Erin Morgenstern in The Night Circus (2011),
“The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen. No color at all, save for the neighboring trees and the grass of the surrounding fields.”
Finally, I leave you with another small-town horror story featuring grasses. This time, the maestro himself, Stephen King. The grass comes literally alive in Stephen King and Joe Hill’s horror novella In the Tall Grass (2012). The seven-foot-tall grassland in the state of Kansas lures people inside it when they hear someone calling for help. But as soon as they go inside, the malevolent blades have different plans for them. People soon realize the innocuous-looking grass is like a maze, and things get weirder and scarier. For all our modern comforts, getting lost in an endless grass field is unnerving even for the best navigators. This reminds us that we are late arrivals on this land, and yet take this bounty for granted. Are you wondering about the thoughts that might arise when you come across an endless grassland during sunset?
The sparse grasslands are often monochromatic in appearance. Nonetheless, they present a clean canvas for artists, authors, and poets alike to paint stories and carve relationships that hark back to when our ancestors crossed the great savannahs and charted new paths for themselves. Our relationship with grasses and weeds remains ever-changing and indelible. The cultural, historical, and evolutionary entanglement of humans with these plants continues to exist. They will still appear in our songs and poems, and movies. They will grace paintings. Weed removal, control, or management using pesticides or genetic manipulation makes for an uncharted future in the face of a warming planet. Friend or foe, grasses will continue to evolve alongside us because of their resilience, plasticity, and variation. Perhaps, by paying attention to these plants under our bootsoles, we can make better decisions about how to farm, how to garden, how to eat, how to buy produce, how to appreciate nature, how to tell better stories, how to write poems, and above all how to inform our neighbors about the importance of natural diversity on this green planet.
