Sleeping like a rock: Unearthing the wildness of chalk

In spite of the demarcation lines separating the walking path from the surrounding pastures, a certain kind of wildness was palpable. Inculcated not only by the arpeggiated song of lively sky larks above,  but by the worn, skeletal ground, consisting of amorphous calcified remains. Ill defined footholds, etched by interminable steps, exposed as superficial and unreliable. Walking was more like stumbling. Down Castle Hill and onto the chalky South Downs, where uniformity is met with  caprice, a geological, but organic, sublime, luminous white like the moon.

Chalky remnants under the soles of my shoes, these traces of life engendered a question. What makes something organic? Within the scope of organic chemistry, organic materials are constituted by their combination of carbon and hydrogen, in simple terms. Once believed to be solely produced by living beings, chemists narrowed down organic substances to their molecular and elemental composition, discovering that organic materials were not unique to earth and therefore, not simply a by-product of life. In the context of geology, organic rocks are those that are composed of once living organisms and this principally involves sedimentary rock. As a sedimentary rock, chalk is composed of the calcite of marine organisms, namely coccolithophores; autotrophic phytoplankton, whose scale-like shells deposited layers of calcium carbonate, accumulated over millennia to form abundant layers of chalk, such as the ones that undergird and constitute the organic geology of the Downs. The chalky soil is actually nutrient poor, but this is beneficial for the grasses and orchids, maintained by grazing sheep, which signals the arrival of butterflies and skylarks. These ecological features are shaped by the unique geology of the Downs, and despite anthropogenic influences, such as Neolithic forest clearing and Ovis grazing, the concomitant emergence of the orchid, lark and perhaps even a fairy ring of parasol mushrooms, a certain kind of wildness murmurs on the rocks. If wildness is conceived qua life, namely wildlife, then non-living entities such as rocks are at least prima facie excluded from such characterisation. However, rocks, or rather mountains, feature heavily in the imagination of the aesthetical sublime, as conceived of by Kant and later interpolated by Romantic poets, most notably Coleridge and Wordsworth, celebrations of the sublime beauty of nature.

This celebration of rocky wildness pervades Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain. Though she reveres the immensity of the Cairngorm mountain ranges of Scotland, made from igneous granite rock, that is cooled magma, crystallised quartz and mica, Shepherd writes that she wishes to 'come to the living things through the forces that create them, for the mountain is one and indivisible, and rock, soil, water and air are no more integral to it than what grows from the soil and breathes the air' (Shepherd, 48). As she contends, 'All are aspects of one entity, the living mountain. The disintegrating rock, the nurturing rain, the quickening sun, the seed, the root, the bird - all are one.' What is interesting is how Shepherd so effortlessly distils the coalescence between life and nonlife on the mountain, yet concedes that the granite is 'inanimate' and in turn, avows of the cleavages and differences that manifest between holistic and contiguous beings.

For nature writer Robert McFarlane, Shepherd's writing provokes comparisons with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body and his conception of the 'flesh of the world', an entwinement between self and world that intuitively challenges dualisms that normatively cleave mind from matter, life from nonlife and so on. In McFarlane's words, this demonstrates that we are 'co-natural with the world and it with us, but we only ever see it partially'; namely, through flashes of perception which shatter previously conceived bifurcations (Ibid, xxx). This is famously made clear by Merleau-Ponty's example of touching one's hand with their opposing one, whereby one perceives oneself as both subject and object, though never concurrently. Analogous implications are present in Shepherd's musings, as McFarlane intimates when he quotes Shepherd writing, 'Place and mind may interpenetrate until the nature of both are altered'. While McFarlane demonstrates parlance with the phenomenologist, his interpretation of Merleau-Ponty is slightly undercooked when he writes that just as for Shepherd, the mountain ''lives' because of our 'outgoing address' towards it', that 'matter is 'impregnated with mind''. In some ways, McFarlane actually betrays the phenomenological ontology of entwinement that he attributes to Merleau-Ponty and Shepherd alike, suggesting that the contiguity between body and matter is merely achieved through inoculating nature with our human perception. For Merleau-Ponty, 'life is not a separable thing' in the first place, something that is added on to matter to make it living, but is 'an investment, a singular point, a hollow in Being' (Merleau-Ponty, 2003; 238). In other words, life emerges or unfolds out of matter, pregnant as it is with this possibility. This is similarly expressed by Shepherd above, when she invokes the forces that 'create' or engender the living.

What makes the mountain living for Shepherd, is it not merely our minds or the life that blooms on Cairngorms against the odds, again erroneously thought of as a life added to matter. Subtly differential, it is the life that emerges in tandem with non-life; that is, life that can manifest with the support of matter, without as Merleau-Ponty puts it, being simply a 'causality telescoping the other'. Shepherd invokes the heather, moss, lichen and algae that are made manifest on the granite rocks of the Cairngorms, patches of life that are able to appear through an amenable rocky substrate, as though translucent. As Shepherd recounts, invoking the plant life growing on the Cairngorms, 'These mountain flowers look inexpressibly delicate; their stems are slender, their blossoms fragile; but burrow a little in the soil, and roots of a timeless endurance are found.' (Shepherd, 49) Fragility and endurance are intricately wedded in the very makeup of life, as plants appear fragile on the surface, yet hardy down below, what Merleau-Ponty characterises as life's contemporaneous 'fragility' and  'obstinacy'. The line is not clear, perceptually speaking, between the organic nature of the soil and the rock, appearing like a plenum that furnishes the life that blooms therefrom. The organic and inorganic are not synonymous with the dividing lines between life and death, for their coalescence instantiates a deeper coalescence between life and death itself. This coalescence is intimated by Shepherd when she writes about the profundity of sleeping on the Cairngorms, as a means of cultivating an intimate bond with the mountain. As she contends:

'Such sleep may last for only a few minutes, yet even a single minute serves this end of uncoupling the mind...I do not ascribe sentience to the mountain; yet ant no other moment am I sunk quite so deep into its life. I have let go of my self. The experience is peculiarly precious because it is impossible to coerce.' (Shepherd, 91)

Letting go of herself is not contrived, because as she says, this experience of being 'sunk' into its life, as if she struggled to separate herself from the mountain, comes as natural as sleep. Stationed in situ, amidst one's environment, non-differentiated, Shepherd sleeps like a rock. But as she concedes, these moments may only last a single minute and yet, their profundity is not eschewed. Sleep is an experience that is perhaps closest to death, but this death isn't the end, but more like a transient state of dormancy, one that is analogous to the unborn seed and yet also to the enduring existence of the rock.

However, is a rock merely enduring, as if impenetrable? As Shepherd suggests, rocks are not invulnerable, for they are at the mercy of 'disintegrating'. Yet, can we in good faith, paint all organic and inorganic beings under one brush? Chemical classifications and nomenclature may mostly have recourse in the context of science, but the meaning of these terms can also be gleaned intuitively, one that can align with our experience of the world. Of course any entity, whether organic and inorganic, is always at risk of exposure, but whether this exposure can be characterised as vulnerability, across the board, is a question that deserves critical reflection. Organic rock, such as chalk, don't necessarily always furnish the most fecund and diverse ecology, because as we saw above, in the case of the Sussex Downs, much adaptation has had to occur for the flora, fauna and fungi to consolidate its place in alkaline heavy soils. Notwithstanding, chalk is often a substrate that furnishes novel and salient ecosystems, including chalk streams, of which 85% are found in the UK. These streams are conducive for thriving numbers of Atlantic salmon and trout, as well as watercress and water-crowfoot, providing clear and filtered, mineral rich waters. This contiguity between chalk and wildlife sharpens the wildness that we experience when engaging with environments such as chalk grasslands or chalk rivers, meaning that chalk is perceptually salient for appreciating wildness.

Not only is chalk entwined with organic beings, but it is an organic being itself, if not the most organic rock there is, only really comparable to diatomaceous earth in its organic composition. But as we broached briefly above, is this phenomenologically salient, as well as geochemically? In certain ways yes, because as we have illustrated, chalk is so often enmeshed in and requisite for the wildlife that we come to appreciate, perhaps in a way that is differential, but not necessarily incommensurate, to other rock varieties. Chalk is a composite of micro-fossils, remnants of organic matter, not mineralised in the same manner as other fossils. As Merleau-Ponty intimates below, about the significance of the fossil, we are struck by the shell of life that continues to unfold in its vulnerability to the world, just as the chalk that sticks to our soles:

The trace and the fossil: ammonite. The living thing is no longer there but it is almost, there; we have the negative of it, which is related to it, not as the sign is related to the signification, the effect or the cause, but something for itself. And the mineral, reoccupying the hollow, remakes the animal in quasi. But hollowed fossils are more striking: there is nothing between them and the very animal—the trace of the footstep—Trace of the “statistical rise” it is still there. (Merleau-Ponty, 2003; 276)

What is more striking about hollowed fossils, those imprints of the living that haven’t been filled with minerals and cast into stone? As Merleau-Ponty suggests, there is no screen between the fossil and the ‘very animal’ or once living organism. Without claiming that the hollowed fossil gives us more direct contact with the living organism than the mineralised fossil, Merleau-Ponty intimates that there are perceptual differences, such that one is more striking. Striking perhaps because they are ‘almost’ there, immovable and yet bearing the history of their once living movement and their continuing placedness, like a dinosaur footprint etched in sandstone. This uncanny ‘almost’ is analogous to the cave paintings of ‘Cueva de las Manos’ in Argentina, a tapestry of hand prints which log the contact made between hand and rock through stencil. Haunting in their anonymity, their liveliness is expressed notwithstanding.  Traces for Merleau-Ponty seem to be the living, not a copy but a hollow, that needn't be mineralised to signify, that don’t have to become stratified objects, to be held and moved in space, for they once were and continue to be a hollow in being. 

Are we at risk though, of what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen refers to as 'organic chauvinism' (Cohen, 16)? In his book dedicated to stone, Cohen argues that ecological analyses stick obstinately to ‘green’ symbolism, gathered primarily from the world of plants. Consequently, we fail to grasp ‘the slow immensity of the geologic’ according to Cohen. As he contends ‘Although tree rings and ice cores yield tales of ancient pollen, glaciation, and aerial chemistry, stone’s archival force endures far longer.’ (Ibid, 35) While he concurs with new materialist Jane Bennett that the ‘omnipresent vitality of matter’ is “obscured by our conceptual habit of dividing the world into inorganic matter and organic life”’, this overarching concept of stone that Cohen develops, glosses over the phenomenal differences between organic and inorganic beings (46). This is why Merleau-Ponty’s characterisation of the hollowed follow as ‘striking’ is pertinent, because it demonstrates how the sense of organic matter can be expressed intuitively. Qua traces of organic matter, the fossil expresses the sense of the living, as well as the dead. 

This is why for ecophenomenologist, Ted Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s avowal of the ‘ongoing resistance of matter and life within spirit’ can give phenomenological sense to both life and death, as an intra-organic phenomenon (Toadvine, 55). Perhaps this is why Merleau-Ponty contends that ‘the living being is known long before the inorganic which is ordinarily expressed rather poorly by speaking of infantile animism’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1963; 157). He is therefore gleaning the phenomenal differences between the organic and inorganic, imploring one not to conflate the two, thereby distorting our understanding of either variety of being. One might argue that this more binary thinking is indicative of Merleau-Ponty’s earlier writing, which is perhaps differential to his later ontology of the flesh. However, I would respond that whilst he moves toward a more holistic view of nature in his later writings, these phenomenal distinctions still remain, albeit never stringently. Therefore, even if such a coalescence between life and matter manifests, this does not, à la Shepherd, mean there is an equivalence or indeed coincidence in Merleau-Ponty's terms. For Merleau-Ponty, the organic have an ‘an immanent signification’, which is of course variegated, but still distillable (Ibid, 134). As  Toadvine importantly concedes, however, ‘This doesn’t mean our scientific account is somehow already contained within the sensible encounter with the fossil’. Rather, the intuition serves not to echo a concept, but confronts us ‘viscerally’ as Toadvine puts it, or striking as Merleau-Ponty does. The phenomenology of the fossil is expressed by Toadvine, who writes: 

As the trace of another life and another world separated from my own by an unimaginably vast temporal abyss, the fossil both invites and eludes my sensory explorations, and I register this invitation and escape in a corporeal way, as the very experience of what it means to perceive a fossil as such. (Toadvine, 4)

Our perception of the fossil inculcates the sense of life within matter and matter within life. This intuitive grasp of the nonliving also gives sense to death, which is not the extinguishing of matter and life, but its continual unfolding. However, not all things unfold in quite the same way, hence why organic things decompose and inorganic rock weathers and erodes. But do these classificatory distinctions have any phenomenal standing? They must do for Merleau-Ponty, who contends that life is 'Not a hard nucleus of being, but the softness of the flesh' (Merleau-Ponty, 2003; 238). If life and its organic continuation after death is the softness of the flesh, perhaps the inorganic constitutes the harder outer shell of the flesh, requisite but differential to life. The organic flesh of the world is the literal petrified flesh of once living things, who continue to unfurl within our temporal purviews, decomposing, bio-degrading like compost.

***

All stone may wear away and disintegrate, weathered by water and air, but chalk, as shown (>), has a kind of contiguity with water that demonstrates its vulnerability, as a once living, decomposing being. Its organic nature is perceived, splintering off as remnants of archaic life. For Cohen, stone is ‘neither dead matter nor  pliant utensil’, but a ‘bluntly impedimental as well as collaborative force, stone brings story into being, a partner with language’ (Cohen, 4). As dead matter, though, the log is dissolved, an abatement that is stretched out but indeed perceptible, infested by the living fungi, moss and lichen, insects and bacteria, which all occupy it as a nutritious sojourn, soon to be returned to soil. Soil and rock may be perceived as a plenum, both requisite for the emergence of life, but the soil, like its chalky bedfellow, is a motley trace of life, of vulnerability, ephemerality petrified, a reminder of the sharedness of our exposure. Exposure may be the fact of the universe, but our earthly one is surely what constitutes the sense of our experience. Without glossing over the magnificence of stone, organic phenomena shines forth, but never in isolation. For organic things come before and after life. We sleep like a rock, but more aptly, like a log, as the proverb so often goes...a log dissolving amidst a chalky stream.

References

Cohen, J. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015). University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis.

Merleau-Ponty, M. The Structure of Behaviour (1963). Metheun & Co. Ltd: London. Tr. A . Fisher.

Merleau-Ponty, M. Nature Course Notes (2003). Northwestern University Press: Illinois. Tr. R. Vallier.

Toadvine, T. The Memory of the World Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology (2024). University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.

Shepherd, N. The Living Mountain (2014). Cannongate.

Excess at the outskirts: Plants and the 'movement' of still life

Figure 1: Martha Darley Mutrie, Wild Flowers at the Corner of a Cornfield, Oil paint on canvas.

Martha Darley Mutrie: Wild and domestic tensions

A frenzy of wild plants or 'weeds', as they are often pejoratively termed, overspill the frame of Martha Darley Mutrie's painting, Wild Flowers at the Corner of a Cornfield (Figure 1). In spite of the brewing conception that humans suffer from the ills of 'plant blindness' the dragonfly is certainly over staged in this naturalistic epic, as a motley bouquet bursts with the vitality of plant life. 

As thistles protrude out of the undergrowth like punk contortionists with razorblade furs, a scratch or sting can almost be felt beneath the painting. What looks like the oft maligned Convolvulus, commonly known as 'bindweed', hangs suspended above the rest, poising elegantly with flowers flared like the bell of a pale saxophone. Emblazoned with bellicose arrow shaped leaves that 'convulse' amidst the foliage, it evokes the 'invasive' plant commonly denounced by gardeners. The more revered fern looms large, entangled by strands of ivy, as the matted webs of this vegetal chimera smother the farmer's crop of corn.

Where is this cornfield that Mutrie depicts, and why a mere corner? Getting up close and personal in the liminal space between the wild and domesticated, Mutrie finds a burst of excessive growth and life teeming on the outskirts of the traditional landscape painting she removes herself from. In lieu of engendering the picturesque aesthetic, she portrays a scene of life that can hardly be called 'still' in any straightforward sense.

In her book This Dark Country, Rebecca Birrell explores the closely woven relationship between female artists and still life in the 19th and 20th centuries. This 'intimate' relation as Birrell calls it, can be understood in the context of gender politics, as 'Tethered in various ways to their father or husband' Birrell concludes 'women remained in the home' (Birrell, 2021: 3). With a particular attention towards 'floral subjects', Birrell contends that women 'were denied access to essential lessons on anatomy', meaning that the scope of their art remained within the putatively primitive realm of botanical illustration, lagging behind their male counterparts excelling in representing the ostensibly more sophisticated human form (Ibid, 8).

Still life is of course historically capacious with organic objects, whether vases of flowers or bowls of fruit and yet quite often, as Birrell demonstrates, these manifest in domestic settings, such as on a kitchen or dining room table. Confined to these spaces, women artists were elicited by objects closest to them, estranged from any such outside world reserved for so-called learned men. Yet, Mutrie appears to travel further afield. Confounding the very concept of still life, her paintings are almost subject-less and yet without landscape. The geometry of space carved by the painter is shaken by the life that engenders its creation.

It is as though Mutrie is encroaching on domestic topography, trespassing on a disused segment of agricultural land. From the low angled perspective, it looks as if she is crouching below the tall undergrowth and admiring the chaotic swell of life which she perhaps feels in some sense, a part of. Pushed to the margins, both her and the wild plants are left to express freely and with excess. Even the ornamental plant in her painting Roses appears incongruously wild amidst a pallid setting, as the roses distend from a mound of mossy rocks (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Martha Darley Mutrie, Roses, oil on canvas.

Cézanne and the sticky life of painting

In his essays on aesthetics and art, Merleau-Ponty often invokes the post-impressionist Cézanne, whose foray into still life certainly bellied the art form that had commonly been considered rudimentary. As Merleau-Ponty intimates in his short essay dedicated to Cézanne (Cézanne's Doubt'), that the post-impressionist saw in still life the nascent opportunity to tease out the primordial inhuman in things and to 'confront the sciences with the nature "from which they came."' (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a: 14) The nudity of the natural world shines forth in the 'closely-woven texture of [Cézanne's] still lifes', a nudity that declares our absence and yet simultaneously distills our entangled relationship with non-human life, as well as non-life for that matter. The 'lived object' as Merleau-Ponty writes:

'is not rediscovered or constructed on the basis of the contributions of the senses; rather, it presents itself to us from the start as the center from which these contributions radiate. We see the depth, the smoothness, the softness, the hardness of objects; Cézanne even claimed that we see their odor.' (Ibid, 15)

Accordingly, we might say that Mutrie's Wildflowers emits the smell of the living through the painting, of blossom and vegetation (Figure 1). A single dandelion pokes its head out of the foliage, barely visible and yet striking in its admirable attempts to reveal itself in spite of being smothered by the other more rapacious plants. There is something suffocating about the scene that Mutrie paints, as if we are being entangled in the weeds, seeds and pollen sticking to us like an adhesive. The chaotic in still life is a sentiment that Merleau-Ponty distills from Cézanne's paintings and yet without being capricious for the sake of artistic effect, he suggests that Cézanne's 'perspectival distortions', which shatter the geometry of space, do more justice to the ways we actually perceive an object as an 'the impression of an emerging order' (Figure 3). 

   

Figure 3: Paul Cézanne, The Basket of Apples, oil on canvas.

 

There is something particular, however, about the living that encompasses the still life. Merleau-Ponty evinces this when he contends that Cézanne 'recapture[s] the structure of the landscape as an emerging organism.' (Ibid, 17) In Mutrie's paintings, the landscape, if we can even call it that, is brimming and swelling with vitality, emerging as one heterogenous plant. Of course, the painting depicts a multitude of differential plants and yet their sticky proximity confounds any such clear differentiation. Merleau-Ponty intimates the sense of this phenomenon as it manifests in Cézanne's still life paintings. As he writes in his essay 'Eye and Mind':

'The enigma, though, lies in their bond, in what is be tween them. The enigma consists in the fact that I see things, each one in its place, precisely because they eclipse one another, and that they are rivals before my sight precisely because each one is in its own place. Their exteriority is known in their envelopment and their mutual dependence in their autonomy. Once depth is understood in this way, we can no longer call it a third dimension.' (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b: 180)

His analysis of the objects represented in Cézanne's paintings fit congruously with our approach to Mutrie's illustration of plants, as an intimate bond is underpinned by a sense of individuality shining through the tumultuous foliage, in the shape of the thistle, fern and dandelion, each a 'rival' and yet all the same, a companion. A 'mutual dependence' as Merleau-Ponty suggests is paradoxically enacted in the very 'autonomy' of these painted objects. 

Figure 4: Paul Cézanne, Pots of Geraniums, watercolour on paper.

The relationship between the illustrated objects is not unique to the painterly world for Merleau-Ponty, but is itself reflected in our normal perception of things. Perceiving the reflection of cypress trees in a swimming pool, Merleau-Ponty contends that he cannot 'gainsay the fact that the water visits [the cypress], too, or at least sends into it, upon it, its active and living essence.' (Ibid, 182) As he continues, 'This internal animation, this radiation of the visible is what the painter seeks under the name of depth, of space, of color'. The water of the swimming pool for Merleau-Ponty is 'not in the pool', like an object in a container, but rather envelopes the scene, injecting vitality into the cypress like blood being transfused into arteries. 

In the above watercolour painting by Cézanne, the geraniums grow luxuriantly and intertwine in their proximity. Despite the respective pots that appear to divide the individual plants, their entwinement makes it hard to perceive where one begins and the other ends (Figure 4). This phenomenon is expressed by Merleau-Ponty when he states that 'Vision alone makes us learn that beings that are different, "exterior," foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are "simultaneity"'. (Ibid, 187) In Cézanne's watercolour, the water enlivening the paint is perceptible in the shape of blotches which etch the outlines of the image on the paper. Just as water is requisite for the appearance of the paint, so too is it for the emergence of the geraniums. 

Illustrating plant movement

Regarding the painter Paul Klee, Merleau-Ponty invokes Henri Michaux, who suggested that Klee's use of colour 'seem to have been born slowly upon the canvas, to have emanated from some primordial ground' and Merleau-Ponty compares this to a 'patina or a mold'. While the former pertains to the green film appearing on bronze from long exposure to the elements, Merleau-Ponty's reference to mould as a way of describing the autonomous and self-emerging appearance of things within the canvas, further emphasises the peculiarity of the living as it unfolds as if on its own, affecting and affected contemporaneously. 

Figure 5: Paul Klee, Blatt, oil on canvas.

With reference to an un-cited painting, Merleau-Ponty writes that 'There is a painting by Klee of two holly leaves, done in the most figurative manner. At first glance the leaves are thoroughly indecipher able, and they remain to the end monstrous, unbelievable, ghostly, on account of their exactness'. (Ibid, 184) I can only assume he is referring to the above painting by Klee, but it certainly depicts what could be two holly leaves (Figure 5). As figurative as it is, the indecipherability of the leaves that Merleau-Ponty speaks of above echoes the foregoing sentiment we distilled from Cézanne's geraniums. In spite of the variegated differences in style, the sense of the living shines through. While not immediately obvious in respects of their denotative depiction, Klee's figurative holly unfolds into a plant(s) much like the female figures of Klee's contemporary Henri Matisse; as Merleau-Ponty writes, almost prefiguring the later Deleuze and Guattari, they 'were not immediately women; they became women.' 

What of movement then? In some respects, movement is implicit to the stillness of the still life. This is captured by Merleau-Ponty when he declares that 'The painting itself would offer to my eyes almost the same thing offered them by real movements' and is especially the case, as he outlines, 'if a living thing is involved'. The still life of the plant is therefore in some sense paradoxical. Yet without engendering an aporia, one can distil the sense of such a phenomenon as the anticipation of movement is always underpinned by a perception of stillness. 

Whilst movement might be characterised by the changing of place, Merleau-Ponty is critical of this solely spatial conception of movement and in turn, is sceptical of the phenomenological recourse of cinema for portraying the sense of such movement. Intriguingly, he suggests that 'slow-motion shows a body floating among objects like an alga but not moving itself' (Ibid, 185). Merleau-Ponty's problem with this depiction of movement seems to be that it lacks the sense of its own movement and is portrayed passively, like the effects of slow-motion applied to a piece of footage. 

Unlike the vascular plant, the alga is not rooted and is thrusted by the inexorable pull of waves. Despite travelling across the seas, Merleau-Ponty appears to attribute an autonomous kind of movement to rooted plants, as he argues that 'the body's grip upon the soil' expresses a 'logic of body and world I know well', as 'these "grips" upon space are also ways of taking hold of time'. While he invokes the grip of the soil taken by a horse, the rooted plant is all the more congruous for grasping the sense of the 'body's grip upon the soil', especially when we consider the sessility of plants which ipso facto attaches them to the literal soil they emerge from.

Movement in still life is therefore implicitly temporal, without needing to represent each of the individual spatial movements as depicted in cinematic footage. Without arbitrarily revering the vascular plant at the expense of algae, there is certainly some, albeit qualified, recourse to Merleau-Ponty's analogy. Namely, as it helps to illustrate the richness of sessile movement unique to plants. Despite being pulled by the waves, Merleau-Ponty overlooks the powers of algae to anchor themselves to all kinds of substrates, meaning that their movement involves occupying both space and place, much like their vascular kin.

The organic objects that fill the paintings of Cézanne and Mutrie alike are never as still as they at first appear. Like the roses in Mutrie's painting of the same name, that at first glance seem as if they are bathing in a familiar vase, soon reveals the backdrop of a rugged and wild terrain, which in turn sharpens the wildness of these ornamental flowers (Figure 2). Both painters distil the wildness already implicit to still life, whether incongruous flowers or distorted apples that will soon be enveloped by the emergence of mould. 

As Merleau-Ponty contends, 'the apple and the meadow "form themselves" from them selves, and come into the visible as if they had come from a pre spatial world behind the scenes'. These living scenes illustrated in still life therefore depict the sense of the eruption without the climax, an excessive burst of movement sensed from within the painting. There is something especially potent about Mutrie's Wildflowers, a living landscape or rather cornerscape, of bellying and pulsating emergence, where the excessive beauty of life can manifest, even and especially on the outskirts.

References

Birrell, Rebecca, This Dark Country, Bloomsbury, 2021.

Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, Northwestern University Press, 1964a

Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, Northwestern University Press, 1964b

Figures

Figure 1: Martha Darley Mutrie, Wild Flowers at the Corner of a Cornfield, Oil paint on canvas.

Figure 2: Martha Darley Mutrie, Roses, oil on canvas.

Figure 3: Paul Cézanne, The Basket of Apples, oil on canvas.

Figure 4: Paul Cézanne, Pots of Geraniums, watercolour on paper.

Figure 5: Paul Klee, Blatt, oil on canvas.