Plantoids!

 

Back in the 1950s, when Flying Saucers were all the rage, people began claiming communications from the occupants of these otherworldly craft- and one commonality between the alleged messages to these so-called "contactees" was a message of environmentalism. The abandonment of nuclear weapons, and care for the lifeforms on planet Earth seemed to have been a top priority for these planet-hopping Space Brothers. One wonders what difference it made to those living on Venus, Saturn, or Mars? Was it a message of fraternity and altruism, or did it benefit them in some way? There have been a variety of answers, ranging from Theosophically informed New Age explanations about balancing life energies to more mundane but equally fantastical ones seemingly culled from the pages of pulp sci-fi mags. 

It may seem a strange question to even pose, as most people don't consider the claims of the contactees to be worthy of consideration. UFOlogy has long had a large schism between the more esoteric types of sky watchers and the "nuts and bolts" ET hunters, but either school of thought tends toward the idea that these craft (and by extension, the entities controlling them) come from another planet. There has always been some amount of thinkers who are inclined toward the idea that the source of these strange visitors might be much more terrestrial indeed. Still others have long contended that there were more metaphysical sources for these phenomena; Meade Layne, for instance, and others in the Borderland Sciences Research Associates, promoted the idea of Etherships from neighboring dimensions of reality. When we entertain the less-than-physical theories of UFOs, we open the door for everything from hallucinations to thought projections, from the unsatisfying mundane to the extremity of psychical weirdness. We always assume, however, that these entities are here for us or extensions of us; us humans, the top lifeforms of Planet Earth. We sometimes consider the mutilated cow or the scared dog, but rarely do we think about the variety of flora in the world. 

 Forteana more broadly has classically approached plants more skeptically, as evidenced by this clipping from a December 1950 issue of FATE Magazine. It's not all too often that the stories in their pages contains a disclaimer, but the tale of the Man-Eating Trees appears to have been too tall even for the editors there. Carnivorous plants are well-documented, and though somewhat exotic aren't necessarily weird. Something about the idea of a meat-eating plant, though, seems to spark a connection and allow us to anthropomorphize plant life, to imbue it with some level of sentience that we understand. We see it in fiction, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek way, in films such as Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors and variations thereof. The carnivorous plant in the movie is actually an alien, which can talk, and demand blood. The vampiric plant being has precedent as well in The Thing From Another World, in which a frozen plant-based humanoid is thawed out from its apparent icy grave and sustains itself on plasma.

There aren't very many UFOlogical examples of this sort of thing, but one was recorded by Gray Barker in the 1960s- the case of Jennings Frederick, whose "Veggie Man" encounter culminated in the entity apparently latching on with suction cup fingers to draw blood. The creature, whatever it was, telepathically conveyed its need for medical assistance to the terrified Frederick, and it was implied that the being was an extraterrestrial. 

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Plant beings from outer space is a fun concept to consider, but it still relies on the idea of interplanetary or interstellar travel. It also implies the very human idea that the most superior forms of sentient being would be technologically adept and probably humanoid in appearance. The more magically inclined among us have, for centuries, accepted that plants have intendant spirit forms. Nature spirits and fairy entities from cultures around the world are intimately connected with plants, or are spiritual emanations from them in some cases. We tend also to anthropomorphize these, as in practices with plants such as the mandrake.

Less magical but still on the fringe, there has long been an argument that plants have a type of sentience- and, one imagines, such sentience would be nearly inconceivable to our monkey brains. The 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird popularized the idea, relying heavily on the "Backster Effect"- a series of findings by a man named Cleve Backster, who used a polygraph machine to test plant responses to stimuli. An episode of the popular TV series In Search of...  also focused on these ideas in the 70s, and L. Ron Hubbard claimed to confirm some of these results through the use of the same "E-Meter" he used in auditing members of his Church of Scientology. (Hubbard claimed that tomatoes "screamed" when sliced or pierced. One imagines he grinned ghoulishly while saying this.) Needless to say, the jury is still way out and plant intelligence is far from proven. Most, if not all of the ideas posed in the aforementioned media has been lambasted by scientists and disregarded as fiction. Fiction, however, provides a useful means of conjecture. Further, "sentience", "consciousness", and "intelligence" are ill-defined abstract terms using only the human mind as a baseline. Hungarian born botanist Raoul H. Francé argued for "True Botany" in his 1905 book Germs of Mind in Plants, saying that the endless categorization and study of dried plant "mummies" neglected the life, the important part of plant studies. Though useful, he felt that focusing on the minutiae of plant parts ignored the fact that humanity and plants of all types had a common bond; a will to live, that they had sensation, and a purpose. Through our animal eyes, we view other forms of sentience- if we see them at all- as either inferior or equivalent in some way to our own. It seems more likely that a non-human sentience and indeed a non-animal one would be so different from ours we may never see it at all.

There are quite a few unknowns in regard to human consciousness, and much controversy involved in investigating them. We don't quite know what happens to consciousness after the death of the body, for instance- nor do we really know the limits of the perceptions our minds can obtain. Extrasensory Perception has been studied for ages, and still unproven in the minds of many. It's worth noting that J. B. Rhine, who started the parapsychology lab at Duke University with his wife Louisa, had a degree in botany. If there are unknown borders to confine what we experience as human consciousness, who is to say whether there are overlapping borders with the neighboring lifeforms, those that sustain us through exchanges of oxygen and carbon dioxide? Further, can we really discount the mystics, the folk tales, and the magical history of nature spirits? And, if we entertain discarnate entities as emanations from the flora, how is that different from the parapsychological apport or the mystical tulpa? Can plants manifest psychic apparitions, or solid objects? Can we?

This may seem to be an insane line of inquiry, but to the mind of this writer it all sounds more plausible than flesh and blood visitors from another planet on a nuts and bolts craft. It has a degree of unreality to it which is so weird it just might be true. Bringing us back to the contactees, it resolves the ecological mission of the Space Brothers. If Orthon or Aura Rhanes were actually plantmind phantasms, it would make a lot of sense. It was jokingly suggested before on this blog that Nessie might be a sentient blob of peat moss, and as the years have gone by I have warmed up to the idea as a real possibility.  As we consider the muck monster form, it is perhaps advisable to refer once again the our fictions as a basis for speculation...

The fictional character Swamp Thing first appeared in 1971, created by Len Wein for the DC Comic House of Secrets. The story of a scientist through misadventure transforming into a monstrous version of his former self saw several changes over the years, culminating in a movie version and a sequel, and several television shows. The "muck monster" idea had precedent in the Theodore Sturgeon story "It! The Thing that Couldn't Die!" and in a comic book called Air Fighters from the 1940s, featuring a monster called The Heap. In "It!", the monster seems to be an animated human skeleton at its core, killing purely out of curiosity; its sentience is unformed and basic. The Heap was animated through the indomitable will to live of a crashed pilot. For our purposes here, we'll stick with Swamp Thing, and more specifically the Saga of the Swamp Thing series written by Alan Moore.

In Moore's story, a lesser DC villain Jason Woodrue is given conditional release from prison to examine the corpse of Swamp Thing. He discovers that all of the organs one might expect to find in a human are there, but none of them fulfill the function they would in a human body- they are replicas, approximations of what human anatomy looks like. They are flora assuming the form of man, and there is actually nothing left of the scientist Alec Holland. So what consciousness drives the Thing? Woodrue's villain persona, the Fluoronic Man, manages to tap into plant consciousness and discovers a worldwide network that operates as one functional mind. He and Swamp Thing refer to it simply as "The Green", a cosmic life force that permeates all of the non-animal life on the planet. So foreign is this manner of sentience, it drives Woodrue mad and he becomes megalomaniacal. 

Our diversion into comic book reality may bear some relevance to a reality we all fail to recognize, though it surrounds us every day. Our houseplant, the denizens of our crisper drawer, or even the Christmas tree we cut down and plant in our living room may have a mind all its own- or, it may be tapped into a network of mind, a cosmic and ethereal energy inextricable from our habitable material realm. Perhaps Plantoids can manifest, as UFOs or lake monsters, as phantoms or fairies; perhaps they can use organic material to build a form or can solidify purely psychic ones. Perhaps the reader assumes that these are the idle thoughts of a human mind under the influence of particular kinds of plants. But maybe, just maybe, the reader is afraid to know that they are not the authority on sentience.

Manifesting Our Cultural Superman: Truth, Justice, and the American Way

 

In 1978, Hollywood not only asked us to believe a man could fly- they gave audiences a directive. You will believe a man can fly. Superman came to movie screens across the United States and inspired viewers, young and old, with a character who at that point had been emblematic of our cultural values for 40 years. 

Belief is a tricky thing, though. Superman himself had trouble breaking into the pages of comic books because he seemed too unbelievable; leaping tall buildings in a single bound or traveling faster than a speeding bullet was considered too far of a stretch by the men at the top. Believing in the impossible requires a level of intellectual bravery, or, paradoxically, childish credulity. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about this as a type of "poetic faith"- that the "semblance of truth" could be conveyed through supernatural or otherwise fantastical means by simply enjoying the impossible narrative for its own sake. When we willingly suspend disbelief, we become privy to ephemeral truths about human nature, about society, and about the world in which we live. All of the best speculative fiction, even if it's considered low brow by literary standards, illustrates the usefulness of actively letting go of critical faculty- taking a leap, into the air, and flying, as an act of faith- and thus being rewarded not only through the power of entertainment and novelty but by the inherent meaning and truth conveyed.

Truth, however, is another sticky concept. Christopher Reeve, in his role as Superman in the aforementioned movie, uses the hero's old motto of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way". We see here how intimately Superman is tied to ideas about the U.S., what it stands for, or perhaps what it should aspire to. Veering away from suspension of disbelief for a moment, this motto traces its roots to the second World War, for Superman's radio show in an effort to support American troops overseas. It again became used by George Reeves in the 1950s TV series, this time as Cold War rhetoric. These are true statements, and the more cynical among us bristle at the hokeyness the tagline embodies while simultaneously being tangential to propaganda. If we employ our willingness to believe, without any umbrage or analysis, we may find that the simplicity of these basic values as stated have a kind of beauty that is often absent in popular discourse. 

Truth is not only sticky, it's very difficult to face. It's not terribly surprising that Superman has been increasingly considered corny in recent decades, or that belief in American ideals has become such a quagmire. People often rightly point out that the men who founded our nation, and spoke of freedom, largely owned human beings for the purpose of forced labor. Many examples from history directly contradict the ideals expressed in the founding documents, and it feels increasingly childish or naive to equate "the American Way" with Truth or Justice. Perhaps, however, a childlike view - or a suspension of disbelief, cynicism, and anger - is helpful in believing we can get there. In recent years, Superman has been instead saying "Truth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow"- and one could argue that the sentiment is precisely the same. The Truth that the founding fathers were promoting was held by them to be self-evident. One might say even a child could tell you what freedom is, what equality looks like, and what's fair. For reasons seem to be intrinsically part of human nature, the basic values of human dignity and equality are reasoned away as flights of fancy. 

There's nothing controversial or even political about Truth. If we accept for our purposes that by "men" the founders used an archaic form of "human", we see by these self-evident truths that we are all equal, and each of us has the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. There are no qualifiers in this vision of what it means to be American. It should be obvious, this Truth, or self-evident as we interact with others in the world- and yet for so many, the premise seems laughably alien. This is, perhaps, where Justice comes in. Prior to, during, and after the founding of these United States the original ideals have consistently failed to manifest in a multitude of ways. In other ways, though, this grand titanic experiment has gradually arced toward its goal. If we are to exercise our muscles in disbelief suspension, through intellectual honesty or childish optimism, we can get to a place where despite all evidence to the contrary such lofty ambitions are achievable. We can believe in a Better Tomorrow, we can believe that it's the same as the American Way, just as we can believe a man can fly.

The ugly truths and injustices of our modern world may lead us to ennui, despair, and hopelessness. It must not, however, lead us to concede defeat prematurely. There is still goodness in the world, and even if it seems less self-evident when one looks at the news or scrolls through social media, we are all equal parts of the equation and in the same boat. Xenophobia, dehumanization, and bigotry seems so obviously anathema to the very specific principles set forth in the Constitution, and yet many wave American flags while spewing such rhetoric. There's something to be said for the fact that Superman stood for these ideals even though he was not only an immigrant from another nation, but from another planet. We seem to be stuck in a binary mindset, one rife with contradiction and logical fallacies. Whether we consider the America of the idea space to be just as corny and fictional as Superman, or whether we believe in an alternate factual interpretation of traditionalism from the founders, we are becoming increasingly at odds not only with each other but also with our humanity. If we don't want the Earth to go the way of Krypton, we should do everything in our power to bring these founding principles to bear.

   As a character, Superman was born out of what became known as the Golden Age of comic books. In a literary sense, the concept of the Golden Age relates to a time before humanity suffered, a paradise that once existed and was lost. Occasionally, examples of this literary device depict a Utopian future. Myriad dimensions of this kind of idea manifest in our discourse regularly; people may speak of the "good old days", or become nostalgic for simpler times. If we are to concern ourselves with Truth, however, we realize that this nostalgia relates to a past that never was. The above image seems like a bittersweet relic of a bygone era, but worse than that, it's a message of hope from nearly three-quarters of a century ago that seems to have burned out instead. The 1950s were a complicated time, and there are plenty of reasons Superman's message here didn't match reality then- but our Man of Tomorrow was forward thinking, and many of the inequalities present at that time gradually met with Justice. Now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, this golden utopian America seems just as fictional, cornball, and archaic as Superman himself. But Superman never dies, even despite stories in the comics and the movies; similarly, the defiant and indomitable spirit of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness can never be crushed.

The point here is that we should not discard our ideals simply because they are impossible. Real Truth exists despite our inborn need to dissect it and twist it and ultimately cast it aside. The America that is analogous to Truth and Justice, that truly embodies such values, exists in the imaginal realm and is still worthy of our aspiration. It also lives in our symbols- the flag, the bald eagle, and Superman- and can be manifested with these forms. There are stories about real-life encounters with Superman, and other comic characters, existing as a sort of tulpa to the writers and artists who bring him to life on the page. Alvin Schwartz, who wrote Superman comic strips for nearly 20 years, writes about his encounters with such manifestations in his book An Unlikely Prophet- and ultimately realizes that Superman is only one half of the character. The other half is Clark Kent, the mild-mannered reporter. While none of us can claim to fly, bend steel or have x-ray vision we can all relate to Kent. Whether we choose to believe claims such as those made by Schwartz in his book, we can nevertheless extrapolate from the idea of thought forms becoming real that the impossible may not be as far away as we think. In spite of the fact that we've never quite seen the kind of Golden Age or self-evident truths in action the way we would wish to, we must nevertheless hold space for them. We keep them close to our hearts, the way Clark wore his costume under his shirt.

Perhaps some symbols, archetypes, and forms outlive their usefulness eventually. Perhaps there are ages and epochs where the gods reign supreme and others where humanity lifts itself up. We can't wait for the deus ex machina, the blue and red bullet from the sky to come and rescue us all from the horrors we've created. But if we believe a man can fly, if we believe that a better tomorrow can be today, if we can suspend our disbelief enough to make room for such naive sounding things as Truth or Justice or the American Way, then maybe we can manifest our cultural Superman as we live our Clark Kent lives. As we look up in the sky, we can channel hope. The fight is not over, and likely it never will be. We fight in spite of it all in the hopes of that impossible future which rests entirely on poetic faith, that there will come a time when fighting is no longer necessary.

Who cares if it's corny? Believe.