Pollen on my Mind
Arcadia Molinas thinks about love as different types of pollination. “In the best of cases, pollination results in fertilization, birth, ‘what spring does to the cherry trees.’”
Reading, writing, and loving. The three axes on which my life runs its course. I feel fortunate for these axes, to have axes in the first place. They disguise themselves well as purposes in life. My childhood room was the family library. Two hundred tomes of fiction slept with me every night for twelve years. My love for reading was unavoidable, a matter of ink seeping from the bookshelves into my budding senses, night after night. Writing followed suit, almost as an extension of all those printed words that surrounded me. I started keeping journals when I was fourteen and writing poems a year later. Now, I write for a living, among other things. And as far as loving is concerned, well, I’m hardly alone in my fixation on it. Love is tricky. It has obsessed poets and beyond for centuries. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda dedicated one of the most beautiful collections of poems I’ve ever read to it, Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair. It’s been my most gifted book to lovers and friends, past and present. In poem 14, possibly my favorite, the closing verses read, “I want / to do with you what spring does to the cherry trees.” I love it because it’s such a beautiful description of what love is.
Many have tried to describe love: as a chemical reaction in the brain, as an encounter with the spiritual, or as a bodily reaction in the presence of the object of affection. Here is my own definition: love is pollination. In the best of cases pollination results in fertilization, birth, “what spring does to the cherry trees.” That’s why it gives life purpose. But sometimes, in the worst of cases, another person’s pollen can pollute, it can produce allergies, and wilt you down to your core. You don’t always choose who takes a walk in your garden, and sometimes a rogue insect can worm its way in.
Not long ago, I was getting over a horrible love affair. In the words of Jeanette Winterson in Written on the Body, it had given me “the clap. Nothing wrong with my organs, this was emotional clap.” On paper, the man who had given me the clap was perfect, he ticked a lot of the boxes I was looking for. He was an artsy type with enough hobbies to fill five thousand buckets, he was funny, silly, he was tall. But in practice, he didn’t live up to expectations. This discrepancy tortured me. I spun and spun threads of thought around him and our affair. Why wasn’t he interested in me? Couldn’t he see what could be if he just gave himself over to me? Despite my hurt, my anger, and the subsequent feelings of hatred that arose (Anne Carson credits Sappho with the first reference to eros as “bittersweet” in her essay Eros the Bittersweet but the fine line between love and hate is a tightrope I’m sure we are all familiar with), despite how hard I tried to exorcise his image from my mind, his passing through had left an unerasable mark. Not only had he streaked me with sadness, but he’d also left new grooves and patterns there too. I was changed. In short, I’d been pollinated.
Love isn’t only for lovers, though. Friends can sprinkle you with their fertilizer too. Gaspard, the lanky, misanthropic lead of Eric Rohmer’s film A Summer’s Tale, is faced with the difficult task of choosing between girls (a medley of lovers and friends) during one summer at the seaside town of Dinard. Although he was hoping to bump into his on-and-off girlfriend Léna there, he soon meets Margot and Solène who confuse him and offer different types of relationships to him. Margot is the first girl Gaspard meets there, and she offers him friendship. They spend a great deal of the film going on long walks, talking. Their minds buzz when in proximity. “I’m only myself with you,” Gaspard tells her. Friendship is one of the most constant suppliers of pollen in life. There are times I look at my friends and think I was put on this green earth to know them and love them. Alice Walker wrote the poem No Better Life that goes, “To be full / Of soup / Cooked / By a friend” and isn’t she right? There is no better life than being ‘fed’ by your friend. Sharing love with your friends is a direct pipeline to your garden and it gets watered, pruned, and tended to around them. “I get high with a little help from my friends,” sang the Beatles. That’s about their metaphoric gardens growing tall together, right?
The other girl Gaspard meets is the vivacious and passionate Solène. Their bodies come alive when they’re in each other’s presence. Theirs is an absolute physical bond – based on touch, excitement, and a surrender to intimacy. While Margot offers him all the fecund benefits of a platonic relationship, Solène’s contribution is entirely to his body, not his mind. In real life too, people can come to represent a category in their absolute. Unreciprocated love can pollute, platonic love can bring down walls, but what happens when someone pollinates your entire body?
Sometime after I’d healed from my bout with the clap, I met someone I connected with to a degree and depth I had never experienced before. I was in awe. I had met someone like Maggie Nelson had described in Bluets “who fucks like a whore. Someone who seems good at it, professional. Someone you can still see fucking you, in the mirror, always in the mirror, crazy fucking about three feet away, in an apartment lit by blue light […] and you both always seem good at it, dedicated and lost unto it, as if there is no other activity on God’s given earth your bodies know how to do except fuck and be fucked like this, in this dim blue light, in this mirror.” Is it always like this for you? I asked him. Do you make all other girls feel this way? Physically, I was consumed, I was floating on cloud 9, steam chugging out of the orgasm train, and I had no intention of getting off. Everyone else would just pale in comparison. The allure of completion, even if it’s only partial, is absorbing. Letting the “soft animal of your body / love what it loves,” as Mary Oliver urges us to in Wild Geese, feels like a return: it’s primal, animal. Any time pollination is happening, it’s scratching an itch burrowed deep inside all of us. That’s why Gaspard has such a difficult time choosing between the girls. Who’s to say what category of pollination is superior to the other?
As the film draws to its end, Gaspard becomes progressively more erratic and helpless before the prospect of picking one of the girls. So, he leaves Dinard without any of the girls and decides to marry music instead. My music is reading and writing. They are pollinators too. I could also choose to marry them instead. Chris Kraus, in I Love Dick, even says reading is “better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill – getting larger cause you’re entering another person’s language, cadence, heart and mind.” Maybe I should follow Gaspard’s lead and leave love to one side. Stop running the risk of pollution. A lot of love ends anyway. “The measure of love is loss,” reads the opening line of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. But like pollen, love is airborne and everywhere. So, to Chris Kraus I would say: a book ends, and you could stop writing, but a person who glimpses into your garden bleeds over everything.
Want more stories like this?
Girlboss, Bimbo, Babygirl–What’s Next?
Does Valentine’s Day Even Matter?
Why Does Stained Glass Make Us So Happy?