Not long ago TPRI began receiving missives from something called “Nepenthean Palaver.” Understanding that whatever this entity is, that it is, finally, for better or worse, “poetics,” we have no choice but to offer links to these undigest communications here. So, like the cathartic botanist who has discovered in the wild a new species so delightful, strange, and extraordinary that it justifies an entire life spent searching for those most delirious heights of knowledge and luxurious, sumptuary treasure, we present: Nepenthean Palaver.
https://nepentheanpalaver.ghost.io/
When we inquired with Nepenthean Palaver about their identity, we were met with this, so I will let them introduce themselves in their own words:
nepenthean palaver is often registered as one form or another of the gutted exhaust that sputters from the pipe of pyrrhic dirigibles. In this lip of the desert, one may mount a maudlin horse and tune in that way. In that one, a din of ludic delirium stretches one ugly fata morgana (belgian stump) across a procrustean cot of oblivion in which one naps in the observance of memory, that boustrophedonic debauchery known as holiday to some and hecatomb to others. You might say, “man, that’s so infradig, man, woo woo basement diddle duodenum. ubuntu pyongyang.” to which i would say, “ yes?” to which you might say, “oh nothing, i’m just stretching.” to which i would say. “oh, gotcha. Thought you were raising your hand.” “Nope, just stretchin,” you say. But you did have a question, didn’t you Pendulum Man? The excoriated horse that came riding in after the maudlin horse–– that’s who they were looking for.
Our researches are still engaged in decoding this cryptic string of glyphs. We got them working in shifts.
In the meantime, I have spent some brief moments trying to crack into the significance of the name: Nepenthean Palaver. It does ring out quite nicely.
Nepenthe (νηπενθές, nēpenthés), I learned, is a drug mentioned in the Odyssey as a remedy for grief, something that induces forgetfulness of sorrow and eases pain. Like writing, which according to Plato was also a North African import, nepenthe is depicted as originating in Egypt. It first appears in the fourth book of the Odyssey:
| ἔνθ᾽ αὖτ᾽ ἄλλ᾽ ἐνόησ᾽ Ἑλένη Διὸς ἐκγεγαυῖα: αὐτίκ᾽ ἄρ᾽ εἰς οἶνον βάλε φάρμακον, ἔνθεν ἔπινον, νηπενθές τ᾽ ἄχολόν τε, κακῶν ἐπίληθον ἁπάντων. | Then Helen, daughter of Zeus, took other counsel. Straightway she cast into the wine of which they were drinking a drug to quiet all pain and strife, and bring forgetfulness of every ill. |
So the word’s usual meaning orbits around the notion of a drug that induces a beautiful forgetting. We might hear here an opposition to that famously dangerous supplement, writing, that would accidentally induce an unwanted forgetting in its user. While Plato warned us of the dangers to memory latent in memory’s continued somatic externalization as writing, a supplemental technicity that he cautioned against relying on beyond its immediate use-value, the nepenthe is that supplement we use to purposefully obliterate memory and suffering, however illusory that temporary respite is. One might, I think wrongly, hear in this idea of the nepenthean supplement something like an anesthetic drugged-out escapism, the simple sumptuary luxurious wasting of life performed by the opium-eater for example. Well, maybe I don’t think they’d be totally wrong to hear that. Nor am I opposed to such wasting. And yet, the truth, I think, is more interesting. The moment in the Odyssey when Helen supplements everyone’s wine with nepenthe is the precise moment in the poem when a shift begins to occur from a series of reflections about the current state of things to the actual narrativizing of Ulysses’ travails. In the first books of the Odyssey we hear about things like the political situation in Ithaca, Ulysses’ long absence, Athena’s urging Telemachus to search for news of his father’s fate, and the tensions mounting between Penelope and her many ill-fated suitors that are ravenously devouring Ulysses’ wealth. Needless to say, everyone hopes Ulysses will return. When Telemachus finally reaches Helen and Menelaus in Sparta after Athena’s help, it is then and there that we begin to enter to slipstream of storytelling aided by Helen’s Egyptian supplement; and rather than drift into a catatonic anhedonia, we arrive at the miraculous mythic tales of Ulysses, a dreamworld we understand is a real alterverse where we hear about what is not present to us, but distant and hopeful; where we imagine our dreams of the way things are supplemented by the way things might be (Ulysses returning); where we hope, love, dream and suspend for sublime moments our prisoner-like sentence to “real life.” So we take the nepenthean supplement not to induce the kind of forgetting Plato warns us writing will cause, nor to bring on a basic anti-social drug-addled forgetting of our responsibility to society. Rather, we take the nepenthean supplement when we want to suppress the certainty of our apprehension’s reality effect, when we want to disorient our sense of the natural attitude, when we want to dispense with ideology and pragmatic action, and when we need to enter a realm where hopes and dreams can be created in opposition to “the way things are;” when we want to tell stories, sing poems, and convene beyond hegemony’s horrible argument; where we build myths and dreams that are the only way to structure the possibility of a better future against the intolerable reality that presents itself as the absolute.
Interestingly, Nepenthes also came to name a genus of carnivorous plant, known as “tropical pitcher plants,” or “monkey cups.”
Eschewing plant-life’s typical photosynthetic alchemy, Nepenthes trap, poison, drown, and eat insects for their food. Their technicolor gaping pitcher-like ribbed lips, known as peristomes, often coated with a seductive nectar, attract insects to crawl into their maw. Their wet lips cause bugs to aquaplane, and slip and fall into the pitcher. Once inside, the Nepenthes slams its lid shut, attaching a filiform appendage to itself, enclosing the prey in its womb-like death-chamber. Most nepenthes’ “pitchers” are filled with a viscoelastic biopolymer that arrests the now-prey insect, trapping them inside this negative womb of death. A waxy inner coating makes escape for most captured prey near impossible. While most Nepenthes are satisfied devouring insects in this way, the largest species, like N. rajah and N. rafflesiana, may occasionally catch small vertebrates, such as rats and lizards, even small birds.
The name Nepenthes was applied to these plants by Carl Linnaeus in his 1737 Hortus Cliffortianus, in reference to the aforementioned Homeric passage. Linneaus expalined,
“If this is not Helen’s Nepenthes, it certainly will be for all botanists. What botanist would not be filled with admiration if, after a long journey, he should find this wonderful plant. In his astonishment past ills would be forgotten when beholding this admirable work of the Creator!”
According to Linneaus, the excited botanist, overwhelmed by the discovery of this unique plant, seizes with pleasure and awe, overcome by a little death that temporarily erases all past sorrows. Their troubles dissolve into a radical moment of catharsis when they behold “this admirable work of the Creator!” that seems to make life’s searching all worth it, precisely because at that moment they forget about reality, and discover themselves in creation. While this might suggest an anesthetic understanding of aesthetics as capable of producing sublime little deaths in the observer that temporarily exhume them from life’s suffering, I will prefer to think more seriously about the bugs themselves. Linneaus’s passionate botanist, after all, does not escape his own arrogant narcissistic Adamic urge to name the divinely ineffable they have claimed to experience. If for a brief moment they experience ecstasy, they just as quickly must seek to categorize it into a taxonomy that simultaneously destroys that ineffability’s singularity (or at least tries to). The irony of the name, we must be clear, is wonderful, as it situates a name for beautiful forgetting into an orderly system meant to facilitate scientific remembering. It is precisely such taxonomies that Plato warned against, wherein an obsession with writing, naming, and categorizing would replace the dialectical emergence of communal knowledge, play, and, eventually, utopia. What we must respect, I think, is that excessive drive of the botanist to name the world out of existence, in an attempt to create a wonderfully obscene perfect map of reality. That drive to representation is the divine kind of passion, failure, exultation, and revelation, and at its best, even technical science drifts into its wasteland, like those bugs seeking food only to find their fated demise.
Insects enter the Nepenthean reverse womb with the expectation of a delightful, luscious, luxurious feast. Upon arrival, like those saccharine bourgeois trapped at the endless dinner party of Luis Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel, they find instead nothing but their own slow and no doubt painful death by drowning, suffocation, and/or starvation. Nature’s cruel irony is not lost on me. The plant’s imitation of life-giving nourishment is a violent disguise, appropriating the promise of sundry gifts, then sundering that promise, revealing the death-blow inherent in all promises of representation and signification. For instructing us, the bugs pay their life, and enter death, the ultimate forgetting.
What does the Orangutan know?
What of “monkey cups.” Did you forget?
Paul A. Zahl reflects in a 1964 issue of National Geographic:
“The carriers called them “monkey cups,” a name I had heard elsewhere in reference to Nepenthes, but the implication that monkeys drink the pitcher fluid seemed farfetched. I later proved it true. In Sarawak, I found an orangutan that had been raised as a pet and later freed. As I approached it gingerly in the forest, I offered it a half-full pitcher. To my surprise, the ape accepted it, and with the finesse of a lady at tea, executed a delicate bottoms-up.”
So we should not too quickly focus on Nature’s deceitful self-proliferation and cruelty as some kind of special insight into our own art’s relation to life and death, nourishment and asceticism, good and evil. Certainly, as Werner Herzog reminds us, if there is a harmony in the rainforest, “it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.”
That discordant harmony, that inassimilable chaos, that vacillation between the artifice of art and the givenness of Nature, is the riven pure multiple where poetry’s event happens, and where all reality effects lose their traction. After all, the bug is Nature, the plant is Nature, the Orangutan is Nature; it’s Nature all the way down (of course, this abolishes Nature; here we would prefer Badiou’s term the “naturalized”). “We in comparison to this articulate vileness, and baseness, and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication and overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe…but when I say this I say this in all full of admiration for the jungle. It’s not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.”
Love against better judgment.
So we should not, I repeat, fetishize the obvious death-drive driven deceit that pervades nature in the interest of reproducing certain metastabilities, lest we fall victim to some stupid dogmatic ideology of “selfish genes,” and anthropomorphizing that seeks to find in these process some signification where there is, truly and finally, none. Instead, we should love, against our better judgement, the overwhelming chaos, and find what to love in that chaos as poetry. This is not a love that is anything like liking, but a passionate love that brings us to the limit.
So it is worth mentioning that some Nepenthes also participate in quite beautiful luxurious symbiosis, such as N. lowii that provide a sugary exudate reward on its reflexed pitcher for tree shrews that perch on its lips, eating its delightful excrescence, while defecating into the plant’s mouth. A study found that between 57-100% of N. lowii’s folia nitrogen uptake comes from the feaces of tree shrews. This small cybernetic loop of sugar and shit is just as “natural” as the chaotic void-maw of the nepenthean disguise, and in both we gain insight not into meaning, but in meaning’s reduction of chaos to signification. Some species, infauna dwellers like mosquito larvae, fly and midge larvae, certain spiders and mites, some ants, and surprisingly a species of crab, have even adapted to living within the death-chamber of the nepenthean palaver, making what for other species is a place of certain death a place to life. Home.
I will leave “Palaver” up to the reader.