Hiroshi Sugimoto

I often wish I were a plant. I would be able to settle in one place and would always be relaxed as long as light and water were available. And since I would have no brain, I would be free from thinking about this or that all the time.. Moreover, I would live considerably longer. The Yaku cedars on Yaku Island in Kagoshima, Japan, for example, have lived since that Jomon Period ( c. 17,000 - 3,000 B.C.). Impressive.

But, like humans, plants are not free of gender issues. They have to have beautiful flowers and appealing scents to attract bees and butterflies to be their intermediaries. However, the gender of moss, the oldest plant on Earth, is more ambiguous, so it reproduces using spores or generative cells. No special tactics are necessary, just sufficient moisture.

In Japan, mosses used to be classified as inka shokubutsu, which refered to lower plants without flowers. However, I like this designation, for the Chinese characters actually suggests that their flowers are hidden, not absent.

The naturalist Kumagusu Minakata (1867 - 1941) was fascinated by slime mold. It grows on decaying stumps and secretes mucus, and sometimes moves like a slug and sometimes remains still to facilitate sporing and reproduction. As human life still begins as a mere drop of mucus (even while we believe we represent the highest form of the evolutionary ladder), which life is better and more advanced? I often think about this, even as my brain, while thiking about this, is still in the process of evolving. Maybe my brain was moss a long, long time ago. The vast timelessness of moss puts in mind the Husserlian epoché - my thinking suspende between self and plant.

- Hiroshi Sugimoto