Purple Rain

100 petals for Kate Siklosi

"When there's blood in the sky – red and blue = purple ... purple rain pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith/God guide you through the purple rain."

— Prince, NME.com

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Outside my west-facing kitchen window grows a Clematis Etiole Violette, a hardy, deciduous vine with dark purple flowers that bloom through late summer and early fall. We hardly noticed it when moving in to our little wartime house last year — the garden was a chaos of plants hastily cropped back from the path — until a few sparse flowers popped up in the half-dead Sunshine Ligustrum bush it was throttling. To disentangle them, both plants had to be cut nearly to the ground.

Early this summer I installed a bamboo trellis and began training new Clematis vines to grab hold. The pandemic kept me close to home, where I could check on the plant’s growth several times a day, coax its tendrils this way and that, pick weeds and ancient bits of trash from the soil around it, and generally fuss over its wellbeing. Mid-June the plant was thriving, not yet forming buds but on course to outgrow the 8’ trellis. Then a particularly savage hailstorm rolled in from the foothills and shredded it, along with the rest of the garden. My Clematis looked pitiful as its battered leaves dried up and fell off, but after a week new shoots sprang out of the wreckage, along with flowers, first one or two, then several, soon dozens and scores, until it was more petal than leaf. Meanwhile the sun raged down, sometimes through the reddening pallor of wildfire smoke, and the first few flowers began to wilt. With zealous care I collected every petal as it fell from the plant (also from the annual phlox growing beside the front porch), hundreds if not thousands of petals I then pressed into a big book of Gustave Doré engravings.

What is the nature of devotion? To grow a plant and collect its deadfall, to make each petal totemic, is an act of love, but to trap this love in plastic film, in an aura of artifice both conceptual and material, is to transgress against nature. Conversely, investing single-use plastic with the very totem of your love is a rehabilitative act, subverting and diverting the flippant deadliness of this petro-culture medium. Of course, it’s hubris to believe an artifact can be redeemed outside the conditions of its material existence — devotion will never outlast its molecular contaminants. As the climate worsens, as plastic pollution reaches ever higher levels of saturation, only archives of human intervention are permitted to grow. Each petal I obsessively collected and preserved, enumerated and documented, then sealed away for transmutation, sequesters something of nature (the petal) and something synthetic (the plastic), each passing through the portal of artifice to find afterlife in the other.

Purple rain then signifies love in the midst of tragedy, love as a kind of tragedy, love as the catalyst for tragedy, devotion concealing an inescapable conflict at heart. These petals, removed from nature, and their plastic sleeves, diverted from the landfill, are symbolic of the troubling inextricability of beauty and death amid spiraling ecological devastation. Donna Haraway urges us to stay with this trouble, to respond by forming productive kinships, decentralized networks of response-ability. In answer, I claim poet Kate Siklosi as my kin, in the sense that aspects of her practice, her thinking, speak through mine. She calls me to account without calling — rather our mutual being-with registers as a calling to account in me — and so I’ve dedicated this work to her. Thank you, Kate, for bringing an ethics of mutual care to your creative practice and collaborative efforts, and may this small act of devotion to a plant signify the network of creative kinships you’ve helped me to better appreciate.

With love and respect,

Kyle Flemmer

September 30, 2020