I love the greenhouse—we went houseplant shopping today, and I spent the longest time staring at cacti in the amazing indoor natural light. I want to live in a plastic barn, among plants. My favorite cactus was the size of a melon, and it had a couple dozen wrinkly faces, each with countless fibonacci-spiraling prickers (spines? jaggers?). The amount and arrangement of information overwhelmed my faculties of cognition; I couldn't see the cactus all at once, and it seemed to be in motion, like those tessellating lizards one sees peripherally in pebbly sand after a sleepless night. It was a living cubist object, thanks to the natural math of optimal form. I really wanted to bring the cactus home but doubted I could take care of it—even my favorite quartz crystal couldn't save Hilary's beloved rat-tail cactus (although that one, dug out of the ground in McNeal, Arizona, was never intended to live a domestic life in northern New England). So instead I picked out three leafy plants that looked friendly and had a quickening effect on my powers of imagination.

This seemed the appropriate time to finally pick up Stevie Wonder's Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. I had seen it in the Soul bin last week at Strange Maine; thankfully it was still there ($6). It is insane that I never listened to this record until now. I mean, I preached from The Secret Life of Plants (the book) in high school, even early college. (After Desmond Morris, Carl Sagan, Fritjof Capra, Terence McKenna, Leary and Alpert, The Celestine Prophecy, and Phish, the science of plant consciousness did not require a great leap in imagination.) I put on Innervisions when I re-pot my plants. I bring up the Wonder/houseplant affinity in any discussion of 70s culture. Maybe the Universe had a reason for hiding this music from me until I was 33. But it's criminal that Journey isn't part of the normative Wonder catalog. You can tell by listening that the music is a soundtrack to something you're supposed to see, but this makes it no less complete (for Wonder, at least, the music is the movie). His genius is fully present, more so because the context is not totally self-defined—you can hear real-time living intelligence more clearly in a commissioned throwaway than in a masterpiece of personal vision. The fact that the music is campily programmatic is a plus; this defeats any ironic New Age angle one might attempt to take up (slapstick jazz can break out anywhere (certain sequences of the movie must be animated (& you know there's lots of time-lapse photography