I'm not a Prynne 'scholar'. But I imagine that any refs to Myrtle or to a
comic Scot in the plant-time text would be covert allusions to real
biologists, whose names I don't in fact know. Thus, conceivably, the Scot may
cloak C.H. Waddington (a Scot, I think). Prynne is adopting a jokey-jokey
tone throughout to fit the peculiarities of Bean News, Ed Dorn and Jenny
Dunbar's one-off paper, where it first appeared. So I don't think he has
either women or Scots in his sights; he's merely masking real scientists in a
way that fits with the perhaps overdone hilarity of the whole piece.
(These discussions may be rather masculine, but that's another matter ...)
Incidentally, the basic point of the piece is being ignored: the strange
distinction between a plant's stem and root time. Root time, I suppose, is
ruled by the "earth time" of biochemical osmotic processes (though this is
not, of course, ordinary at all), whereas stem time is open to circadian (and
astral) influence. Perhaps this is because the plant bends towards the sun
owing to the action of light upon auxins which then restrict growth on that
side of the plant. It's rather like a tank, one of whose tracks stops
running. For a highly peculiar development of this, see the lyric "As grazing
the earth", where, if I recall, the Little Musgrave plant's roots have been
removed, isolating the reactions of its stem to light (there used to be a
graph which went with the poem).
Prynne certainly has always been interested in sidereal time, not just
occasionally: he was first off the mark with the advances in astrophysical
mathematics of the late 1960s.
But this is not a Prynne-defensive position of mine: as I've said, I'm uneasy
with much comment on his work: praise that will glide over difficulty and
towards ecstasy is no better than a TLS-like fearful contempt. There shouldn't
be this pre-charged field of discussion; it's sort of seriously undemocratic!
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