Venus Flytraps

Is it any wonder that this plant was given a name to indicate its ethereal other-worldliness, or at least transcendence in the realm of flora?  Yet, I suppose, the irony is that it fully embodies ‘this-worldliness ‘ in a truly exquisite and lurid form.  It is not its capacity to reduce the fly and ant population around Wilmington, North Carolina (since that is the only place it grows indigenously, strikingly enough) but its capacity to digest ants and flies at all.  This is truly something out of the movies – dare I say only Hollywood, or perhaps Bollywood, would think of something so bizarre, subtly cunning and exuberantly meretricious.  Scientific investigations have revealed that, unlike the lesser known, though more common carnivorous plants like pitcher plants and butterworts, flytraps actually have the innate capacity ‘count’, or at least delay electrical impulse thresholds long enough to distinguish between false alarms like raindrops or dust and true meals, like flies.  I suppose one could reduce the poetry of the flytrap’s mordancy to calcium ion channels and cellular responses, but this would, after a fashion, condense the elegant dance of the ‘daughter of Venus’ to a graphical equation.  In much the same way, one could reduce the poetry of romance and love into an equation about social economics or pheromone preferences or symmetry recognition; but this would do more harm than good.  I am not saying that it would be wrong to study all of these intricacies and much more, but I am saying it would be wrong to leave it at that.  If one cannot see forest for the trees, if one cannot see the poetry for the math, if one cannot respond to the lover’s beckoning call of “I love you” without analyzing the etymology and inflection of the words, then one may need to reconsider the nature of reality.