Description
“There is a lilac that blooms once per periselene cycle and cannot be photographed. Syringa lunaris var. miragea, first entered into the record on the fourteenth of June, 1969, at the Hortus Jezerei Research Station — in handwriting that later analysts described as consistent with someone writing in the dark, toward something — has been the subject of fifteen disciplines, fifteen failures, fifteen attempts to fix in language. Its bloom conducts a current whose unit of measure was invented for the purpose and has since been applied to nothing else. Its perfume, described by those who could not afterwards describe it, seeds memory backward: the gardener remembers, in the moment of smelling, events that have not yet occurred.”
—Andre Breton
How To Grow Lilacs On The Moon is a handbook. It proceeds in the manner of handbooks — through taxonomy and germination study, soil protocol and tidal harmonic, transit certificate and petal metallurgy and the schedule of duties payable at the lunar port — because the marvelous, when it cannot be seized, can at least be administered. The algebra of propagation set against the impossibility of the bloom. What the reader finds here is the complete bureaucratic record of an attempt that is still ongoing, the field notes of a science that is also a devotion, the cultivation manual for a plant that will not, under any condition that has yet been met, be grown.
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