Flower began with the feast. Twelve low tables, made from found wood, were joined together to form a large “X” in a clearing near a small white cottage. Two unusually beautiful girls helped the audience sit on the ground around the tables, offering them a choice of wine or water. The girls, layered in cotton printed with cornstalks, acorns, wheat, and chrysanthemums, performing as geishas conducted the ebb and flow. Once the audience was seated, the tables overflowed, all one hundred places taken.
The place settings were narrow black papers printed with the words “Dismember” and “Remember” framing a single grain of wheat. A handmade scroll, singed at the edges, containing journal excerpts, a table of witch burnings from the 1400s, and engravings of herbs bisected each setting diagonally. The rest of the tables were covered with plates of apples, hundreds of burning candles, oak, pine, and sage branches. What started as an annoying but manageable sprinkle at the beginning of the performance became, during the feast’s prayer, an undeniably heavy rainstorm. At first, the audience stayed put, watching the rain fall onto the candles, snuffing them out slowly, then with increasing success. Some people headed for the trees, huddling in bands of four and five, hands working bodies like windshield wipers. Many in the audience created hats out of the scrolls, assuming the air of a secret hat-wearing cult, looking for direction. After several minutes of mild chaos, the barn was opened and everyone ran for it.

In the late 19th century, a large silver vessel was unearthed in Raeve Bog, a small pot-shaped peat bog located on the northern end of Borre Fen near Gundestrup, Jutland, Denmark. The vessel became known as the Gundestrup Cauldron and is considered the finest example of a Celtic ritual vessel in existence. The meaning of the picture-world depicted on the plates that form the bowl can only be imagined. It’s a sacrificial bowl; even when it was disassembled and carefully buried in the bog some 2,000 years ago, few outside an initiated priesthood would have understood its language. The pictures tell of a world where goddesses and gods, cult processionals, and sacrificial scenes of bloodletting must have served as welcome relief to the harsh, workaday life of Iron Age Denmark. In 1891, the year the cauldron was found, that hard life was remarkably unchanged. In August of that year, Anna Thomine, a farmer’s daughter raised on the cauldron’s land, moved to Illinois hoping for easier circumstances.

She paid an American photographer to take her picture in front of a brocade backdrop after, first, ironing her bangs, then, buckling herself into a belt that reached from navel to breastbone thereby making an hourglass of her figure that, in time, yielded nine children each child more difficult and complicated than the one before. Meals were battlefields; bedtimes dangerous and obstructed. And it would all show up later and stay the same forever because that’s the lineage, the uneasy lineage. It’s hard to digest obscenity. What it means to go flat. To disregard beauty. The pressure of fecundity. The children who lived, married, but never intermingled so that the fraying and fracasing went on decade after decade splitting all the children down the middle, then those halves split, then those halves split down all the middles. And looking back across the years, past the ocean and into the originating fields, it seemed to prove theories about intercontinental drifts and African Swiss Alps, lost underwater civilizations, east Indian Celts, the moving and changing slippery slopes, gliding rock shelves, ledges shifting one inch per million years, the spit of lava, a charred bone, and iced flesh tattooed blue waiting for a shaman’s gloved fist.