Vegetal, Anyone?

I submitted an article last week, so I’m back on the grind for my next book.

Yesterday, one of my students was saying how hard it was to disabuse oneself of scholarship as finished work. We all know (and hope for) that finality to be an illusion if we want our work to actually be engaged. I want to write things that will give people something to talk about. Perhaps more importantly, I want to be able can go back and continue to thoughts that didn’t make it to print. My own past writing should give me more to consider.

Anyway, this prompted me to pull the curtain back a bit on stuff I’m learning. The other day I was trying to think of a word to describe a motif in Islamic art. In so doing, I came a cross this 2001 exhibit at The MET called “Vegetal Patters in Isalmic Art.”

“Vegetal” was precisely the word I was looking for, but I didn’t know what it meant. I assume that it has to do with plants. The dictionary seems to back that up.

Some of you will ask, “Why use a word that few people may know?”. It reminds me of a scene from The West Wing when the President’s staff is debating whether he should use the word “torpor” in his re-election speech. The President walks in and says, “It’s not our job to appeal to the lowest common denominator… It’s our job to raise it. If you’re going to be the ‘Education President’ it’d be nice not to hide that you have an education.”

I think that holds for scholars too. I’ll only add that, for me, this means starting to show the process of what I’m learning.

I don’t know if I’ll actually use vegetal. But I’m glad I’ve begun to think about it.