Madder: A Memoir in Weeds, in my view, reads similarly to how a cyanotype looks. Wilkinson's memories are told to us as stories marked and blotted, impressed upon and faded, brought back to consciousness (with or without doubt) by a searching for something deeper beyond the memory itself.
Though the text reads as such, Marco Wilkinson works with actual, real weeds. Why is he so interested in weeds? It would be easier to say that is because of a genuine, commonly shared care for nature (which it is), but, I feel there is a more difficult reason reflected in his title: that these weeds he works with and gardens are a way for Wilkinson to understand his broken history, both personal and cultural, and unearth it with new meaning.
"To be the sun, to lord over the others more privileged, to be desired over those more proper to this ground: explosions of sulphur-yellow flowers, bombs of jealousy, clouds of dazzling anger brocaded into the sky. Trace the maze of clawing aspiration down and it all converges to one, rough, bloody root. The gardener passes by, and with one tug, the whole empire wilts away." - p. 54
These wonders of his trade fade into and out of his life story and the book does not work by chronology but by a different kind of sensory and intuitive lineage of time's significance, or lack of it, through perception, signs, symbol, and his own writer's impulse. His mother, a presence that brought him love (albeit indirectly), as well a profound aversion, is a figure molded into his own fate in unexpected ways. In his childhood, she was a farm laborer, deep in the soil and excrement of nature, doing a job she didn't take to at all and could not be grateful for, thus finding a new one in a more domesticated setting. In a paradoxical tandem to her story, Wilkinson ends up doing a similar job with similar materials in the earth, but he is instead able to transform and transcend her ill-feelings towards seemingly lowly ways of life, moving towards appreciation and higher consciousness.
"Unlike the biting fragrance -- sharpest when fresh -- bedstraw, madder, sweet woodruff, and their kin only come into their own when dead. They dry to gold, releasing the soft smell of fresh-mown hay so characteristic of coumarin, the compound they share in common." - p. 63
His father, from Uruguay like his mother, is absent from his history, and as Wilkinson learns to cope with this absence in the United States, he finds an affecting solace in experiences other than what some might deem more normal. At the same time, he has memories of his mother like most others do, focusing on characteristics that defined who she was and what she meant to him. Instead of remembering family outings of eating, drinking, and being merry, he remembers another kind of presence in being alone. And, he also remembers his mother's shoeless feet, dancing, dirty, and calloused until she felt the need to wear shoes, tight and worn for another type of job.
"What I remember: ...Irene's desk piled high and messy with accounting work. Bob's office of dark wood paneling and the lawyer's boxes that match. Belle's opulent apartment... Elizabeth's autumnal backyard.
What I forget: A Baskin Robbins sundae on a weekday evening after finishing up at Irene's. Chicken sandwiches... from Wendy's on the way home from Belle's. The hamburgers bubbling in pools of gray fat..." (p. 57)
In place of Wilkinson's forgetting are other things, the scent and taste of mushrooms from the field, the feel of oil on his skin pressed down by a masseuse, the touch of a barber trimming his beard, the sound of a quieter conversation shared. They are impressions to savor from what he can't taste otherwise, maybe held within and somewhere beyond his worldly body in the passing of time.
"When I die I want (though I will be past wanting) to be buried without casket or shroud, naked, completely unadorned, and have a fruit tree planted above me (above that which is not me), so that its roots might plunge hungry into what is (not) my stomach, curious into what it (not) my brain, desirous into (not) my pelvis, thirsty into (not) my mouth. (p. 131)
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