O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. ­–Psalm 104:24

All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. –Isaiah 40:6

There is a scene in Spike Jonze’s 2002 film Adaptation in which Nicolas Cage — who plays real-life screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his fictional twin brother, Donald — classifies a roomful of women at an orchid convention like the various blossoming species they are there to admire.

“One looks like a schoolteacher; one looks like a gymnast; one looks like a Midwestern beauty queen,” Cage observes.

“One has eyes that dance; one has eyes that contain the sadness of the world.”

Adaptation is among the quintessential “meta” texts of the early 21^st century, a story within a story, a film that ingeniously incorporates its own author, in the tradition of Federico Fellini’s 8½, or Seinfeld.

As the name suggests, it adapts for the screen the 1998 novel, The Orchid Thief, which the journalist Susan Orlean herself adapted from her own article for The New Yorker, entitled Orchid Fever, about John Laroche, an American horticulturalist who was prosecuted for illegally removing endangered wild orchids from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in Florida.

Layers of fiction and fact intertwine across an enchanting narrative about Kaufman struggling to transform Orlean’s prose into a brilliant script, wanting to do justice to her freewheeling style while living up to the cult success of his breakthrough 1999 hit, Being John Malkovich, and ultimately choosing to weave in himself and his own frustrations as a vehicle to bring Orlean and Laroche to life.

The movie version of Kaufman declares that he wants to “create a story where nothing much happens, where people don’t change, they don’t have any epiphanies,” he says. “More a reflection of the real world.”

There are many fine books written about them both, no doubt, but I don’t know much about Georgia O’Keeffe, and even less about Henry Moore. I know that they both created artistic works that drew heavily upon natural forms: stones, bones, and especially orchids.

I also know that the shapes O’Keeffe and Moore created tend to look a lot like pornography, a connection they both apparently denied. Nonetheless, it is there, and their respective eroticized mythologies endure as a part of popular culture. “Not surprisingly,” Orlean writes in Orchid Fever, “orchids have all sorts of sexual associations […] even other creatures find orchids alluring.”

The thing about orchids, and in fact all living things, is that they do change. They may not have epiphanies as such, but orchids have a very short window of remaining alluring. Many of them appear unremarkable, even ugly, when not in bloom.

And they die. Eventually, a flower’s sensual petals and stems wither away into dust. Surely, that is why O’Keeffe and Moore found purpose reproducing through painting and sculpture these fleeting and mortal structures — to preserve them for posterity, to transfigure their earthly beauty into some more durable state.

During a recent visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, I found myself attempting to take some original photographs of O’Keeffe’s and Moore’s works. But it was a Friday afternoon, and the gallery was quite busy, meaning that other people were getting in the way. Many of them were themselves attempting to snap the perfect picture, presumably, to share elsewhere. I decided to lean into the obstacle, realizing at once that the people were just as interesting to look at as the artworks were.

One looked like a Tiger orchid; one looked like a Lily of the Valley; one looked like milk thistle growing between the cracks of the pavement.

I began to notice that there is a certain way that people look at art, a kind of awe in a moment of repose that occurs naturally and cannot be helped. You see the subtle transformation in people’s posture, their composure, an instant of awareness, of recognition and insight.

That instant is as ephemeral as an orchid’s flowering phase. It’s there and then it’s gone.

I continued through the rest of the gallery more content to look at people looking at things than at the things the people were looking at. Their subtle transformations changed me, too, and reminded me that I was a part of this blossoming and annihilating cycle. Like an orchid and its pollinating insect, custom-built to attract an analogous companion, the museum’s patrons appeared to be reflected in the artworks.

Human beings are very adaptable — that’s one of our greatest strengths as a species. We can learn and grow and adjust to extremes. We can adapt our environments to suit our needs and desires. We can learn new languages and ways of doing things and establish new networks of survival. We can even produce artificial climates called greenhouses, and others called museums.

More perilously, we can also adapt to stasis, the reiteration of regression. Over the past two years, we have become accustomed to hearing about battlefield deaths in two spiralling global conflicts. Two years before that, we were constantly adapting to the new normal of pandemic-era restrictions. Two decades before that, at the turn of the millennium, we adjusted to an ambient environment of global terror and surveillance the likes of which put George Orwell to shame.

Change is not a choice that we humans can make. “If you begin collecting living things,” Orlean writes in her New Yorker piece, “you are pursuing something imperfectible, and even if you manage to find them and then possess them, there is no guarantee they won’t die or change […] To desire orchids is to have a desire that can never be fully requited.”

To want to preserve something — a flower, a language, an entire nation — is strictly vanity. If you love something, you have to let it go. Not because it will ever come back to you in some idealized form, but because at some point, everything must go.◼︎

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art continues through June 2nd 2024 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1380 Sherbrooke Street West.