Gorselight Pours

What is gorselight? In 1736 the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus is riding through Putney Heath in London. The father of modern taxonomy, he sees a flowering gorsebush, falls to his knees and begins to weep. Or so they say. One year earlier Linnaeus releases the first edition of Systema Naturae, the breakthrough publication in his lifelong quest to name and classify all life, especially plantlife. Years later while walking through Dry Diggings, I see a gorsebush in bloom and hallucinate. Body-temperature liquid pours down the back of my head. The distance between the bush and I thickens like a substance. We remain locked in this position for some time. ‘What is Gorselight?’ asks Anne Carson. The first word from Paul Celan’s Matière de Bretagne, gorselight instigates a failure in language, its materiality as it breaks down. And so I disguise myself as a gorsebush and hold a series of conversations and mock interviews with Carl Linnaeus. Together we question the practice of regulating and delimiting emotions through systems of classification. And we ask each other, what is gorselight?