Venus's Bush(es)

On the corner of my office laptop perches a small shrubbery made from extruded plastic: LEGO greenery, fashioned into a wedge of landscape to obscure the tiny LEGOTARDIS resting over the power button. My young son has been here. He clearly meant for his ersatz foliage to cover up the time machine, but it actually calls attention to it. It signals that something must be hiding there, something we are meant to find. “Look, look!” say the bushes, “but pretend you aren’t looking.” Real flora can function similarly, as when leaves in a bouquet direct our eyes away from unsightly stems and toward colorful blooms. But curious pedestrians also peer through hedges at the houses behind them. Does a bush conceal, then, or only pretend to conceal? Is a bush an actant or an alibi, like the pasties on Barthes’ strip-pers, the conceit of privacy serving only to heighten the eroticism of the hidden?1 Perhaps we can’t even speak of “a bush” but rather “bushes.” Bushes are messy, insistently plural; yet they can be tended and tamed into the very embodiments of b / order, separation, and singularity. Shake-spea re’s Venus and Adonis bears witness to the multivalence of bushes, suggesting that they contain all of these possibilities — and more — within their interlace.