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.• 62 •MURMURThe lower hemisphere of the album cover makes senseas an electron microscope photo, and not much else—acrawling, hyper-real jumble of polarized fibers.It couldbe a photograph, or its negative.The intricate contrastof dark and light is like a Surrealist’s rayograph of steelwool, a conspiracy between everyday things in a dark-room.When the lights are turned on, what’s left is anoptical illusion of scale, a frozen surface like “a mass ofbrown strings / like the wires of a gigantic switchboard”(from James Dickey’s “Kudzu”), the opposite of the or-dered circuitry on the cover of A Flock of Seagulls’ Listen.The roiling quilt of kudzu begins to unravel abouttwo-thirds of the way up, giving way to a darkish blurthat only then starts to imply the depth of a natural space,micro giving way to macro.It’s a snapshot through atime-lapse kaleidoscope where some facets click by inmilliseconds and others in millennia.Nearby is a darkruin of plant mass that looks like judgment from theshadow of an imploding cathedral.Without reference tothe solid Georgia soil beneath, it could either be theremnants of a whole farmhouse or just the overgrowngravestones of its former tenants.Beyond the ruins, the fibrillar dance of the foregroundslows, stratifying into weird sepia tendrils that stretchbeyond the top margin.Burnished out like the ghostsubjects of a Gerhard Richter painting, the tendrils dema-terialize into the colorless sky beyond it, or maybe emergefrom it.The words R.E.M.and Murmur are superimposed in the top left corner in lettering that’s the sublime blue-gray of a summer evening’s dying light.It’s an utterly static image, with a gnawing subtext ofmovement and drama.Are the fibers eating the forest,• 63 •J.NIIMIor merely providing cover for an unnamed darkness that’sabout to engulf the entire tableau? Where is nature inall of this, and what is the observer’s relationship to it?We clearly see a haunted forest, except it’s still alive.Maybe you’re the one haunting it.In the South, kudzu haunts everything.Initially broughtto the US from Japan in May of 1876 for the PhiladelphiaCentennial Exposition, Pueraria lobata (or kuzu to the Japanese) enchanted the fairground’s visitors with its fra-grant purple flowers and ivy-like deciduous leaves.Thevine had already occupied the imagination of the Japanesefor centuries; kudzu figures prominently in the epic eighthcentury Manyoshu poems as a symbol of autumn.Butbeyond its aesthetic beauty and Oriental exoticness, P.lobata displayed another unusual quality that was particularly intriguing to its new American audience: the plant’sastonishing growth rate, which wasn’t so much an inertquality as it was a full-on botanical sideshow.You canexperience the plant’s perfumed charms as the morningsun evaporates the dew from its violet flowers, then splitto grab some lunch and a nap, and by the time you getback a few hours later, the vines have become longer,visibly longer.At the height of the summer season, akudzu vine can grow up to a foot and a half a day.Onecould build a porch trellis in the spring, plant some kudzuunder it, and by the end of the summer enjoy the shadeof a fifty- to one-hundred-foot growth of vine aroundthe front of the house.Its possibilities weren’t lost onenterprising Southerners in the early part of the lastcentury.• 64 •MURMURUpon exporting kudzu to the deep South, homestead-ers and farmers discovered the Oriental vine’s furtherusefulness as a grazing crop (goats and cows love it) andas an effective device for controlling soil erosion.Thiswas due to the fact that the kudzu plant’s hearty roots—which can weigh up to 500 pounds—are able to sustainthemselves in even the poorest soil, or the sandy orangeclay of Georgia.In the 1930s, unemployed men were paidby the government to plant kudzu throughout the Southunder the auspices of the Soil Conservation Service andthe Civilian Conservation Corps, outgrowths of Roose-velt’s New Deal.Struggling farmers were subsidized upto $8 an acre to plant it on their properties
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