Palm tree bisexuality (part one)
Take your hand. The line that curves between and beneath your middle finger and your third finger is called the Ring of Venus. You might not have one, you might have one, you might have many.
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Charles (Le Vicomte) de Noailles had his hand read by the palmist, sexologist and psychologist Charlotte Wolff. Wolff appears on a diagram of friendship constructed by Walter Benjamin in 1932. She sits between Helen Hessel and Ernst Schoen. Scholem sits within an isolated constellation above, connected to Moses Marx and Escha Burchhard.
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Charles de Noailles’ hand is the twenty-sixth of an artist in Wolff’s Studies in Hand Reading (1936). His handprint, like many in the book, appears like a leaf, with delicate veins radiating outward. Fingers as prongs.
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Wolff identifies in Charles de Noailles’ hand a love of collecting and travel. She doesn’t mention gardening, even though she might have known that he had one at Villa Noaille, his family home in Hyères, on the French Riviera.
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Villa Noaille was first to be designed by Mies van Der Rohe or Le Corbusier but it was eventually built by Robert Mallet-Stevens. The building stands today, its garden still intact, originally designed by Gabriel Guevrekian. There may or may not be a palm tree there.
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Charles de Noailles eventually wrote a book on gardening with Roy Lancaster, who was succeeded by Monty Don on the BBC magazine show, Gardeners' World. The book was called Mediterranean Plants and Gardens (1990).
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At the close of From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (1977), Gershom Scholem recalls how he secured his first job at a university via a recommendation from Immanuel Löw, an expert on botany in rabbinic literature. Löw had written a letter, arguing that Scholem should be appointed on the basis that he had found two excellent pages in his book on the bisexuality of palm trees in cabalistic literature.
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In Charles de Noailles and Roy Lancaster’s book, there is an entry on palm trees, but neither of them acknowledge that they are bisexual.
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Charlotte Wolff eventually goes on to publish Bisexuality: A Study in 1977, but much earlier, in 1936, finds bisexuality written on the hands. The second case in Wolff’s study is a person unnamed. The case is simply labelled ‘double heart line’, filed under "abnormalities". All we know is that the hand is from a 27 year old man. A triple Ring of Venus indicates for Wolff that this person’s “choice of lover is not confined to one sex.”
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Elsewhere in the book: broken lines on the Ring of Venus indicate the sublimation of erotic desires in beautiful objects (on the ‘Hand of a Politician’); four Rings of Venus indicate an “unusual degree of refinement” (on the hand of Cecil Beaton); a triangular Ring of Venus indicates sublimated parental instinct that have become the source of pedagogic talent (on the hand of F. M. Alexander).
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For more on Queer Poetics, Plant Reproduction, Plant Poetics, Queer Reproduction see Caspar Heinemann's essay FUCKING PANSIES