Let's return to Motherland. We have been here before many times. We will return to this wondrous place again and again. It is the cover for a solo album by Natalie Merchant, an American singer. There's enough in this image to keep a writer thinking and dreaming for all the days in a lifetime. But before plunging into it, before going nuts about its play of light, leaves, knees, flesh, and much, much more, I must confess I have never actually listened to the album. What I have failed to find from the first day I became aware of Motherland is something in my being (from the surface to the depths) that has any real interest in hearing its music or determining if its recordings are related to what possesses every fiber of the stuff (meat, fat, matter) that powers my imagination: the cover. All I know is that Motherland was released in 2001, it did okay on the charts, and it's Merchant's third solo album.

My lack of interest in the album's music is all the more curious because I'm actually a fan of Natalie Merchant's voice, which I first discovered in 1988 on a cassette tape owned by a woman I was madly in love with at the time. Sadly, the love was one-sided, but the tape, which I borrowed and listened to on my Walkman as I explored the narrow streets of Brighton, kept me from falling into a deep depression. (My first true love was studying anthropology at the University of Sussex, which is near that seaside town "they forgot to close down.") Our asymmetrical relationship had two movements—one long and the other short. The long one happened for much of 1987 in Harare, Zimbabwe, where we first met. The second movement happened the following year at the end of an English fall, a few days before I flew to Sweden for the winter. I came down by train from London for the weekend. She introduced me to 10,000 Maniacs' In My Tribe. As I walked the town or reposed on the floor of her tiny flat, reposed in the ruins of my unreflected feelings of love, I found comfort in the way Natalie Merchant warned Jack Kerouac to think of his mother, or in how she asked where the sun was hidden away on a cold and rainy day, or in the mountain of indignation she felt about the city of Los Angeles ("Heaven, heaven, is this heaven where we are?"). The only other singer who affected me in this way was Harriet Wheeler of the Sundays.

In 2001, I came across the cover of Motherland in a record store on the Ave. Everything around me at that moment vanished, and all I could see was Merchant resting under an apple tree. A sweater hangs from her ample shoulders. Her dark-black hair is pulled back. Ripe apples hang overhead. Fallen apples are on the dappled ground. An apple is by the tip of an ordinary shoe. Apples are gathered in a basket. This image is not sexy or erotic. It concerns the core of life, its one and only purpose: the production of more life. The apples are about the production of more apple trees; Merchant is about the production of more human animals. What her body, and particularly her knees (in the sunlight), communicates is a cosmic fecundity. We must understand this image as representing the only form of immortality that is available to us. These wholesome knees, the hand on these knees, the slit of the skirt, the fullness of the blouse—all are pointing to more life, more breathing, more hearts beating, more mouths eating, more eyes seeing, more bodies being coupled to make even more of the same.

You, yourself, cannot go on forever. You are mortal. But the line leading to your life is very long. That line goes all the way back to the early earth, the earth that was only one billion years in age. A monstrously huge moon filled its sky, the days were much shorter, the sun smaller and more like a star. During the billions of years that passed, life was nothing but microscopic. Then it suddenly became more and more complex. And the moon became smaller and smaller, and the sun larger and larger. Eventually, flowers appeared and brightened the land. Fruits formed and fell from burdened branches. Everything that lived tried to eat something that lived. Big reptiles came and went. A troop of primates dreamed in the leaves. Great apes stood in the rain. Humanoids walked on ice. Your life is a museum of animals that did not die too soon, that did not get eaten before their germ line successfully connected with another germ line. But all of that is now behind you, and the only future you can ever have (the all-there-is of life) is found on the cover of Motherland. Those knees are eternal.