February 02, 2005
In Nature, There Are No Wallflowers
FLOWERTOWER IV, by Catherine King, January 2004.
To make a little Flower is the Labor of Ages. -- William Blake
by Jerome du Bois
I'm a lucky man in a thousand ways, the first one being Catherine. Among the others I include her flower arrangements, which I am free to explore at my leisure. I tried to grow flowers when we moved to this house, since I like to have them around, but it was too much work. Then, months after our hit, when I detected that Catherine needed something else for her pain beyond love, talking, and time, I suggested she get some flowers from the grocery store and see what she could make out of them. It turned out to be a great idea (and still is, despite the ALittleMoreRed/Lisa Greve debacle).
The result: the Rays of Flower photographs, which you can find by clicking on those words, or the image on the sidebar.
I don't know what you have to look at during a large part of your day, reader --a video screen, a television, a highway, a cloud-topped mountain, a babbling brook, a sea of faces-- but you could do your eyes and your heart a soothing favor by letting them wander among these images, which burst with life, which embody exuberance, and which exude mystery as well. (I know one loses a lot without the sense of smell, but I'm sure some geeks are working on smellovision as I write.)
I wrote about flowers early in this blog, in my long, rambling essay with the long, clunky title New Eyes: How Darwin Clears The Day So You Don't Have To See Forever. On October 21, 2003 --which is somebody special's birthday, by the way-- I wrote:
Consider flowers, a staple of art and life from antiquity to Marc Quinn. Nodding, blind, peaceful flowers became transformed in my mind through the urgency of what I call the AllGoRhythm [evolution by natural selection]. . . I knew flowers, if not scientifically, at least emotionally and experientially. I grew up in Hawai'i, around hibiscus, bird of paradise, torch ginger, plumeria, pikake, orchid, morning glory, lily, gardenia, and many others. They were inside the houses and out in the yards, up in the hills, winding around the trees, and strung along the edges of the beachside lawns. We studied their complicated centers, we smelled them and stroked them, we plucked them and strung them on leis, tucking the extras behind our ears. Oh, I knew flowers.
Then, over thirty years later, I came across this, in Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct:
And if you really doubt that we have botany instincts, consider one of the oddest of human motives: looking at flowers. A huge industry specializes in breeding and growing flowers for people to use in decorating dwellings and parks. Some research shows that bringing flowers to hospital patients is more than a warm gesture; it may actually improve the patient's mood and recovery rate. Since people rarely eat flowers, this diversion of effort and resources seems inexplicably frivolous. But if we evolved as intuitive botanists, it makes some sense. A flower is a microfiche of botanical information. When plants are not in bloom, they blend into a sea of green. A flower is often the only way to identify a plant species, even for a professional taxonomist. Flowers also signal seasons and terrains of expected bounty and the exact locations of future fruits and seeds. A motive to pay attention to flowers, and to be where they are, would obviously have been useful in environments where there were no year-round salad bars.(page 426.)
But there is more, which I anthropomorphically outline with sadness. The sheer variety of the beauty of most flowers, the nearly-endless fashion parade, the heady perfumes, now carry for me an aura of desperation. Why so gaudy, with all the flutes and stripes and ripples and bells, the gauzy mauves, the swooning purples? (We must ask because, under natural selection, every single tiny thing has a reason and no single tiny thing comes free.) Obviously to attract the crucial pollenators or other creatures or substances that keep them alive. Show your colors! How else to go on? It's a desperate beauty they embody.
To know also that Nature doesn't care about its own blind intricate mechanisms, turning its back on the insistent, flamboyant parade, to know that the flowers cannot care, only we can care, cuts me to the heart. And now flowers mean more to me than they ever did before, because they are testaments to survival, literally rooted in the Tree of Life.
End of excerpt.
As a final note, to explain the title of this post, let me add a little to what I mean by "desperate beauty." Flowers are not just "doing the best they can," they are doing it all, all the time. They live 100% of the time they're alive. People talk about being in the present moment; if you examine the extreme curves of the opened lily's petals, every edge is defined. There is nothing fuzzy, hesitant, or indecisive about flowers. They're so much in The Now you can almost see the future within them.
Reader, I invite you to take a few minutes today to bathe your eyes in beauty.
You might also be interested in Photography by Catherine King: Meet My Collaborators, by Catherine King.
Posted by Jerome at February 2, 2005 08:33 AM | TrackBack