Nature has an urge to flower. It can’t stop itself. And right now it’s summertime in the San Francisco Bay Area and things are blooming like mad. So bear with me if my thoughts turn once again to my brand-new gardens and the question of flowers.
I take a lot of flower photos. If a photo comes out well, I label it “art shot.” But, the artist wannabe in me finds flowers too nice and too darned pretty to be the subject of Real Art. That perfect rose I just captured? It’s way too perfect.
Real Art Needs Grit
Whether it’s a photo, a painting or prose, Real Art needs grit. It needs to be problematic. It needs tension. It needs woe and desolation. Something has to be askew.
Flowers, by their very nature, fail the tension test. They never seem troubled to me, or even ruffled.
Whenever I find myself face-to-face with a plant in bloom, be it a hot house orchid or the forget-me-not growing up through the cracks in the pavement next to our mailbox, I am beguiled by its perfection. By its completeness.
I can’t take my eyes off the thing.
There is something about a pansy in bloom or an Iceland poppy nodding from its stem — something that reckons on being looked at.
Just as fragrance is meant to be breathed, and texture fingered, so is a flower meant to capture the eye. A bee’s eye. A hummingbird’s eye. Your eyes and mine.
Flowers and the Wisdom Traditions — Too Optimistic?
A flower in full bloom has something in common with the teachings of the world’s great wisdom traditions: they are so, so nice. So unapologetically upbeat. Yes, they announce, God is actually, really and truly in her heaven and all is right with the world.
“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well,” Julian of Norwich heard Jesus saying saying to her.
Jon, when he was alive, saw flowers differently. He would rather I not bring cut flowers from the garden into the house. He couldn’t bear their evanescence. They made him sad.
He knew that sooner or later, like the humans in his life who had passed away — and more recently Jon himself — they would one day succumb to their mortality and die. Flowers do that. Death and decay are embedded in that poppy’s DNA, and in ours.
Are We Works of Art?
And so, yeah. It turns out that perfect rose does indeed signify woe and desolation, after all.
Does that make it a work of art? Does that make Jon, and you and me — destined as we are for decay — works of art?
More about the nature of things — and the human condition — at, “I Let the Maytag Man Into the House (During Covid) and Here’s What I Learned About Human Nature.” Also, “Geoff Machin: “We Go Looking for God, When We Could Be Having a Beer.”
I love to watch some of my roses pass through various stages of life to death. I have collected their dried many-different-subtle-colored heads and created a kind of cornucopia display of them, which I have found beautiful, on a sideboard in my kitchen.
I love the look of dried flowers. Their colors soften so beautifully. Glad your roses are doing well. My new ones are still a bit tentative.
another interesting essay. thank you. i am drawn to decay, at least in cut flowers.
Lots of beautiful decay in Michigan last week. The oak leaves break down and turn the white Lake Michigan sand gray and black.
Yes.
xxoo