Flowers

Addendum #42

My wife brought in five daffodils, the first of the year, she cut from the back garden and put them in a small glass vase that sits on the kitchen table. I have seen them before but I have never seen these. I have admired their chaste elegance and their exuberant talent for the color yellow and how they rise up out of the late winter, bit by bit, confident despite whatever the changeable weather throws at them. I’ve helped my wife put the bulbs in the ground in the fall, honoring the faith that goes with gardening, joining the long-time ways of Earth, and staring with wonder at the mystery contained in the bulbs, what comes forth from them.

There is the matter of their beauty. They can deal with the cold and they show it in the almost rigid aspect of the flowers, how erect and precise they are. But words fail me. They are so much what they are and the very fact of their being flowers puts them in some universe related to mine but different. They are so purely themselves. Perhaps they speak to one another; perhaps they are, even when grouped, solitary, each one coming from its own source and intent on its own life. Indeed, everything is like that, but the daffodils are reminders of that perfection that shows itself every day in the natural world and that I take for granted. So much has gone into the making of their being. No church or creed could hold it.

Flowers are necessities, not only from the viewpoint of pollination, a pivot of life, but also from the viewpoint of our need for beauty that is tied to the seasons and our feelings of evanescence and fragility, feelings that in our vulnerable way sustain us and contribute to whatever wholeness we may have as human beings, that offer something beside a chance for our egos to disport and declare. It goes without saying that they are hardly considered necessities in a world dominated by machines, by metal and plastic, the latter being formed into replicas of flowers, an unhappy, wilt-proof obeisance that savors of the tomb rather than life, one more mindless convenience that obscures the steady miracle of growth. How apt that we place plastic flowers on gravestones. Much of the practical, efficient time, we prefer a two-bit eternity to perishable life.

Throughout his career, the painter Piet Mondrian painted flowers, typically a single flower rather than an arrangement. He wanted to confront the intensity of the lone flower, its aptitude and negligence, its palette and design, its flourishing and its decline. The story goes that Mondrian would spend a considerable amount of time at the flower vendors’ stands choosing the exact flower he wanted to paint. For sure, he considered the flower’s life expectancy but who knows what else he was pondering? He was confronting something much more than subject matter. Considering his penchant for the abstract, how much interest he ever had in subject matter is debatable. The aesthetic presence was ever calling to him. When we see these paintings, the one genre he knew he could sell, we see patience encountering the energy Blake defined as beauty, but an energy that, as a cut flower, is dying before our eyes. Yet the paintings are not really poignant. The spirit in them is too strong for such a feeling. He could render the strength that went with delicacy without bowing to any fussy surface effects. His paint brush was a calm yet rapturous probe.

Any time we draw or paint a flower, an aspect of homage is present. Our hands moving some simple tool on a surface connect us. Schools used to teach drawing but the cameras that came with modern times diminished the hand and the eye as they worked in tandem. Imagination was also at work since there is no such thing as a copy, however “accurate” it may seem. The human representation of anything stands apart, as it must. A world that has forsaken drawing is a world that no longer believes in the subtlety of the hand, a world that prefers quick outcomes and welcomes the intermediary of the machine. The camera is part of the march of progress, which, as my father liked to aver, can’t be stopped. Technical progress of any sort was any idol to him and countless others but any idol can be stopped. You don’t bow down to it.

In 1967 the Rolling Stones released a compilation album entitled Flowers. The album cover showed thin stems with photos of each of the Rolling Stones in a space where the flower would be. This was when Brian Jones was a Rolling Stone. The album contains its share of classic raunch as in “Let’s Spend the Night Together” but also features the beautiful, unforgettable “Ruby Tuesday,” the archly lovely “Lady Jane,” and the pensive “Sittin’ on a Fence.” The band could rock but had not abjured sensitivity. Celebrity had not yet buried them alive. The title and the album art feel almost quaint, coming as they do from the land of vulnerable feeling, a decidedly youthful place. No one could live there for long but the songs have a permanence. What mortality could enter this precinct? When Brian Jones died two years later, the answer came. I think of Mondrian scrutinizing each flower to ascertain the degree of flourishing and the degree of decay. Both, of course, were present to his scrupulous eye.

The era the Rolling Stones hailed from, the 1960s, gave the world a rhyming slogan—Flower Power. Anyone from that era knows the iconic photo of a young man sticking a carnation into the barrel of a soldier’s rifle—a gesture and like many gestures a show of meaningful futility. A seemingly endless amount of animus has been directed at that image, as if to say, “We don’t want that. Flowers? Are you serious?” I have seen the world go on its unhappy course and the beautiful living stillness the flowers offer has been resisted vigorously in the name of countless hollow causes. Spring still comes, however. I want to say, “More than we deserve,” but I think of the bees and butterflies and am pushed once more into the arms of an enormity that issues in a bloom.