April 27, 2008

Happy Sunday.

Tulips
Posted by Ann Althouse at 9:10 AM
Tags: ,

4 comments:

rhhardin said...

According to the language of flowers, red tulips are a declaration of love.

They don't look like a declaration of love to me.

It looks like some male gardener doing his job, and moving on to the petunias.

Wiki needs to know about Bataille, by the way, The Language of Flowers, which you'd think would turn up there.

At least at first glance, and in general: in fact, most flowers are badly developed and are barely distinguishable from foliage; some of them are even unpleasant, if not hideous. Moreover, even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centers by hairy sexual organs. Thus the interior of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty; if one tears off all the corolla’s petals, all that remains is a rather sordid tuft. Other flowers, it is true, present very well-developed and undeniably elegant stamens, but appealing again to common sense, it becomes clear on close examination that this elegance is rather satanic: thus certain kinds of fat orchids, plants so shady that one is tempted to attribute to them the most troubling of human perversions. But even more than by the filth of its organs, the flower is betrayed by the fragility of its corolla: thus, far from answering the demands of human ideas, it is the sign of their failure. In fact after a very short period of glory the marvelous corolla rots indecently in the sun, thus becoming, for the plant, a garish withering. Risen from the stench of the manure pile–even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity — the flower seems to relapse abruptly into its original squalor: the most ideal is rapidly reduced to a wisp of aerial manure. For flowers do not age honestly like leaves, which lose nothing of their beauty even after they have died; flowers wither like old and overly made-up dowagers, and they die ridiculously on stems that seemed to carry them to the clouds.

I assume he had no girlfriends.

4/27/08, 9:26 AM
ricpic said...

Very pretty. On the other hand...

SPRING

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots,
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay


Edna having a bad hair day.

4/27/08, 9:45 AM
Ann Althouse said...

"I assume he had no girlfriends."

Exactly. He's really displacing his morbid fear of women.

4/27/08, 9:48 AM
cardeblu said...

I love the tulip pics you've been posting. Those dark purple/black ones a couple posts down are absolutely gorgeous. I have only a few in my garden (red and yellow), and they finally opened yesterday. This place isn't too far from me, although I've never been there in all the time I've lived here. One of these years...

4/27/08, 12:31 PM

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