Well this morning my sociological mind got ticking early, courtesy of Mr. Mazzuca. He mentioned the societal norm for a gentleman to give flowers to a lady in his attempts to suit her(or take her to a dance in high school)and how strange that seems to him. Thinking through it, it's not that strange to me. Sure a plastic bag of severed, botanical sex organs isn't attractive under those terms, but the flower has it's merits, in the industrial world of today especially.
Not many of us can trapze around like Wordsworth and write poems about fields of daffodils. Most of us are lucky to even see one naturally growing daffodil let alone a field of them, and for this I think the flower is a way for us to integrate nature back into our lives. Why we do this is probably dependent on society in part, as a new trend is telling us to return to natural beauty and slow down our lives, but I think part of it is the individual aspiration for beauty as well. There are few flowers considered "ugly" and people value that and hope that by surrounding themselves with beautiful things, they too might adapt some of those characteristics from something so shallow as the pleasant smell of a flower, to the determination to live of the orchid or the intensity of the hydrangea. These characteristics are ideal to people and the flowers help them find those characteristics in themselves.
Another possibility is that the flower is just wired in our genetic makeup as a symbol for affection. Ancient man was known to use flowers at his primal burials and today flowers still adorn funerals as well as weddings and myriad religious ceremonies. Perhaps, then, the beauty of the flower transcends mankind and that silly bag of dead plant parts is something far beyond our comprehension? Or it's dead plants in a bag. All about perspective here too I suppose. I welcome any and all thoughts!
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2 comments:
As you said, it's much more the idea of a flower, and what it means then a dead plant. I'm sure that there are 50,000 meanings that we subconciously hold for flowers inside us.
Why this is, and where it comes from, I could not begin to speculate. But for whatever reason, we associate roses with love, so it seems natural to give to people that we are courting. If we associated small smooth rocks, for some reason, with love, I'm sure we'd be giving bags of those to our prom dates. But we don't, and we aren't. Certain things are just engrained in our culture, and since we see it so much, and hear it, it becomes part of us. Even something so simple as a rose means love.
Such a great way of putting it - botanical sex organs.
Anyways, the only thing I'm not sure I agree with is the idea of flowers representing a new trend to return to natural beauty and slow down our lives. I am more inclined to think the flower represents our inherent materialism and love for all things pretty and colorful. Many flowers sold today in Dominick's stores are prepackaged bundles of fake-dyed daisies. I'd say that is quite a ways away from a field of fresh daffodils. And on the lines of Wordsworth, did he actually walk through the field? Or was it his imagination? And is it not this imagination that should be valued over the materialistic beauty of flowers? So in the end I do agree with your (and ryan's) statement about the pleasures associated with the idea of a flower, just not in it's physical presence.
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