On the rose

As you might imagine, a rose is a tired metaphor. Tired because it has been used and abused by poets, writers and artists for centuries, turning the rose into anything but a thing of beauty. The rose is like a song you’ve heard one too many times on the radio: the song isn’t bad necessarily, but you change the station anyway. So the rose exists on two planes–one as a biological specimen, and two, as pure metaphor. Yet even as metaphor, the rose has been reduced to ashes through overuse and overexposure. I’m sure many people see no beauty, indeed, no magic, in the rose anymore. You can buy a dozen for almost nothing at the grocery store any time of the day, any day of the week, any week of the year. The rose is dead, and I defy any writer, poet, or songwriter to write anything in which the rose does not come across as superficial, trite, or rehashed. The rose needs a respite from pop culture, from literary expression, from the greeting card industry, from the vapid savagery of unbridled capitalism. It needs a rest. The rose is a beautiful flower, but if you look at it too long and too often, you end up seeing nothing but another flower. I can’t blame people for liking the rose, the image of the rose, the name of the rose, the smell of the rose, the metaphor of the rose, the symbol of the rose. Red velvety petals, thorny green stems, fragrant smell, the rose is put together in perfect harmony with itself, and after it is picked and gifted, it is finite and perishable, a work of art that will soon vanish forever. You can create as many simulacra of the rose that you care to–paintings, poems, t-shirts (“Carpe diem!”), greeting cards, but you can never recreate the real thing. The complexity of the rose is only equaled by its charismatic charms and its exotic architecture. Each rose that blooms in Spring is already marking time until it withers in the harsh winds of winter. The rose, as a symbol of beauty, carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction long before it ever opens. Death is the only outcome for this analogue of human life. Perhaps the reason they so enthrall our culture has everything to do with our own finite natures, our obsession with death, and our unwillingness to accept the passing of time, the inevitability of growing old, and limited time that we have on earth.