Cutting flowers as a questionable strategic metaphor

Flowering of Civilization -- Deflowering of Culture (Part #3)

---

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx | Refs ]

---

Curiously the engagement with flowers, notably in the case of both the dying process and conference environments, is primarily through cut flowers -- possibly watered, but otherwise unnourished (being unrooted), and expected to fade within days. As a further metaphor of decay and unsustainability, these are shipped in large quantities from developing countries to industrialized countries -- no longer able to produce sufficient to satisfy the demand (Fresh-Cut Flowers, Shipped by Sea? Wall Street Journal, 11 May 2013). Recognized as an annual $14 billion "perishable business", shipment by air has epitomized issues relating to "food miles" and consumerism (Air-freight flowers greener than Dutch hothouses, say Kenyans, The Guardian, 14 February 2007; The Flower Industry, Ethical Trading Initiative, 18 November 2011).

For a collapsing civilization, the cutting of flowers offers a further metaphor through a perverse interpretation of the injunction central to remembrance celebrated in the Christian Eucharist, as primary driver of the practice of faith-based governance: Cut; observe, this do in remembrance of life -- whether understood as "everlasting", or in terms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is curiously reminiscent of the slaughter of "Christmas trees" -- some 80 million annually. Deflowering through deforestation?

Here "cut" is the process of ensuring disconnection through severing and establishing artificial boundaries; "observe" is primarily the process of quantitative measurement; and "remembrance" is characterized by information and knowledge management. The process may be used to cut off what may be ignored and forgotten as being irrelevant -- possibly as an act of conceptual gerrymandering. The unfortunate perversion is echoed in metaphorical use of "plant" (for factory), "crop" (of trainees), "fruit" (for any product), "leaves" (in books), "root" (for any fundamental), "tree" (for any hierarchy), "jungle" (for any condition meriting clearing).

There is a sense in which the "cutting" mindset has been reframed as fundamental to the methodology of science -- whereby restrictive boundaries are legitimately defined to isolate systems meriting study, irrespective of any context, as separately discussed (Vigorous Application of Derivative Thinking to Derivative Problems, 2013; Systematic Gerrymandering of Declared Threats and Legality of Response, 2013).

There is little appreciation of wildflowers or wilderness, or that the wilderness should have a voice, to sing -- as is evident from the progressive extinction of bird species (Jonathan Franzen, Last Song for Migrating Birds, National Geographic, July 2013). This mindset is echoed in the framing of terrorism through the opportunistic conflation with the traditional fear of wildlife by humanity -- beyond any conventional understanding of law and order. This poses the question of how disparate voices are to be heard, as separately discussed (Enactivating Multiversal Community: hearing a pattern of voices in the global wilderness, 2012).

As noted separately (Endangering species by rationalizing the environment, 2003), the modern civilizing enterprise has been a vast exercise in taming the "wilderness" through "cutting" -- reframed as clearing the land". Animals are destroyed as being "dangerous to man" (or his self-image). Any species deemed to be of direct value are domesticated or cultivated. This enterprise is now being extended to include the destructive exploitation of ecosystems that are habitats of species that are no danger to humans. Even amongst the domesticated species, care is taken to emasculate or destroy those (such as bulls, stallions, or pack leaders) that might draw them into natural behaviours unwelcome to conventional society. The approach is further extended to include the restraint of dissenters, if not their criminalization (George Monbiot, At last, a law to stop almost anyone from doing almost anything, The Guardian, 6 January 2014).

Strangely, through the absurdity of war and conventional mindsets, those upheld as the "flower of society" (whether the elite or otherwise) are recognized as being "cut down" in battle -- another form of "deflowering". In remembrance, notably on Poppy Day, this has given rise to laments such as Flowers of the Forest or In Flanders Fields:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.

Curiously a variety of the red poppy is a central feature of the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan -- where it is a primary source of opium to enable (and fund) forgetfullness worldwide in a dysfunctional global society. Given the extraordinary parallels with a century ago , there is a case for exploring the possibility and value of a future lament of equivalent poetic form -- especially given the inportance of poetry to the culture in question, as separately described (Poetic Engagement with Afghanistan, Caucasus and Iran: an unexplored strategic opportunity? 2009). One approach is the following:

In Afghan fields the poppies blow Between the crescents, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The drones, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.

A remarkably insightful study of the role of flowers in relation to war is provided by Ann Elias (War and the Visual Language of Flowers: an antipodean perspective, War, Literature and the Arts, 20, 2008). This explores the poppy as an emotive symbol, an example of significance and symbolism of floral imagery to the war imagination. It notes the incongruity of flowers -- which popularly signify innocence and beauty -- within military contexts.

Elias specifically remarks on the philosophical study of the significance of flowers by Claudette Sartiliot (Herbarium Verbarium: the discourse of flowers, 1993):

... it is in their nature to embody double meanings, since flowers are male and female in one, and when cut they become mobile metaphors that do not denote any fixed identity. In war imagery they oscillate between the beautiful and the ugly, the masculine and the feminine, death and love, and the transcendent as well as the abject. They are simultaneously symbols of grief for the slain, and symbols of hope about life's renewal. Sartiliot describes the flower as a unique entity that:

seems to have no topos, no clear or real place, no role. If flowers are traditionally -- and as literary emblems, primordially -- associated with feminine beauty, life, and innocence, they shift in the same texts into their opposite.

Elias then concludes:

Nationalism depends on the symbolism and aesthetic of red which enfolds not only visceral references to the dead but also historical references to Flanders fields. However, the red poppy that increasingly emerges today as symbol of contemporary war, and its aftermath, is the cultivated narcotic poppy from Afghanistan. The Flanders poppy and the Afghanistan poppy symbolise two different eras of warfare, but in both cases, their image embodies the melancholy of the human condition which is the struggle between war and peace.

---

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx | Refs ]