The Names of the Rose

No le toquéis ya más, que así es la rosa

(Don't touch it any more; that's what the rose is like.)

Juan Ramón Jiménez

A Rose is a Rose is a Rose.

Gertrude Stein

The lily has a smooth stalk,

Will never hurt your hand;

But the rose upon her briar

Is lady of the land.

Christina Georgina Rosetti

Je vois la vie en rose.

(The world is rose-colored to me.)

Édith Piaf

I am always being given horrendous assignments in this job. Maybe I should quit and get a different one, a better one, one that wouldn’t send me into mad mood swings all the time. Just when I had recovered from the last assignment, which was trying to give some dignity to the concept of doing random acts of kindness. Or the one before that, which was how you can use up all your fabric scraps and be done with them. Or the one before that, which was about how not to fall in love with all the wild animals you feed. I mean, really! Sometimes I think my boss, who’s the Chief Editor of this place, has it in for me. She always gives me the hardest assignments. 

I would like to know why she does it. I love her, anyway.

Now she’s outdone herself, though. She’s given me the topic to write about that will have zero readers. I have been assigned to write about the most romantic flower and why it’s so romantic. Apparently the Chief Editor, my boss, has single-handedly decided that flower on which I will naturally want to focus on is the rose, seeing’s how she enclosed a few quotes to get me started on the article. That is a bit presumptuous of her, perhaps, because we all have our preferences for flowers, whether for growing them or receiving them. 

But you know the old saying: If life gives you lemons... 

I just got roses instead, and lemons don’t seem half bad by comparison.

Before I get started writing this piece, I have to make a confession.

It’s beyond me how this one flower gets all the glory. Mostly they’re red, too, but we know there are lots of options. When I was a little girl, I got pink ones or yellow ones, while yellow roses were often hard to find. My mother got white ones after her mother passed away. It was the custom, so they said. 

I think I actually preferred the bleached pink primroses that grew beside our house and in the back yard. They weren’t really pretty, they had a clunky shape for a rose, and certainly there was no romance attached to them. I know, because I tried to see if any were caught in their tiny thorns, to no avail. 

Still, they fascinated me. Why? They just lived their lives, got very little attention from anybody but me, and flourished - for a few days a year. I would prolong their lives because days before any pinklets could be discerned, I would be looking for them. Finally, after days of awaiting the arrival of the buds, I could run my little fingers over them, breathe their air. For a few days, a few hours, we were best friends. Rosebush magnet. Old as the hills, scraggly, simple. 

In a few days the thin, slightly-bent petals would begin to waft to the ground. At that point I would have to run and hide, unable to watch the loss of the pink pallor that had been so promising. Its pallor, I knew, disappeared after being on the shady soil for several days. I didn't want to think about where it had gone.

Thus you could say that I learned at an early age that some beauty is far too fragile. And far too brief. That’s why I don’t love the primroses any more. Their deceased beauty still hurts more than their thorns, which weren’t all that big or sharp.

Speaking of thorns, Rosetti makes a good observation. She literally attributes the power of roses to their ability to wound the hand that would remove them from the bush. While that is accurate, I suppose, it could indicate that the poet believed strength comes from cruelty, distance, or the danger of touching them. Did Rosetti mean to imply that roses are only superior to lilies because they possess the power of inflicting pain? Did she mean that they are born with the ability to protect themselves, which increases their beauty? (Unlike the proverbial shrinking violet, which can be scooped up by the armful.)

It’s true that roses will always beat lilies in my book, because I can only see lilies as white, spotted with yellow pollen, and sitting on our church altar in memory of someone. Lilies are flowers of the dead for me. There are some yellow ones in my front yard and along one side in back, but they were here before I moved in. Yellow isn’t bad; it's better than white. I don’t care for the orange ones, though. They’re a dime a dozen.

I won’t tell my boss that the Rosetti quote didn’t work for me. Actually, it didn't work at all. She meant well, I assume. Still, she missed the mark.

Now I think I will tackle the Édith Piaf line. It’s a very famous song, and although rose in this context - meaning in French - means pink, we can probably get by with using it. Maybe my boss doesn’t know much French, and she just assumed... 

Oh, let’s just think about the song. It’s one of the most famous in the world and the lyrics are about how her lover’s embrace turns the universe rosy-pink for her. That is too over-the-top for me, to be honest. This is likely because I don’t believe in love, which goes back to the reason this assignment is so difficult. 

There is another drawback to using this quote as my prompt. Even though Piaf’s voice is haunting, passionate, perfect, it is also laden with pain. This line, and the song it belongs to, may not be something I can handle. They depress rather than inspire. So did Piaf’s life.

Perhaps it’s time to move along. 

There are only two rose prompts left, so my fingers are crossed.

Going back to the list, the French has inspired me to try to use the Spanish line. It’s just one line, but I am not fooled. I’ve done my homework and it turns out that single line is the entire poem. Surrounded on all sides by a lot of white page. The page could suggest silence or maybe we should focus on the toquéis, which means to touch, in the second person plural negative command form: No le toquéis ya más. Don’t touch it any more, you who are present at this poem. Is this you referring to a group that wants to harm the rose? If so, why? What have they been doing to the poor flower?

Some insist this isn’t a poem about a rose at all. Instead, they say it’s the poet talking about his work, his poetry. That makes no sense. He didn’t want to force the world to ignore his poems; he wanted them to be read, understood, loved. This, in my opinion, means the author was warning humans not to try to adorn the rose when its natural self was enough. No need for adjectives or sophisticated verbs. What isn’t known, of course, is why he chose the rose over a lily, a tulip, or a dandelion. Not to mention lilacs, daisies, or echinacea. Juan Ramón Jiménez wasn’t lacking in ability, since he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was in 1956, I believe. He could have come up with another flower if he’d wanted to. 

Nevertheless, the Nobel Prize rose scores high marks for its nudity of words and its standoffishness. Untouchable. Pristine. Is it fragile? Do the oils in human skin and the ridges on fingertips sully its beauty? Is that the poet’s idea? Humans really are predators, as we know. They aren’t careful a lot of the time. Or maybe it’s the poet’s way of saying the rose is utterly perfect on its own. It needs no embellishment, no cute descriptions to make it more majestic. This is what I believe the line that is also a poem means. If my interpretation is the correct one, there is no use in going any further. There is nothing to be said about the rose, nothing can be added to it. Surrounded by silence, it shows off its beauty. Well, that pulls the rug out from under me, since I am being told to leave it alone.

Did my boss set me up or something? Only one option left. And I bet she included it as a joke.

A rose is a rose is a rose. This is one I already knew. It pops up from time to time and after somebody quotes it, everybody smiles, thinking how nonsensical it is. Gertrude Stein was an odd bird, after all. Not that her oddity kept her from mentoring writers like Hemingway or being painted by Picasso. She was odd, I say, because she found paradise in France. No run-of-the-mill writer could have done that back then. Gertrude also seemed determined to make language do what painting did. She knew how to take words and syntagms, twisting them and spinning them until something emerged. Few people have really figured out how lexicon and tenses could be square, simultaneous, and sharp-edged, but Gertrude knew. She understood the wealth of repetition, and therein lay her genius.

Tell us again, Gertrude Stein. A rose is a rose is a rose.

I’m thinking this was included as a joke in my assignment, but now that I’ve bitten into the line, I am going to write it for all it’s worth. Which means that I am going to shape the rose as the author makes me see it. And see it. And see it. As I see it three times, the reading of the word forms three sides. If the rose is repeated, then the three sides will fuse into a single rounded un-angled circumference. Rose rose rose. I wrap myself around it, or them, and the line becomes a ball. It might be a red ball, a white one, a yellow one, a peach-toned one. It is not clear whether the color matters or if it is just the rose-ness that matters. 

This four-letter word has entrapped me. I spin rose after rose after rose, sensing the circular and I have formed part of a painting. We are the red ball of the clown or little boy, the ball or flower or face that any good cubist knows is not flat, not two-dimensional. Picasso knew faces had two eyes, and so his silhouettes had them when he painted. Roses are not flat and the blooms are rather curved, rounded, cup-shaped. Stein knew this and used her word to pull us around the round rose. We read, and walk. We see the rose in three dimensions, not just as flat. We are not supposed to see things as flat ever again, not since cubism.

Do not think I am displeased, as you could think after reading the previous paragraph. Perhaps the term entrapped was poorly chosen. It’s more like seduced. 

Where Juan Ramón warned us away from the rose, Gertrude calls us to it, to relish, revel in it as an object and to outline it with our bodies, going around and around and around. Keep away! Says Juan Ramón. Come hither, says Gertrude. Come and see. Walk with me, walk around it. Focus on it. There is nothing to fear. After all, a rose is a rose is a rose. Which, after all, is just what the rose is! Insists Juan Ramón, hoping to get the last word.

*****

I must have dozed off. Bad idea, given that I’ve got a deadline to meet. Given that all I’ve done is walk in circles, sing in French, keeps hands off as ordered, and wondered if using one’s thorns is also an example of tough love. Rosetti might have been able to answer that. I don’t have time to research it.

I’m running out of time. 

The whole assignment has been a useless effort, a waste of hours. Roses might be the most romantic flower, but they’ve also got a lot of baggage for some people. There must be other options. Other flowers. Just not lilies. I don’t like lilies, as you know.

Is it flowers or something else I should be writing about?