Where The Meanings Are
I had a 9am meeting scheduled in silver spring this morning, and took the metro out there. I brought along with me a recent issue of Parabola which I had yet to read. My meeting didn’t show up, which made me feel bad. But on the way back I was reading the article “Where The Meanings Are” by Alin Amit — and it made me feel better.
I published something metaphorical about humans being like flowers (blooming) a few weeks ago. Amit’s article, which is exploring Kafka’s Metamorphoses (in which a dude becomes a bug) includes this passage:
Flowers open in their season and blossom in full splendor. Some for a few hours, some for many days. Ultimately, they all wither and a new cycle begins. What is the sense of that splendor if everything withers? …. The individual, unique flower represents, beyond the biological motives for its existence, rare beauty. We wonder at that beauty and try to cultivate it. Yet we understand that the flower does not exist in order that we admire it. Wondrous flowers grow in uninhabited places where they are never observed. At times, we can sense a sanctity that dwells in the flower, giving rise to admiration and reverence for its form. The wish to cut the flower and appropriate it is an impossible bid to penetrate into the sanctity and connect with it, that leaves us with only crumbling ashes between our fingers.
That last part reminds me of the great ballet ‘La Sylphide’, in which a man tries to capture his love, accidentally killing her in his attempt to have her. In his defense, he was tricked by a witch – who knew that scarf was gonna make her wings fall off? More on that later.
Print of Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide
