A Rose a Day No. 5

In the latter part of his career the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte became  interested in the rose’s compelling cultural significance. In a letter from late 1951 he wrote: "My present research, at the beginning of the winter, is concerned with the rose. I must find something precious and worthy to say about it.” In ‘The Blow to the Heart’ (1952) [Illustration], Magritte seems to have painted what he discovered. A single red rose of the modern Hybrid Tea variety is shown growing on bare ground next to the ocean. Instead of prickles, it sports a large golden dagger. In a letter to the poet Paul Eluard, Magritte wrote: 

for about two months I have been looking for a solution to what I call 'the problem of the rose.’ My research now having been completed, I realize that I had probably known the answer to my question for a long time, but in an obscure fashion, and not only I myself but any other man likewise. This kind of knowledge, which seems to be organic and doesn't rise to the level of consciousness, was always present, at the beginning of every effort of research I made.... After completion of the research, it can be 'easily' explained that the rose is scented air, but it is also cruel.

Magritte’s insight was not entirely original, but his painting certainly made something that is always latently present strikingly manifest. I already mentioned the Sufi Sa’di, who declared that there is no rose without thorns, meaning that any desirable outcome inevitably has its disappointments and struggles, and this same wisdom is also found within mystical Christianity. The Catholic mystic Angelus Silesius writes: ‘Beauty I dearly love, and yet / I think that Beauty scarce adorns / Aught that I see, unless I find / It always set about with thorns.’  What these different voices remind us of is that the special power of the rose as a metaphor and symbol emanates from its duality, which makes it a fitting metaphor for the fact that pleasure and pain, life and death, exist in the same one-and-only world. But as Magritte’s reminds us, we tend to be in a state of knowing and not knowing simultaneously, we turn a blind eye, so to speak. Magritte’s insertion into his painting of a very visible dagger was obviously intended to make us apprehend what we usually don’t consciously see because we prefer not to acknowledge its implications. 

Here are some more paintings by Magritte that feature roses: