A Rose a Day No.46

This lithograph on paper is by the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. It’s entitled “We Won’t Do It without the Rose, Because We can No Longer Think’, and is from 1972.

The Tate Gallery says:

Taken from a photograph by Wilfred Bauer, this lithograph shows Beuys at the desk of his Information Office at documenta V, Kassel in 1972. The Information Office was run under the auspices of the Organization for Direct Democracy, a platform for the propagation of the artist’s radical ideas, which he had founded the previous year. For 100 days Beuys tirelessly debated his ideas with visitors to the exhibition. On the last day, he fought a Boxing Match for Direct Democracy.

Beuys probably had in mind the traditional idea of ‘sub rosa’ - under the rose - meaning, secretly and securely. As a follower of Rudolf Steiner, he may have had in mind the Rose-Cross mediation, which I mentioned in a previous post on the rose and the Occult and mysticism.

But perhaps Beuys was also thinking about the seventeenth century Catholic mystic poet Angelus Silesius in The Cherubinic Wanderer, who evokes the rose as a striking metaphor for living ‘without why’. Humanity, Silesius pointed out, is always doing things.  We are aware of our doing, and are often concerned about what others make of our actions, and this, Silesius noted, is precisely the root of our unhappiness. By contrast, Silesius wrote: ‘ The Rose because she is Rose / Doth blossom, never asketh Why; / She eyeth not herself, nor cares / If she is seen of other eye. Silesius used the image of the rose to give beautiful concrete form to the observation that all too often we contract into  ourselves in attachment to our own desires, and so we become ‘closed’, cut off by too much self-love. But when we are willing to ‘open’ ourself to God’s gift, we will be truly with God. But this means letting go, or ‘abandoning’ oneself, as only then can the divine rush in, like a rose bloom opening to absorb the sunlight.

Silesius, in his turn, was inspired by the medieval Catholic theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart who believed that the truly spiritual life must be lived without any reason or purpose extraneous to the love of God. Eckhart was specifically protesting against the Catholic moral doctrine of the period that seemed to trade ethical behaviour for the divine favour of the Beatific Vision. Instead, Eckhart suggested that ‘[The just person] wants and seeks nothing, for he knows no why. He acts without a why just in the same way as God does; and just as life lives for its own sake and seeks no why for the sake of which, it lives, so too the just person knows no why for the sake of which he would do something.’ Eckhart therefore counseled that we should strive to exist out of the plenitude of our own being alone. “I live because I live”, he declared. ‘God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground……You should work all your works out of this innermost ground without why.’

In the early nineteenth century, the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson looked out of his window on spring morning of 1840 in Concord, Massachusetts and saw roses in bloom, and wondered why people immediately turn them into symbols instead of just appreciating their joyful presence. The problem, Emerson concluded, lay with the character of a society which inevitably alienates its members:

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think’, ‘I am’, but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These rose under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present above time. 

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, writing in the mid-twentieth century,  became fascinated by Angelus Silesius’s rose that knows no ‘why’, and sought to free what he saw as a profound existential insight from the limits of metaphysical Christian context and to place it within a modern secular worldview in which the goal was seen to be self-realization. Heidegger noted that in modern culture people value above all mental control, and crave clarity of communication, which is achieved through unambiguous, exact, graspable, objective and concrete information. There is nothing that is without some reason or ground. In other words, we excessively value the head over the heart. 

Heidegger argued that the contemporary importance of the spiritual metaphorical rose envisaged by Silesius was that it is telling humanity to strive to live for the sake of life, not in relation to some external purpose. As Heidegger wrote: ‘But blooming happens to the rose inasmuch as it is absorbed in blooming and pays no attention to what, as some other thing – namely, as cause and condition of the blooming – could first bring about this blooming. It does not first need the ground of its blooming to be expressly rendered to it. It is another matter when it comes to humans.’ Heidegger used the word Gelassenheit, or ‘releasement’ , to describe a state of unselfish surrender, letting-be, or will-less existence. Such ‘release’, Heidegger declared, was what it means to live like a rose – ‘without why’.

In a poem entitled ‘Walking Past a Rose This June Morning’ the contemporary British poet Alice Oswald mediates on an encounter with a rose that launches many profound associations. The poem takes the form of a series of unanswerable questions: ‘is my heart a rose? how unspeakable’, Oswald writes. She evokes the deep sense of absolute otherness she feels in the rose’s presence. Oswald’s reactions do not engender tame emotions associated with the kind of domesticated beauty with which the rose is so often associated. On the contrary, the rose puts her in a fluid and intimately entangled relationship with the world. For Oswald, the rose evokes the vulnerability of existential openness that is intrinsic to the ways of the heart. During an interview, Oswald (who used to be a professional gardener) explained that her poem came ‘from the way I always feel when I meet a rose: it's a point of metaphor, and it's so unbelievable that it throws you into a sort of metaphorical and remembered world.’ And then she added: ‘I'm wary of roses because they are used so much as symbols, and yet the actual rose still remains. It's somehow a hinge between the spiritual and the tangible world.’

 Image courtesy of the Tate Gallery.