A Rose a Day No.8
To celebrate the recent publication of my new book, ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’ by Oneworld, I am posting a rose a day for a while. You can see a new image every day on my Instagram account, morleypsimon. Here, I give a bit of context about the same image.
Today: death and the rose.
The rose lends itself almost as readily as a metaphor referring to death as it does to love. It renders visible in an acceptable form the ineffable otherness of death. It contains death. By budding, blooming, withering, dying and decaying in such a short period of time, one can say the rose (or any flower) actually enacts death.
Many British people will have strong memories of the mountains of flowers left as a memorial to Princess Diana in September 1997, and many Americans, those left at Ground Zero after 9/11. Not long after the terrorist attacks of November 2015, I was in Paris, and happened to walk passed the Bataclan club, where more than 100 people attending a pop concert had recently died at the hands of Islamicist terrorists. All along the railings on the opposite side of the road were various forms of tribute, including plenty of roses in many colours.
These instances of memorializing flowers are directly linked to a recently excavated graves near Mt. Carmel, Israel, which has been dated to between 13,700 and 11,700 years ago, because the site reveals the impressions made by flowers and other plants that seem to have been deliberately placed under the bodies prior to their internment. But the modern day use of roses in particular as a tribute in relation to death is even more closely linked to a rose garland discovered in 1880 in a tomb in Hawarra, Egypt, which is today preserved in Kew Gardens, London. The date of the burial is put at 170AD. When archeologist rehydrated the dried flowers in the garland, they found it to be a species rose named Rosa richardii, which is also known as Rosa abyssinica or Rosa sancta, and, more colloquially, as ‘Saint John’s Rose’ and ‘Holy Rose of Abyssinia’. The Romans often commemorated their dead with rose offerings. Funerary associations visited tombs regularly to scatter roses on graves, and to deck funerary portrait-statues. By adorning a tomb with roses in springtime, the cyclical nature of life was demonstrated in a beautiful manner. Many inscriptions record foundations for the annual strewing of roses, poppies, and violets on graves, and those who could afford it gave instructions for the creation and upkeep of the gardens next to their tombs. As one poem-epitaph puts it:
Sprinkle my ashes with pure wine and fragrant oil of spikenard:
Bring balsam, too, stranger, with crimson roses.
Tearless my urn enjoys unending spring.
I have not died, but changed my state.
On the walls and vaults of tombs, paintings of red roses on white grounds and images of rose-gardens where also common, allowing the Romans to step more firmly outside the natural order. For while a real rose was an ephemeral offering, a painted one remained unchanged all the year round, and so was a pictorial ‘unending spring’, at least for as long as the paint remained, and the tomb was not destroyed.
Within the context of rites surrounding death, flowers have an obvious practical function. Their pleasant odours mask the fetid ones of putrefaction. But for the living, the visual beauty and beguiling scent of flowers also stimulates happy memories, a primordial sense of the joyfulness of life in the face of loss. Flowers establish emotionally affirming relationships. They remove some of the sting of death through merely being beautiful, and so spaces of ritual mourning become places where the living can share time with the departed amongst symbols of joy. But in leaving flowers as token of remembrances, the living plant has also first to be picked – plucked – just like the human has been ‘plucked’ from life. In this sense, the convention of offering flowers can satisfy the desire to control and overcome nature, to reaffirm the power that regulates the community, bringing order through contesting the unruly forces that lie beyond human control. In fact, the strewing of roses and other flowers can be a way to fabricate within the minds of the living an ideal world in which no one dies. Flowers belong to external nature, but are made part of an internal, imaginatively fired reality where nature does not necessarily hold sway.
The brief flowering period of the Western roses made them especially poignant in this regard. ‘So passeth, in the passing of a day / of mortall life, the leafe, the bud, the flowre’’, writes the sixteenth century poet Edmund Spenser of a rose. Sir Richard Fanshawe, a century later, directly addresses a rose, and his erotic imagery serves to drive home more powerfully the sobering message:
Thou blushing rose, within whose virgin leaves
The wanton wind to sport himself presumes,
Whist from their rifled wardrobe he receives
For his wings purple, for his breath perfumes;
Blown in the morning, thou shalt fade ere noon,
What boots a life which in such haste forsakes thee.
As today’s picture demonstrates, nowadays many of the roses and other flowers we use to commemorate death are plastic (and in appallingly sentimental taste). These plastic roses will not wither and die within days, and so are more effective at suggesting an ‘unending spring.’ Some of them are designed to be planted in plastic pots filled with fake soil and placed on or next to the grave of the departed loved one. As people tend not to look too closely, such surrogates provide enough of the consoling effect of the real thing. The vegetal original is no longer required, as enough of the meaning of the symbol survives the transformation of the source into a representation, a simulacrum, or low-resolution copy. This still has the capcicity to trigger the necessary positive associations. One could say that memory and tradition furnish the grounds for the cathartic practice of presenting flowers in remembrance of dead loved ones rather than the actual organic flowers themselves. But much of the subtle underlying value implicitly encoded in the tradition cannot possibly be fully carried over once the connection to the living source is severed. One could even say that a memorial offering of plastic roses feeds the dangerous illusion that we have placated, dominated, and domesticated death, and so can continue to enjoy the fruits of life in blissful ignorance of our inevitable fate.
A Rose a Day No. 3
The cover of the iconic hippy band Grateful Dead’s second album, released in 1971, shows a drawing of a skull garlanded with red roses, which was lifted and adapted from an illustration in an early translation of the Sufi classic, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. 'I've got this one spirit that's laying roses on me’, said band member and lyricist Robert Hunter. ‘Roses, roses, can't get enough of those bloody roses. There is no better allegory for life, dare I say it, than roses."
Grateful Dead’s lyrics often include references to the rose, most famously in the song ‘It Must Have Been the Roses’, which begins: ‘Annie laid her head down in the roses. / She had ribbons, ribbons, ribbons, in her long brown hair. / I don't know, maybe it was the roses, / All I know I could not leave her there.’ Annie, it seems, is dead. Another album is called ‘American Beauty’, and features cover art of the eponymous red rose (of which, more later on). Their 1991 compilation live album is called ‘Infrared Roses’. There’s a Grateful Dead gig poster of a blue rose (see below) which you can buy on-line. The Dead seem to dwell on the connection between the rose and death, a theme to which I will return in relation to future images of roses.
The album cover featuring the roses and skull was going to be called ‘Skull Fuck’, but for obvious reasons the band’s record company vetoed the title, so the album went title-less. ‘Skull fucking’, by the way, was Hippy slang for ‘blowing your mind’. But as Bob Dylan sang in the early 1960s, ‘The times they are a-changin’, and the on-line Urban Dictionary informs me that nowadays ‘skull fuck’ means, ‘the act of grabbing a partner's skull and putting your dick in their mouth, grabbing their skull and holding it still, therefore having sex with their skull.’
Here’s some more pictures with roses for all you ‘Deadheads’:
