Roses
leaving the andc last night, madhavi was doing some final goodbyes with jason at the bishop's desk.
on the desk rested a vase full of roses. while jason and madhavi talked, i started smelling the roses. moving from rose to rose and smelling them individually.
and i found the one that smelled the best. so i picked up my head and suggested they both smell it. and i watched them both lean down to the roses that had been there all night and really pay attention to the one i'd noted.
in the midst of an awfully intense day, i remember this and wonder: what is it about me that pushes me to smell each rose. stopping to smell them is not enough. lately i find i want to absorb the unique scent of each flower and find which is lush and which is dry and which is full of raspberries and which is smokey and which is the one i want to draw everyone else to.
when shakespeare wrote that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, he was wrong. there are roses and there are roses.
i've picked the right rose. i know it.
As Andre the Giant might say, I do not think that sonnet means what you think it means. As Cole Porter might say, "brush up your Shakespeare!"
perhaps, miss epstein.
oh perhaps not.
a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, i.e. no matter what you call a thing, it is what it is. or, as lao tzu would say, existence is beyond the power of words.
but as i see time and again, "calling" a thing frequently shuts it away. to say, "that is a rose" to someone, suggests that they already know what a rose is and needn't bother smelling, or looking, or considering. names categorize. that is their purpose.
so, yes, i agree with shakespeare and no, i do not. a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but a rose by no name smells sweeter.
As love-struck Juliet says,
"'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself."
Ergo, I suspect you agree entirely with Juliet after all. A name cannot fully describe a person; in fact such a label can impede understanding and appreciation. Therefore, you would love your rose even if she was named "Cankertous Buttfloss"...or if she doffed her name completely.
I find it awfully suspicious, though, that you use the metaphor to explain a) that you have found the "right" rose and b) that you want to sample every single rose very thoroughly. I had no idea you'd succumbed to polyamory! ;)
ah!
i humbly stand corrected. (for those of you who think i can never admit i'm wrong....
flowers, if nothing else, are widely known as the sluts of the flora kingdom.