A rose by any other name
by Bob on June 23, 2007
I received a wonderful photograph of a beautiful Asian flower from a friend the other day. It was as if this particular flower had a glorious ear-to-ear smile, and as if it had eyes which were shining as bright and as precious as rubies, and seemed to have arms to embrace one with.
I thought for a moment. What a beautiful picture. I studied it. I took it in my heart, as this Asian flower was so very siren-like in its presentation. The image stuck in my mind.
I had to remember it was only a photograph. I could not touch the delicateness of this flower in a sensible way with my fingers, rub my cheeks up against its petals, or even smell it. I had to remember such images are not the real thing, lest I fall into a both simultaneous ancient and modern trap of believing what is in front of my eyes, communicated to my mind.
So what did I do ? I had wanted to put the photograph up on my wall to be captivated by its beauty at any instant in my day or evening.
But I then thought the better of it.
I wanted either the real flower, in my hand, so I could savour its true essence and sensousness, or let it be and keep whatever image I had in my mind, no matter how inaccurate it was from the photograph. Becuase I think it allows more leeway and more romantic to remember this precious flower if we simply keep it in our mind's eye. We have maximum freedom then for interpretation and metamorphsis of the memory, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Everything changes from moment to moment -- if we can ever, in answering Nietzsche's riddle in "Thus Spake Zarathustra" -- define and encompass just what a moment is. Our fond and sentimental and pleasing memories should change a little and be dymnamic, too, I should think, to avoid a crashingly boring life of steadfastly similar images with no life in them in our minds. Or drawn on paper. Or etched into a rock. Or chemically mixed into a photograph. Or digitally stolen from reality by a modern digital camera.
I remember conversing with a meteorologist about what the weather is like in cities. Or even in a particular. He said to say, for example, 78'F and cloudy, is a very socially useful but yet an extravagant misrepresentation. He said it depended even at one moment (yes, we have run into that concept again of the seeming impossibility of a moment) on where in the city one measured the temperature and sun level. It would be sure different in different parts of the city. Was the thermometer in the sun or in the shade ? And similar qualifications. So saying the temperature in a city is a utilitarian invention, but not a terribly accurate one, in actual truth, unless it is one of those absolutely 100% meteorologically uniform days which hardly ever happen.
This seeming digression leads us right to the intended point. That trying to nail down and confine and define an image in the sensible world is a very slippery slope indeed.
When people used to use photographic film in cameras, which I used to use myself, one found out that different national films had a colour bias. German film tended to be very earthy, kind of like Tolkien's Middle Earth, American film, especially Kodak was absolutely colour-saturated and like a visual carnival of colours all seeming equally bright, and Japanese film was very aqua like the sea, in its tint. This all was in the chemical predisposition and manufacturing composition of the film. The film was just simply pleasantly biased.
So as we look at something, people see what would appear to be the same thing very differently and each takes back what he wants from it in his memory.
If we videotape it or photograph it we run the risk of losing its true flavour. There are harsh shadows in photographs which we don't see in reality and it makes the scene softer for us, pleasingly so.
So one can imagine easily that judges have a hard time with witness testimony in a court of law. So they do.
We should remember that some "primitive" cultures (if there are any left which don't have cable TV or a McDonalds) which disdain photographs being taken of a person. Or even taking a photograph of a thing or animal. It's considered bad luck, possibly a curse, and in some sense a theft of one's identity in a visual and spiritual sense.
So we remember also the Kalachakra sand mandala of the Tibetan monks who, after making this beautiful multi-coloured sand drawing, then pray and throw in the air and into the river. Similarly, the American Indian tribe, the Navajos, make sand drawings on the ground just to whisk them away after they are done.
The point seems to be that people will look at these sand drawings and take away with them what they wish. And it's better in their mind than etched on stone. Or in a fashion magazine. Or on TV. Or in a photograph.
So, in the end, I didn't hang up my precious Asian flower photograph that was sent to me. I studied it. But then I committed it to memory but allowed myself some mental room to imagine it as I wished.
Someday I will go to see the real flower and savour it's fragrance and beauty.
So, indeed, Shakespeare was right in one sense. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Maybe. So it goes.