{"id":147288,"date":"2020-09-03T09:00:45","date_gmt":"2020-09-03T13:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=147288"},"modified":"2020-09-02T13:33:05","modified_gmt":"2020-09-02T17:33:05","slug":"vanitas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/09\/03\/vanitas\/","title":{"rendered":"Vanitas"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her column, Corpus<\/em>,\u00a0Jordan Kisner examines the stories our bodies tell.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Abraham Mignon, The Nature as a Symbol of Vanitas<\/em>, c. 1665-79<\/p><\/div>\n

I like flowers all right, I suppose. I like having them around, I like how they smell. I like their delicate skins, their manner of shedding yellow everywhere in a fine powder. I try to stop on the street, when I can, to bend down and look directly into their faces. I have mild flower preferences, in a bodega-selection way: ranunculus over chrysanthemums, peonies over roses, lilies over hydrangeas. Having lived in New York City my entire adult life, bodega-flower choice has been more or less the extent of the relationship.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible that I no longer live in New York City, a fact that won\u2019t be decided until next year sometime and which I only relay here because the place I currently inhabit has a lot of wildflowers and no bodegas. Inasmuch as flowers exist here, they exist because they come out of the ground randomly, with no rubric or intention or market. First there were lilacs (on bushes!) and then when the lilacs died the peonies bloomed, which began wilting just as the day lilies and trout lilies and tiger lilies sprang open like self-peeling bananas. That was right around when Dame\u2019s Rocket, highlighter purple, was all over the fields and dominating the unmowed grasses along the side of the road. A gigantic mock orange bush exploded into blossoms and made everything smell like, naturally, orange blossoms. Then vervain, then Queen Anne\u2019s Lace like weeds, wild lupines. Right now we are in red clover.<\/p>\n

Trying to articulate what\u2019s so stunning about watching flowers just appear and disappear makes me sound like an idiot. I was on a long walk with an older gentleman who\u2019s been watching the seasons cycle in this part of the world for something like ninety years, and trying my best. \u201cThey just arrive!\u201d I said. \u201cAnd then they go!\u201d<\/p>\n

He seemed briefly at a loss for a response. \u201cThat\u2019s true,\u201d he said, encouragingly.<\/p>\n

Helplessly, moronically, I am amazed by them. Their brevity, for one. Lilacs bloom for \u2026 maybe two weeks? Most of the year they just look like bushes, and then for the briefest moment they burst into the lushest Day-Glo purple, a jammy, fragrant, fecund burgeoning. Everything within a quarter mile smells like sweetness. And then after a few days the purple begins to look slightly blurry, slightly less explosive in its presence. And then you wake up one morning and the bush is just a bush again: green, leafy, pretty but unremarkable. This repeats itself again and again in waves, as every flower\u2019s death is met by the profusion of some new species whose moment in the season has arrived. This all happens, uninterrupted and untended, wholly separate from human timelines and activity, relentlessly.<\/p>\n

I went to kindergarten, like everyone else, and so it is not technically a surprise to me that flowers have seasons, that they bloom and fall, and that this is a tidy metaphor for human life cycles. But I grew up in the suburbs in a climate where summer days are eighty-three degrees and winter days are seventy-three degrees, and then I moved to a place where flowers primarily appear in cellophane wrapping. Knowing it in the abstract, or knowing it on the pages of a book, didn\u2019t exactly prepare me for living with it in time and space.<\/p>\n

The film director Derek Jarman kept a diary from 1989 until 1990 as he was shooting his film The Garden<\/em>, editing another, stage directing a stadium-sized rock concert, and dying of AIDS<\/small>. It begins January 1, 1989, and continues, month by month, until September 3, 1990, after which he writes no more. He begins by describing the landscape surrounding the cottage in Dungeness where he lives most of the year. It faces the vast shingle beach, for which Dungeness is famous, and the ocean beyond that. \u201cThere are no walls or fences. My garden\u2019s boundaries are the horizon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Any \u201cplot\u201d in this diary, inasmuch as life can be organized into a plot and recorded that way, is relegated to the background. Things happen: Jarman works on major films (Tilda Swinton dips in and out); friends, identified only by initials or first names, come to dinner or join Jarman in painting, or call to give the news that another friend has succumbed to AIDS<\/small>. Jarman records trips back and forth from London, political events; he recounts childhood memories; he grows sick, and then sicker. But all that feels somehow secondary. Modern Nature<\/em>, instead, is mostly a book about flowers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI counted 77 blooms on the early daffodils I planted two years ago. They are multiplying very slowly. At the water\u2019s edge the sea kale is sprouting. The plants have small leaves of two or three inches; they are a deep purple.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDiscovered a clump of ivy-leaved toadflax covered with bright blue flowers growing on a mound of asphalt alongside the lifeboat station.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Californian poppy are growing everywhere: they have colonized the garden. In every nook and cranny the scarlet field poppies have germinated: if they survive the winter they are going to cover the garden in a field of scarlet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jarman loves flowers. He loves poppies and lavender and Alexander and burdock and samphire and bugloss. With each passing month, as more of his friends die, he devotes page after page to recording what he did in his garden, how each flower is doing in the harsh, salty climate and soil of Dungeness. He in particular tracks emergence and disappearance: \u201cBeneath the willows at the Long Pits I found the first primrose of the year.\u201d Later: \u201cThere is one foxglove out behind the house, and along the lakes, just three. Last year there were thousands. Alasdair phones to say Spud has had his cancer removed. Hardly a day passes without illness invading.\u201d<\/p>\n

All diaries are a record of attention, but this diary feels more acutely so because mostly Jarman writes about what he has spent the day looking at and touching, rather than thinking or feeling. He records the slender bodies of flowers with more detail than any of the human bodies that come and go, with more detail than he describes his lover\u2019s body or even his own body, which starts gradually to die as time and pages pass. By the end of the book, Jarman has begun to go blind, which feels particularly unfair as this will make it difficult for him to know whether the lavender has survived the next storm.<\/p>\n

Why record a flower? What\u2019s the point? They\u2019re ephemeral, they\u2019re never the same from day to day, they\u2019re so brief, there are so many of them. Incremental change, inevitable loss. Their scale is both too large and too small. I\u2019ve never before wanted to write about them, except that I am noticing them now, and the way they make me feel time, make me see<\/em> time. On their bodies I see time much more clearly and poignantly than I see it on my own. And yet my body, too, is in time, and its season is indefinite. It, too, is just one of so many. \u201cFlesh dreams toward permanence,\u201d wrote the poet and essayist Mark Doty, who survived the AIDS<\/small> epidemic but buried many people he loved and wrote about it. He writes also about the natural world, the ocean, lemons, painting. In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon<\/em>, a meditation on still life portraiture that is also a meditation on loss, he writes, \u201cDescription is an inexact, loving art, and a reflexive one; when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jarman is very much what he describes his flowers to be: scrappy, planted defiantly in an inhospitable landscape, delicate, beautiful, hardy, worthy of care. \u201cAs I sweat it out in the early hours, a \u2018guilty victim\u2019 of the scourge, I want to bear witness how happy I am, and will be until the day I die, that I was part of the hated sexual revolution,\u201d he writes Wednesday, September 13, 1989. \u201cAnd that I don\u2019t regret a single step or encounter I made in that time; and if I write in future with regret, it will be a reflection of a temporary indisposition.\u201d<\/p>\n

One varietal of the seventeenth-century Dutch craze for still life paintings (out of which Doty\u2019s beloved painting Still Life with Oysters and Lemon<\/em>\u00a0came) was the vanitas<\/em> painting. A vanitas<\/em> was a kind of memento mori, or artwork designed to remind the viewer of the inevitability of death. Typical memento mori paintings had skulls, clocks, extinguished candles, that kind of thing\u2014but a vanitas <\/em>was typically a still life with flowers or musical instruments. Sometimes the flowers were fulsome and blooming but accompanied, subtly, by a piece of bone, or a turned-over hourglass. Sometimes their edges were just starting to curl. Sometimes they were in full wilt, losing petals, bowing over gently toward the ground, as if in acquiescence. The function of these paintings was not only to remind us that we\u2019re all dying, but to encourage the viewer to let go of their vanities, the worthless worldly pleasures that serve no purpose in a Judeo-Christian afterlife. Stop paying so much attention to the flowers, these paintings tell us, because soon they\u2019ll be dead and so will you and all this frivolity will have done you no good.<\/p>\n

Flowers are frivolity, maybe, nature\u2019s frivolity\u2014a production of beauty with so much variety and playfulness that it exceeds any obvious purpose. Looking at flowers, doting on flowers, is frivolous, I suppose, in the sense of engaging with beauty for beauty\u2019s sake. It is also frivolous if we assume (as the theology behind these paintings did) that taking our eye off the eternal and training it on the ephemeral is an empty, if glorious, distraction.<\/p>\n

Jarman\u2019s diary is its own kind of vanitas<\/em> in that it offers us flowers and death in one work, but its spirit is precisely opposed to the original intention. He wholly embraces what might be deemed frivolously beautiful or ephemeral, trains our eye on it, dwells in it without shame or rebuke. His diary argues thrillingly for pleasure, for joy, for tender identification with the wilting stem. A gardener with a death sentence, he valorizes what is beautiful and must die.<\/p>\n

While the original vanitas<\/em> asked the viewer to look at flowers and think forward to death, to an afterlife, flowers as Jarman writes them are about life as it presently exists, which is beautiful precisely because it is transient.<\/p>\n

Right now, there\u2019s prairie phlox in the field. There\u2019s yellow lady\u2019s slipper dying in the woods behind the house, and white baneberry. Right now, hepatica. Right now, goldenrod.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jordan Kisner\u2019s writing has appeared in<\/em>\u00a0n+1,<\/em>\u00a0The\u00a0New York Times Magazine,<\/em> The Atlantic,<\/em>\u00a0GQ,<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0Guardian, The American Scholar,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>The New Yorker,<\/em>\u00a0among other publications. Her debut essay collection,\u00a0<\/em>Thin Places, was published this year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve never before wanted to write about flowers, except that I am noticing them now, and the way they make me feel time, make me see time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1904,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[61509],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corpus"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nVanitas by Jordan Kisner<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 3, 2020 \u2013 I\u2019ve never before wanted to write about flowers, except that I am noticing them now, and the way they make me feel time, make me see time.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/09\/03\/vanitas\/\" \/>\n<meta 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