The Flower Can Always Be Changing Read online

  The flower

  can always

  be changing

  The flower

  can always

  be changing

  SHAWNA LEMAY

  Copyright © 2018 Shawna Lemay

  All rights reserved

  Palimpsest Press

  1171 Eastlawn Ave.

  Windsor, Ontario. N8S 3J1

  www.palimpsestpress.ca

  Book and cover design by Dawn Kresan. Printed at Webcom in Ontario, Canada. Edited by Aimee Parent Dunn.

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Palimpsest Press would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program. We also acknowledge the assistance of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Lemay, Shawna, 1966–, author

  The flower can always be changing / Shawna Lemay.

  Essays.

  ISBN 978-1-926794-69-3 (softcover)

  I. TITLE.

  PS8573.E5358F56 2018 C814’.54 C2017-907125-4

  “Genre no longer interests me. What interests me is mystery.”

  —CLARICE LISPECTOR

  The Flower Can Always Be Changing

  ***

  The bonsai. Purchased years ago from the hardware store. A wish, a pretension, a desire for peacefulness, with an envious thought to the serious practitioners, precipitated its purchase.

  Relegated to the basement when it sensed I was not living up to its requirements for emptiness, calm, and a true tenderness. It became too lush and I could not be severe in bringing it back to balance. Years later, it re-emerges. Parts of it have died, irretrievable. Unbalanced but splendid and we understand the elegance of each other’s broken loneliness.

  At the stage where she was dreaming, conjuring, The Waves, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, “A lamp and a flower pot in the center. The flower can always be changing.” There would be, “…a perpetual crumbling and renewing of the plant. In its leaves she might see things happen. But who is she?”

  Quickly followed by the wish she remain unnamed. The leaves would most certainly see things happen.

  I forge a plan that I quickly abandon, to ask women I know about the plants they have on their windowsills, kitchen tables, desks. I imagine receiving answers about geraniums being overwintered, about African violets, and about bouquets of grocery store tulips and about long stemmed, candy-coloured daisies, and roses that deliberately open. Once, someone told me about the aloe vera plant she has on her desk that has vast properties of healing and with which she conducts séances and hearing this made me too delicate.

  We breathe the plant in and the plant receives our exhalations and our chakras align accordingly.

  Of course, with Clarice Lispector, I’ve been thinking about the sadness of flowers in order to feel more fully the order of what exists for a very long time.

  As Cixous said, we have all lived one or two flowers. We have felt the light of them, the light they attract and which goes right through them, and also the heaviness, the gravity, and we have known, perhaps, as the painter Francis Bacon called it, the violence of roses. Not just the thorns, but the colours changing and bleeding and seeping out of those generous, soft, petals. The way our souls might rise up and speak to flowers, met by flowers, their breathing, the faint breath of them. The pain of finding we can’t quite sip, can’t quite internalize the answers to, the question of scent.

  I imagine the pots and vases of flowers on a table near a window in timelapse photography that encompasses several years. The first day emerges deliberately. In a veil of morning light, I place a vase of garden roses on the weathered table. The pink-orange petals are so various, each one a slightly different combination of pink fluttering into orange. They have opened under the sun, have been changed by breezes gentle and ardent and arduous. Insects have nibbled and continued on their way. And now the light becomes more diffuse, evens out, brightens, declines again, and then moonlight comes in and bathes the roses, they soften and at the same time become more radiant, full. The leaves droop a little, curl, the water clouds, the edges of the petals wither, turn a greyish brown, and the pinks become less vibrant, and the orange deepens, lessens. They begin to look tattered in the repetition of this cycle, more graceful, more noble. At one point a hand comes into the frame, and shoves the vase from the center of the table to the edge, to the far end.

  In this way we come to know the unrepeatable secrets of flowers, and then to forget them. We learn opening, opening. And then empty, drunk, we succumb to their heavenly sadness. It is the sadness of flowers that reminds us to keep the secret.

  The table is empty for several days. The timelapse speeds up. A geranium arrives in a terracotta pot. The stems are thick and gnarled. The plant has lived and lives on in the slips that have been taken. It grows, leaning toward the light through the day, a slow dance. And then the cuttings are removed, and it must grow more leaves, and it does, small sprouts emerge. At which point someone takes it to make room for a gift, a vase of flowers. A ghostly image enters the frame and leaves, as if on security camera footage.

  An arrangement, a gift. A florist’s concoction. Tulips, roses, hydrangeas, snapdragons, bits of greenery in a rigorously balanced and visually interesting triangle. Light pink, fresh green, and lavender. For days they stay as placed, rather too perfect. But then the tulips begin to droop through the course of a single day and are nearly done in.

  The timelapse slows and then speeds up, and this feels alarming, how the flowers move as though in a deep conversation, the intensity of their gestures, leanings, listings, to and fro, petals drop in what could be happiness one moment, anger the next, then resignation.

  Those that have perished are removed, and the bouquet is awkward, strange. A hand removes the bouquet, the arrangement returns in another form, the remaining flowers cut down and placed in a water glass. They last a day or two more. And at this point, the light in the room becomes grainy, and I can’t help but think about the clouds that must be responsible for this effect.

  It goes on like this. Long periods where the space is empty. Shadows of people pass over the table. A bird flies by and casts a low and fleeting shadow. Snow falls so the window resembles a 20th century television screen at three am. The window is opened and the curtains blow into the frame, ever so slowly. Punctuated by moments of flowering. Flowers changing. And changing.

  It goes on like this. The colours. The fading. The beauty of decline, the simplicity. All of the attendant moods arrive and pass in waves, swelling and subsiding, at dawn, at dusk.

  While I’m imagining the flowers on a table I’m also thinking about 17th century Dutch flower paintings. The way that artists would make and collect studies of flowers so that they could paint them into lush floral bouquets that couldn’t actually exist as the specimens didn’t naturally bloom at the same time. Sometimes an artist would share a particular study they’d made, so that another artist would have the exact same rendering of a flower in their own floral painting.

  I remember the painting by Remedios Varos called Still Life Reviving, which is the last thing she painted before her unexpected death. At the center of a small round table with a tablecloth draped on it is a lit candle. Swirling around and hovering above the table are plates, and above them various fruits that at times collide and explode, all of this witnessed by dragonflies. Seeds drop from the colliding fruits, and plants are being born from them before they hit the ground.

  I remember t
he way things appear to lose their magic, and later regain it.

  Paper whites in winter. An amaryllis bulb, forced. Spring plum blossoms. Forsythia. Peonies. Roses. Tiger lilies.

  The flower is always changing, which is dizzying. Which is why, still life.

  Poets Looking At Art

  ***

  I find myself thinking about why I am not a painter, which is also the title of the pretty well known poem by Frank O’Hara, the one with SARDINES in it, and about the colour orange, its absence, and also its presence. I have decided to become a painter in my next life and leave it at that but only partly because of orange and the way it’s there and not there. For me there have always been questions about the colour red, and I have quite a few feelings related to the colour blue. I have very much wanted to paint in pink and orange and bits of purple but that’s how you’ll know me in my next life. I should be more like Gertrude Stein, who said she wouldn’t want to be a painter for anything. But even so I do like looking at paintings. I’m with Stein, who also said, “The only thing, funnily enough, that I never get tired of doing is looking at pictures. There is no reason for it but for some reason, anything reproduced by paint, preferably, I may even say certainly, by oil paints on a flat surface holds my attention.”

  Paintings hold my attention and I see that they also hold the attention of many poets, while it’s true other poets walk right by a painting and head straight to the bar at the Folies-Bergère. But for the poets that do look at paintings, I wonder why they enjoy looking at them and then writing about that looking. Is it because they wish they could paint, or is it because writing about painters and painting is a way of talking about writing, or is it because the way poets see the world is conducive to entering the mysteries of paintings? Do poets see more like painters see?

  Or is it envy? In his “Notes on Corot,” James Merrill once said, “The writer will always envy the painter. Even those who write well about painting, he will envy for having learned to pay close attention to appearances.” Merrill goes on, “Daily the painter masters new facts about the world. But years pass, and the writer is still studying his face in the mirror, wondering at what strange tendencies lie hidden beneath a familiar surface.” Very few poets will know how to render the lines in their own faces or the bags under their eyes or how to mix the colours to convey a tired but illuminated and bedraggled soul and other tendencies.

  Some poets paint, which must give them a greater feeling for the paintings of others, and so it makes sense that these particular poets are drawn to write about art. But there are poets who write about art who have never picked up a paintbrush and like Stein, wouldn’t want to become a painter for anything.

  I don’t suppose I’m going to become a painter for anything but I would still like to paint and someday I’m going to give it a whirl. But you see I’d also like to make movies and there’s a movie I talk about making and never make. I do that a lot. Write about the movie I’m not going to make. This movie is called Poets Looking at Art. I would invite poets into a museum, let’s say The National Gallery of Canada. In the movie the poets look at the art, up close and then far away, and circle around the room and back to a favorite painting. The movie will try and decipher which paintings hold a poet’s attention and for how long and why.

  For some of the movie, I will film them from above. Watch patterns develop. The poets will write things in notebooks, some of them will sketch, some of them will speak into their smartphones and record their first thoughts upon encountering a painting. Others will just breathe and think in front of the paintings. The soundtrack will include the sound of poets shuffling from one painting to the next, and the occasional cough. Poets breathing and sighing and whispering to other poets. Poets making interesting gestures, poetic ones. They will smile and frown and roll their eyes. I will spend some time zooming in on their eyes, those limpid pools, the way they move over paintings, darting here and there or intensely gazing. And when I interview them in front of paintings, they will talk about colours and feelings and envy or equanimity and also their strange tendencies. I will ask them why they want to write about paintings, and what painting they would like to write about, and why that particular painting. Maybe there is no reason for it other than paintings hold their attention.

  Looking for a Quiet Poem

  ***

  I was looking for a still life poem, something I thought I’d read. I seemed to remember it was near the beginning of a book. I seemed to remember dog-earing it. The poem, I remember, made me feel calm, made me slow down. There was light in it, a radiant light. Maybe it felt like transcendence. The objects described could have been anything. An apple, a tomato can filled with what someone might describe as weeds. It was a quiet poem and I’m sure it talked about silence. The emptiness of the room, the sturdiness of the table.

  Surely the poem spoke of possibility, how anything might happen next. But then it brought the reader back to the matter at hand. These objects in the light and how they’re ordinary, really, but also not. How when you give your attention to humble objects, you see them in a different way. The weight of them will strike you as will the way the light transforms them, too. It’s wonderful that when you read a poem like this, you feel a subtle shift in your soul. The world feels smaller, warmer, more filled with light.

  Some objects become holy when placed at the centre of your attention, goes the poem. The objects are looked at long and with love. What has been overlooked is now placed in the centre of your vision. And maybe now the objects shift, the light changes, we begin again.

  Then, the poem most likely brings us back to the world after leading us in a reverie of depth and song. When I finish the poem, first I sit with it, let it settle and sink in. I close the book and close my eyes.

  The poem lends itself to another reading, this still life poem, which I never did find.

  Dinner at Irving Penn’s House

  ***

  In 1941 Irving Penn left his job as art director at Saks Fifth Avenue to try life as a painter in Mexico for a year. At the end of his time there he washed the paint out of the fine linen canvases, folded them up, and kept them for tablecloths.

  I wonder how he would have photographed the colours seeping out of the linen, pooling and swirling in the silvery sink. Nothing is ever really lost, says dear old Walt Whitman, and so we remember the image of the woman whose lips have been smeared with seven shades.

  Perhaps, at dinner parties, all the fashionable women, ran their lacquered nails over the cloth, spilled the jewel-toned wine, the gravy, the cherry sauce, the plum pudding. And when the dishes were cleared, the tablecloths seemed again like paintings.

  Transcendence

  ***

  I want to say that what makes me beautiful is I know how to endure the deep winter and how when the snow falls it changes my soul. I want to say winter strengthens me but I know the grocery store flowers are the only reason that I make it through.

  The time it takes for art to move out into the world and to be accepted or admired or understood is often longer than the artist’s life. Some of the blossoms get lost. We know that.

  Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small it takes time. This is what Georgia O’Keeffe, said, though if anyone has seen flowers, it must be her.

  O’Keeffe’s words echo the Buddha’s. If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

  To see clearly while at the same time maintaining faith in the horrible, shabby beauty of the artistic life is a miracle.

  I used to spend a lot of time naively wondering what it would feel like if my entire existence, or at least most of my day, was for making art, and I used to think that only in this sort of situation could true art be made. I also imagined that such a life could be bestowed upon a person, and even that some day it would be bestowed upon me. And I also felt that somehow I was more deserving than many others.

 
I like O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers because she shows the inside of the flower by painting the outside. The colours and the layers are complex, spicy and juicy. But I also like Irving Penn’s photographs of flowers, the poppies, the way you can see right through the petals. And then, Cy Twombly’s flowers, all the pinks and reds, the density of them. They’re like clouds. Like weather. Like lipstick.

  There is a story about Georgia O’Keeffe and how she painted a commission for Elizabeth Arden. They became friends. At some point, Arden talked her into submitting to a make-over but of course, O’Keeffe cleaned it all off as soon as she was able.

  Irving Penn photographed for Vogue and one of his iconic images is a close-up of multiple shades of lipstick smeared and smudged in outward stripes over the model’s lips. It’s possible to think of each smear as the petal of a fabulous flower.

  At the beginning of the winter solstice my lips are dry and thin and sometimes pouty. The sky is thick gray and full of snow for weeks until the lack of light shatters nearly everyone. We bring home pink roses from the grocery store and I keep them company.

  Each rose blooms and then declines on a slightly different timeline. They begin as a non-descript bunch. Then, some open, generous. Others are cautious and slow. Still others are remote and reticent. On several of the roses, the outer petals turn a dun colour. One of the blooms darkens as though it’s bleeding out, or has stolen all of the colour from the other roses, and its petals are the most dramatic, partly open, asymmetrical and weird looking. Without meaning to I lavish most of my attention on it.

  I come back to them through many days. Have breakfast with them. Tea in the afternoon. I keep them company, take photographs starved of light. It’s quiet like visiting at the hospital. I understand a certain heaviness in their presence. I don’t mourn them as I would a sick aunt but they’re on a plane of existence that conspires with Rilke’s lines about changing your life.