A Rose Is a Rose?

I call this blog “Metaphorical Times” because I sense that the extreme divisions that are so characteristic of our society these days have reference to the nature of metaphor itself. I sense, both from my job teaching college students and my casual social relations with others, that we are losing an important means of understanding our world, through metaphor. Metaphor is essentially associative and synthetic, the opposite of so many of the opposites we are bombarded with these days.

So, what's a metaphor? Well, whole books have been written on the topic, and “experts” will argue the definition forever. But I have developed a simple working definition of metaphor that I have found is very helpful in everyday life—certainly not just in English classrooms. In my definition, a metaphor is a linguistic association of two different entities; usually one entity is a concrete image, such as a rose, and the other one is an abstract idea, such as love. To take it further, one element of a metaphor makes reference to a physical entity that we can interact with, while the other element reflects mental categories. (And, in this simple definition, a simile is just a subset of metaphor, since it performs the same function, but more openly.) So, when the late eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns writes, “O, my Luve's like a red red rose . . . ,” he is using the concrete image of a rose (of a very red rose, to be precise) to describe his love—his experience of loving a particular person. Why does he do this? For two reasons, I think. First, he's probably struggling to understand his feelings, and somehow his past experiences of a red rose help him to focus the perhaps chaotic experience of love. Second, if Burns wants to convey this confused state of being to another person (i.e., his reader), he can best do so by referring to a physical thing in the common experience of his reader, such as a red rose—an experience many people share.

The more Burns himself and we, the readers, have extensive experience with roses, the more we will understand what Burns is trying to convey about his love. It would be a careless poet, indeed, who would not take into account that roses are not only considered to be among the most beautiful productions of nature with a wonderful aroma, but that they also have thorns, get diseased pretty easily, and die relatively quickly (the flowers, anyway). Indeed, cultured roses these days need a lot of human care to flourish. Only the rest of Burns' poem can guide us on which physical characteristics of a rose he intends to compare to his love--in other words, what his experience of this love has been.

A rose as the symbol for romantic love, especially a red rose, has become virtually a cliché to us modern folk, who see pictures of roses everywhere each February and at times buy or receive roses in the supermarket in protective plastic sleeves, usually de-thorned. But how often do we consider why it is a red rose that has come to express romantic passion for us? Do we stop to consider how a common component of passion is the rush of blood to the skin? Or that a person we feel we love even more than ourselves is a person we value even more highly than our own life force, our blood? In the non-fiction course I taught last spring, as we were reading an essay on Georgia O'Keeffe and looking at some of her erotic flower paintings, I asked the students if they ever wondered why we tend to give flowers to someone we have romantic feelings for. In the ensuing discussion, it seemed that only one or two students knew or remembered that the flower is the sexual part of a plant. Of course, not every young person who walks into a florist and buys roses for his or her beloved is thinking of buying vegetable sexual organs as a means of hopefully seducing the receiver to have sex with him or her. The connection is usually unconscious, but it's there by way of a long history of human associations with flowers.

The immediate conscious connection of concrete image and abstract idea has often been lost in the social process of reducing real thing to symbol--the narcotizing deception of the rose (or romantic love) as an eternal ideal of wonderful feelings, rather than the real, beautiful, hurtful natural thing it is. The latter form of knowledge—reality—wouldn't help Hallmark sell cards so much, would it? Roland Barthes has discussed this process of socializing nature, using the term “mythology” to describe it:

“Holding as a principle that man in a bourgeois society is at every turn plunged into a false Nature, [mythology] attempts to find again, under the assumed innocence of the most unsophisticated relationships, the profound alienation which this innocence is meant to make one accept. The unveiling which it carries out is therefore a political act. . . . in this sense mythology harmonizes with the world, not as it is, but as it wants to create itself. . . .”¹

The alienation Barthes mentions here, as I take it, is our alienation from the natural world as it really is.

We humans have become so proficient through our verbal and technical manipulations in defining and controlling nature that we are hardly conscious anymore of the state of being we come from, both physically and historically. We are so used to living within an artificial world of society and culture (by artificial I mean man-made) that we easily accept the Hallmark rose as close enough to the real thing—even as superior to the real thing, since it doesn't convey any of the more negative experiences one might have with a rose, or with love. But in accepting the artificial image as, essentially, our domesticated reality, and in increasingly not minding or even happily participating in the weeding out of the real Nature, we dispossess ourselves from physical reality. We are manipulated by social markets to expect an “innocent” world, as Barthes puts it, when really we have been made “innocent” (ignorant) by our increasing distance from nature and therefore much more liable to be disappointed and hurt—or to no longer feel deeply, in order to avoid or deny the negative feelings that are not socially acceptable. (This may seem like a silly example, but one time I was camping with my family, a group from a nearby city in the opposite campsite started throwing kerosene from styrofoam cups into their fire, to get it blazing. The kerosene that dribbled from the cups away from the fire caught, and the whole campsite was at risk. I have rarely been so frightened by “innocence.”)

Anyway, what seems to me to be at the heart of all the oppositions clattering around us these days is that some people trust technology to save us from everything—even to deliver us to another planet when we use up this one. As Barthes puts it, for these people, “. . . Nature . . . is nothing but a Usage” (271). In other words, some people trust to the abstract and think our salvation lies in our increasing distance from nature. In recent discussions of the Higgs boson, Robert Wright has bravely said:

“I personally continue to have no idea what the Higgs boson is. And I think the physicists who 'understand' what it is can do so only because they don't have the lay-person's compulsion to think about the world in ways that are ultimately metaphorical. Or, at least, these physicists have dropped the idea that to truly understand something is to have a crystal-clear metaphor in your mind, a metaphor that doesn't break down at any point and doesn't contain internal contradictions. For them, apprehending a purely mathematical description of something is tantamount to comprehending it.”²

I don't go so far as to want “a crystal-clear metaphor,” because I think muddy metaphors that make us think about what works and what doesn't are far more valuable—like the natural rose and love. But Wright makes an important point here—many technologically oriented people (even pure mathematicians use technology) put their faith in the abstract, in a realm we cannot really know because we cannot directly experience it. Someday, they seem to believe, if we fund technological exploration sufficiently, it will save us from ourselves and from our rapidly degrading and disappointing physical world.

On the other hand are people who believe we are creatures of this Earth and should be working to respect the earth and keep it healthy as a good physical home for ourselves. Much of technology tends to spoil the earth, making it a less pleasant home—and one in which we are more dependent on the consolation of the Hallmark rose. These people tend to believe that we should fund environmental protections and universal health care and population control—dealing with real elements of this real earth. Many of the oppositions we deal with daily come from this largely unstated disagreement, I think. Are we not disturbed by global warming or mass poverty or the extinction of species because we are just going to chug off to another planet someday, where we will be in technological control? Or are we going to tend to the real experiences of abuse and suffering on this earth so that we can go on living here into the far future, we hope? Are we the creator or the creature?

If we can't think metaphorically, we are doomed to do the former—to use up the earth and then move on. If we can't think metaphorically of our constant relationship to the natural world and what it tells us about ourselves, then we cannot do the latter—the natural state of the real world comes to have no stable meaning for us. Only through a metaphorical unity of natural thing and our rationalizing, abstracting human mind can we hope to deal with the very great problems that predominantly abstract thinking has brought to this world. I'll give Roland Barthes the last word:

“. . . I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry (by poetry I understand, in a very general way, the search for the inalienable meaning of things.) . . . And yet this is what we must seek: a reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge.” (274)

1Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies [1957], transl. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (NY: Hill & Wang, 2012), 271. Sorry for the name-dropping, but this is one of the few times a French theorist makes sense to me! Following quotes from Barthes are also from this source.

2Robert Wright, “What This Higgs Boson Thing Really Means,” The Atlantic on-line, 7/5/12.