Looking at the poinsettia that's growing in my little garden - the way the blood-red petals gape open so shamelessly to reveal the flower's private parts (so to speak), the way they yearn towards the morning light – I'm not surprised flowers are often described in a language that 18th century prudes considered shockingly obscene.
Botany in the early days (I read somewhere) was fraught with sexual symbolism, most of it the creation of an innocent Swede called Carl Linnaeus, who classified plants in a way that is followed even today. An outraged Encyclopaedia Britannica declared: A man would not naturally expect to meet with disgusting strokes of obscenity in a system of botany, but. . . obscenity is the very basis of the Linnaean system.
Yet all the poor man did was to clearly spell out the sexual analogies between flowers and people. The calyx, according to his erudite explanation, was the bedchamber, the pollen was sperm, and so on.
Botanical textbooks were naturally considered too risqué for nice young ladies. It was only after the language was sanitized that botany was taught to them.
And in those days erotic poems about plants were what soft porn magazines are today to those seeking a little titillation. Even Darwin wrote a long and erotic poem called Loves of the Plants, with many learned footnotes.
I have so few flowering plants that when they do flower, the pleasure I take in them is immense. A flower is born! Yet no one bursts crackers and no sweets are distributed to celebrate the birth, and the flower will die in a couple of days and no one will grieve. That might be in the nature of things. But do human beings have to behave as if they alone – in all of nature – possess procreative powers?
Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it – so goes the song.
The humble bee has even been called a flying penis by one enraptured botanist. If only the bee had an ego, how it would boast!
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
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Your sentence about man’s arrogance towards other forms of life has triggered this
Who are we?
We are a bunch of creatures called people whose imagination knows know bounds and this has caused us a lot of misery. Because we are preening away all the time about how we are blessed with consciousness and we are god’s chosen creatures and how he has made us in his image and if he has bothered to create us at all he MUST have some purpose. This great purpose of course, escapes us completely and we go on blathering about hundred thousand probabilities. This quest has occupied us from time immemorial and all kinds of fantastic tales about how and why the world was created are still doing the rounds. It would all be still ok if we accepted this as human imagination not to be taken too seriously because when man gets thinking his mind rattles off things that he has no control over. Basically our problem starts with the fact that we want explanations for every single thing that stares at us, unlike the lucky monkey for whom food ,shelter, sex and sleep are more than enough compensations for living on planet earth. And since the good lord is supposed to have made us from his own image, or so we presume, we have every right, to be his chosen creatures. This kind of bullshit fiction has gone on for so long that it’s a bloody joke. Every religion has reams and reams devoted to all kind of cock and bull, allegorical stories about creation, god, the chosen ones etc, etc. We don’t know about the old days but these days all you have to do is ask a simple straight forward question, to any of these so-called gurus., spiritual manipulators, or people who have generally assumed the mantle of god’s spokesperson and what do you hear- they claim that the basic human unit has become so corrupt that it can’t feel the vibration of the divine- and that if one does feel the vibration no explanations will be required as there will be no more questions thereafter-what kind of divine scams is this we ask?, and all we get is a supercilious smile which indicates that this person knows a hell of a lot more than you on the subject of god but cannot explain as our minds are corrupt, and filled with so much of rubbish that he feels a deep sense of pity for us. Science of course, confuses us even more with bizarre facts that it has proved beyond all doubt, but where this all leads to, is there a single unified madness theory that can explain all things? Of course not- does this stop all kinds of weirdo’s, cranks, and nuts to offer the most unlikely explanations? Of course not- they keep on talking as if they know- when you confront the people with simple facts that are known to all like the size and age of the cosmos, the number of billion stars and galaxies, the fact that there has to be intelligence elsewhere which could blow every one of our pet theories to smithereens- is something most people don’t want to actually think about
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