Morning Glories on the Make

 

     Why are flowers universally considered beautiful?  Though a functional part of nature, enabling sexual reproduction, flowers are favorite images in poetry and visual art in all parts of the world.  As compared with leaves or stems, they are, of course, showy things, with extravagant forms, colors, and even fragrances all of which are considered attractive.  Surely, for one who suspects that aesthetics derives from functional use, flowers may be significant to people’s survival, though they are rarely eaten, because they are the promise of fruit to come.   As the flowering parts are sexual organs, the plants, it seems, are flaunting their reproductive capacity in the most flamboyant display possible.  Flowers bring the pleasure of a reinforced confidence that nature is percolating with vigor throughout, and that, on the most basic level, dinners need never cease.  Their showy sexuality is the dynamo propelling fertility.  Unsurprisingly, flowers have become part of the imagery and the social practice of romantic love, from “I am the Rose of Sharon” to contemporary St. Valentine’s Day marketing.  In nature the flowers’ reproductive organs communicate with other flowers as well as with birds, insects, and humans.  The faith of the flower in a generation to come is expressed in overdetermination to the point of glory.  

     The birds attracted to this floral display have their own costumes and rituals to celebrate their own affairs.  Such behavior is familiar to everyone who watches nature films.  The inconvenience of the peacock’s magnificent tail is undeniable at all times when the bird is not engaged in courting.  The bowerbirds not only build elaborate structures; they decorate them with shiny or brightly colored objects and perform dance movements to attract females.  Male jumping spiders twist their bodies to display colored or iridescent hairs (the most spectacular is called the peacock spider) while hopping about seductively and singing in distinctive tones.  Some have areas of ultraviolet reflectance which they also flaunt just as some flowers attract bird visitors through similar ultraviolet flashes).  Even the ordinary house fly cavorts before his love object with the hope of soliciting the female’s cooperation.  Egg-laying is the functional goal of the blue-footed boobies’ dance, or the solemn movements of pirouetting sandhill cranes, or Costa’s hummingbirds swooping and diving and then suddenly flashing a startling display of radially symmetrical purple face feathers, yet what the animal does is only secondarily, one might say symbolically, related to reproduction, rather like human fetishes. 

     Nature employs symbols to perpetuate itself, and it infuses those symbols with ostentatious passion by using the brightest colors, the most inventive forms, the most conspicuous cues.  The birds are surely expressing enthusiasm; I suspect the flowers may be as well.     

     Reproduction is the Aristotelean final cause of all this folderol, but the practical seems all but lost in magnificent symbolic clothing.  If the drive to pass on their DNA is what leads animals and plants to express themselves so creatively, one might suspect a similar goal lies at the root of human art.  While it may be undeniable that many artists have successfully pursued sexual variety, it remains unclear whether they developed their skills in order to provide variety in the bedroom. 

     I once witnessed a festival in Ogwa in Edo State, Nigeria in which, accompanied only by percussion of a drum ensemble, individual young men took turns doing acrobatic dances not unlike breakdancing that surely were meant here not only to satisfy the local deities but also to impress the young women of their acquaintance.  Though such an outright connection is rare, to Freud not only art but energy in general originates in the libido.  In a classic essay in 1910 he argued that the work of Leonardo da Vinci was entirely the result of sublimation after he had recoiled in horror from his own sexuality. 

     But can it be called sublimation when so often eros is explicitly invoked in art?  Vast amounts of love poetry have been produced (though in volume it may yet be outweighed by religious poetry).  I once worked in a prison library where a book in high demand, kept safely behind the counter, was called Pearls of Love.  It was a collection of romantic poetry from which the inmates copied warm passages to include in letters to their lovers.  Were the countless sculptures of naked women from the Venus of Willendorf to Jeff Koons’ Woman in Tub created from purely aesthetic motives?  Would Venus look equally beautiful to an alien who reproduces through budding? 

     Most would agree that a hungry person is unduly influenced by circumstance, who quite sincerely, while salivating, thinks that a photograph of a beefsteak the most beautiful thing in the world.  One suspects that the judgement would not survive a good meal.  Yet eros can hardly fail to be present when one person regards a figure of another. 

    Some artists are emphatic.  Van Gogh said, “There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” To Klimt “all art is erotic” and those who most appreciate his work might be likely to agree, while Picasso is said to have oracularly declared “sex and art are the same.”  Matisse said in an interview that “Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love.”  A link between artistic practice and appeal as a lover is encoded in popular art as well including Burgess Meredith’s character in That Uncertain Feeling, Lute the “troubadour” in the comic strip Hägar the Horrible, and the macho posturing of heavy metal guitarists.

    Even if the theme of a poem, painting, dance, or tune has nothing whatever to do with love or sexuality, surely in art where the maker like a god shapes a small universe with a free hand such a fundamental human element of nature must be present.   Just as dreams often take a sexual turn, the fantasies that we have learned to project for each other’ amusement, our art, is inevitably lit with some level of erotic glow.  Every text has a sexual meaning, just as every text might be read psychologically, or metaphysically, or socially, or self-reflectively, yet, for most humans, the sexual interpretation may have a certain primacy, an inside track.  Perhaps among us hominids who like to think of ourselves as “higher,” just as among the birds and the bees and the flowering plants, art is a secondary sexual characteristic.