Our Relationship With Flowers

[peter]

I've recently came across the Japanese art of flower arrangement know as ikebana (obviously I've seen them before, but had not realised that it was such a formalized discipline) and am staggered by the power and beauty of the best examples. As important as the floral elements themselves are the gaps and spaces between them (there is a name for them that I forget) and even a ritualised way of looking at them. Yesterday, a single tulip my wife had placed on our dinner table caught the sun briefly, and over the course of an hour, opened slowly to reveal it's fiery interior - and then closed, once again showing its delicate pink and cream outer hues. It was a beautiful thing to experience and got me to thinking about our relationship to flowers, about how and when it started - and why it is so strong.
I think I'm right in believing that it is one of evolutionary science's problems, the question as to why we should find flowers beautiful, there being no readily available advantage in so doing - but evidence of the long standing relationship between humans and flowers may be seen in depictions of bloom filled vases on Greek urns and in the earliest of mosaics, and even earlier in the scattering of flowers on the delicately positioned bodies of neanderthal burial sites. Love of flower is it seems, hardwired into us and even though I don't understand it I thank the whatever it is that made it possible that it is so.

[Skyweir]

Is it simply by virtue of having an eye for beauty What evolutionary imperative would there be in finding pleasing one thing or another.

But then.... not a scientist lol

But isnt beauty a thing subjectively appreciated .. I share the beauty you see in the perfection of a single flower .. in gardens, in flora and fauna.

Look at art .. not all art forms are appreciated as beauty by all. Its very much subjective. Some see beauty in one thing where others do not

[peter]

Have found a glass pot and am going to go out later and try to gather plants for my first attempt at ikebana; this [from what I have read] appears to be akin to learning to play chopsticks on the piano and then settling down to write Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, but hell - yer gotta start somewhere!

[wayfriend]

Well, flowers are by design (by which I mean naturally selected) attractive to insects, birds, or other pollinators. So perhaps whatever makes them attractive to those creatures also makes them attractive to humans.

[Zarathustra]

Pete, you remember Deutsche devoting an entire chapter to this, right? It is a puzzling situation that a plant that evolved to be sexy to an insect would also have aesthetic--not to mention romantic--appeal to us, a mammal.

Deutsche argued that this meant beauty might be an objective quality, and not merely a quirk of natural selection.

[Skyweir]

Well, flowers are by design (by which I mean naturally selected) attractive to insects, birds, or other pollinators. So perhaps whatever makes them attractive to those creatures also makes them attractive to humans.

Wow ... brilliant insight Wayfriend .. perhaps youre right. The interesting thing is that nature is not only filled with all manner of beauty but its also therapeutic.

Z .. beauty is objective Thats interesting .. if that was so wouldnt we all find beauty in the same things. But then elaborate and simple patterns in nature are beauty, are they not. But surely there is more to beauty than symmetry and pattern

[peter]

Yes - almost like a further back version of why men have nipples - because it's part of the basic human design - perhaps the attractiveness of flowers resides in some early shadow of neuronal networking that persists to this day........


Gosh, I'd forgotten Deutsch had gone into this in depth (must be time to dig out The Beginning of Infinity again); I can see how say, hardness as a quality can be measured objectively - but beauty? Could you do that? Did Deutsch have a suggestion about how this might be achieved? Perhaps beauty is not a single (simple?) quality - after all, when I think of it, I can see that the pleasurable sensation that comes with aesthetic appreciation is of various forms depending on the nature of the object of ones attention. Perhaps it is the elements of each type that can be further analyse to simplify and indeed quantify the experience. An analogy for this might be the Terracotta Army; no two figures are the same, each having apparently it's own countenance - but on inspection it turns out that only a small number of standard elements, seven I believe, have been juggled around to achieve this apparent variety. Perhaps beauty is like this and the elements, once isolated, become 'objectively gradable' like hardness.

[Skyweir]

[Vraith]

Perhaps beauty is not a single (simple?) quality

That.
I suspect it is compound-complex. Subjective/objective mixing which is further expanded, gains greater reach, depth, meaning, through/by intelligent abstraction and reconcretization.
I mean, we find flowers...SOME flowers---there are some mother-killing-UGLY blooming plants out there---attractive. Some people find the bugs/bees attractive, too. I mean Mantises! WTF!?! Gorgeous.
But---as far as I can tell, flowers and bees don't find US unexpectedly attractive...
Also...why is it that certain subjects---people, even---would disgust/offend us on the street, in the restaurant, suddenly become beautiful things, brilliant art, when some bastard with fine-motor skills and an eye paints them?

[wayfriend]

[peter]

Perhaps beauty is not a single (simple?) quality

But---as far as I can tell, flowers and bees don't find US unexpectedly attractive...

You've clearly never encountered an English wasp on a hot summers day on the beach when your eating an ice lolly V. - but that is by the by..........

No, you're absolutely right - why in representation can the ugly be transformed into the beautiful? I think it has to do with the particular 'eye' through which you happen to be viewing them. Yesterday I was in a charity shop faced with a shelf unit scattered with one dollar items, cast offs from other people's lives or the deceased - junk to the casual eye. But on inspection some of the pieces turned out to be beautiful - miniature ceramic pots with subtle glaze work, intricately enameled dishes and the like - items made with care and attention to detail that only when viewed 'with the right eye' once again gave up their hidden charm.

[Skyweir]

Wayfriend

[Skyweir]

But---as far as I can tell, flowers and bees dont find US unexpectedly attractive...

[Vraith]

Perhaps beauty is not a single (simple?) quality

But---as far as I can tell, flowers and bees don't find US unexpectedly attractive...

You've clearly never encountered an English wasp on a hot summers day on the beach when your eating an ice lolly V. - but that is by the by..........

Hah...like most men, you've failed to differentiate interaction from attraction.

[Skyweir]

For a man youre very honest .. unless youre a woman .. if so touche .. you nailed it

[Linna Heartbooger]

...Some people find the bugs/bees attractive, too. I mean Mantises! WTF!?! Gorgeous.

Mantises - yeahhh!
I still can barely believe orchid mantises exist...

...Also...why is it that certain subjects---people, even---would disgust/offend us on the street, in the restaurant, suddenly become beautiful things, brilliant art, when some... with fine-motor skills and an eye paints them?

I like this.
...and what peter says about the eye... the example with the knick-knacks on the shelf in the thrift shop!

Maybe the people so painted had been seen with "eyes of love."
that there was beauty in them in the first place, but for a variety of reasons, the un-beauty they also embody collides with our sensibilities first.
like people despising the "Oakies" back in the day.
and then photographers, journalists, and authors and set out to tell their story.
and that, umm.. maybe helped a little?

Any living human being we see is brimming with beauty, yet also with physical and moral deformities that mar and twist that beauty.
And, too, he or she is bearing harbingers of death within the body.

peter- quote for you:

As a newlywed couple, my wife and I began our journey with very little...
...We had a tight budget and often had to ration our food (lots of tuna cans!) to get through the week.

One evening, I was sitting alone, waiting for Judy to come home to our small apartment, worried about how we were going to afford the rent and pay for necessities over the weekend. Our refrigerator was empty and I had no cash left.

Then Judy walked in, and she had brought home a bouquet of flowers. I got really upset.

"How could you think of buying flowers if we can't even eat?" I remember saying, frustrated.

Judy's reply has been etched into my heart for over thirty years now. "We need to feed our souls, too."

The irony is that I'm an artist. I'm the one, supposedly, feeding people's souls. But in the worrying for tomorrow, in the stoic responsibility I felt to make ends meet, to survive, I failed to be the artist. Judy was the artist: she brought home a bouquet.

I do not remember what we ended up eating that day, or that month (probably tuna fish) but I do remember that bouquet of flowers. I painted them.

[Skyweir]

Nice Linna

However, consider the possibility that an artist does not need to see an object with eyes of love ... but light and their own view of subjective truth .. and they have sufficient skill to capture an image in paint, photography, clay, stone, marble, graphic art etc

Also in many cases they replicate their subject in 2 dimensions or 3 dimensions in clay etc. Sometimes a really good photographer can capture so much more than singular dimensions provide.. feeling, joy, heartache, passion, power, success, a number of different emotions on the broad emotion spectrum

That IS art ...

Flowers are natural living beauty .. perhaps one day we may learn more about plants and flowers ...

Why is their colour important, their scent .. their taste .. ok to attract bees, some birds and insects .. but why. Why colour and scent

Or perhaps it just is as it is .. the end.

Its intriguing how life on the planet is fundamentally interconnected ... and how valuable and necessary biodiversity is .. and each component within a given environment.. even micro environment. Theres so much about the planet we inhabit that we do not fully appreciate