For over thirty years I have seen plants when I close my eyes. They began appearing when I was in my twenties and weeding my first garden. I saw what I’d pulled for hours, sometimes days afterward. I thought they were after-images, ghosts of what I had killed “with my bare hands.” But then, flowers also appeared, often when I was most happy, or often, too, unexpectedly, not linked to anything I had just seen. I feel their color rather than see it, though their shapes are distinctly here, if instantaneously here and then gone. They are not generic (as our feelings are not generic) but specific: lily, columbine, rose, hyacinth, sometimes simply leaves. Like Ko Un’s poems, they seem to rise up from the soil of mind I must be carrying inside me. I began this essay in search of what they might mean.

What is unique about the flower image is that it is both threshold for this experience and form of that experience.

The image takes root at the heart of the world, writes the poet Adonis in his book Sufism and Surrealism, “a real world deeply rooted at the heart of the world of appearances.”^[36] This world, which the Sufi mystics say lies between the sensory world and the ideal or divine world, is accessed by the creative imagination, whose door of perception is the image itself. “The significance of the image,” Adonis writes, “does not lie in its visible surface but rather in the fact that it is a threshold to whatever meaning it has and a door that leads the spectator to what is behind it: the absent or the abstract, in its essence or nature,”^[37] in other words, the invisible, the unknown. What is unique about the flower image is that it is both threshold for this experience and form of that experience. What I mean is that at the same time that it exists as a means to contemplation, it also mirrors, in its shape and colors and perhaps fragrance, a specific and age-old path that one might take from unseeing to seeing, from ignorance to revelation, an organic, even alchemical, path that is shared by many cultures who have attempted to come face to face with the soul.

Branche de pivoines blanches et sécateur, 1864
(Oil on canvas, 31.8 × 46.5 cm)
BY Édouard Manet
Musée d’Orsay
PHOTO: The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei

“Flowers are allegories of consciousness,” writes Novalis, in a fragment quoted in Shapiro’s essay on Mondrian.^[38] I recognize the allegory, the agreed upon parallel between our inner experience and the outer world of appearances: from deep below the surface of the earth, which is colorless, dark, secret, a seed sprouts and sends up a shoot that flowers into its own unique form in the same way that a thought or dream or awareness arises from ignorance into knowledge, from nothingness into presence. As it enters the light of consciousness, it takes shape. It moves into our world, petal upon petal, growing from a center that often becomes sunken or hidden, yet signals with stripe and color, luring birds and bees and other seekers. Yet if it is to move past allegory to symbol, as Corbin would define it, it must call to us and we must respond. It must persuade us to follow, like the bee or fly, down its corridors into our own centers. It must not reveal everything; it must leave something for us to find. As Mallarmè writes, it must employ “evocation, allusion, suggestion.”

The image takes root in us perhaps because it finds not its allegory, but its home in our being, our inner earth, in centers and colors that resonate with it, or in the meadows and streambeds that constitute what Corbin calls the “mystic geography”^[40]of the soul. In the lines above, excerpted from Howell’s “Another Letter to the Soul,” the flower/soul addressed is a climbing one, perhaps a clematis, and it is precisely drawn from all the others who are growing into the “blue / foyer of the sun.” In the act of distinguishing it, “in this way” of seeing it alone, separate, the speaker is able to understand his own flowering as a “shadow” or parallel process. Or the “way” is perhaps that of belief, by which I think he means creative imagination, of first believing the flower is his soul, and then practicing that belief each day until he sees it as such. Howell suggests, in his image of the luxuriant vine, that, though we cannot see our souls, we might act as though we saw them. “The poet therefore does not explain or make clear but rather, as al’Buhtari says, only provides a flash, whose indication is enough,” writes Adonis.^[41] Enough for what? Enough to confirm that there is in absence a promise of presence, that “an interior world exists, which is invisible, unknown and inaccessible by logical or rational means.”^[42]