Blue fire

Newness, brightness, purity : you can see this three qualities in a flame. A flame is a new thing at every moment, is always a fresh thing. There are no old flames. Freshness of flames, freshness of fire. Every material thing on earth is fresh as a flame. A rose is a rose is a flame, is red fire, -a rose, or the hedge at the bottom of the garden, or four bamboo chair legs in the middle of a room :

A rose is a rose is a rose, but these chair legs were chair legs were St Michael and all angels. [...] I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers -a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. [...]

  The bold heraldic blossom of an iris in my garden (with my old nokia mobile phone)

 

 

Istigkeit -wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy -except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were -a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence. I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing -but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden" (Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception).

It seems to me that this qualitative equivalent of breathing is another name for freshness, for incessant newness, -pulsing newness :

From the French window I walked out under a kind of pergola covered in part by a climbing rose tree, in part by laths, one inch wide with half an inch of space between them. The sun was shining and the shadows of the laths made a zebra-like pattern on the ground and across the seat and back of a garden chair, which was standing at this end of the pergola. That chair -shall I ever forget it ? Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes of an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that they could be made of anything but blue fire. [...] None too soon, I was steered away from the disquieting splendors of my garden chair. [...] A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision. So passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance, the flowers strained upwards into the blue. Like the chair under the laths, they protested too much. I looked down at the leaves and discovered a cavernous intricacy of the most delicate green lights and shadows, pulsing with undecipherable mystery.

The Doors of Perception -the first two-thirds of it -is the most beautiful text I have ever read. I read it first in French (in the old translation by Jules Castier, which is not flawless : A rose is a rose is a rose becomes : Une rose, si elle est une rose est une rose -with no note about Stein ; Wordsworth's daffodils becomes les asphodèles de Wordsworth, etc) and then in the 1994 Flamingo edition.