Katherine Anne Porter (111 page)

Woman has been symbolized almost out of existence. To man, the myth maker, her true nature appears unfathomable, a dubious mystery at best. It was thought proper to becloud the riddle still further by referring to her in terms of something else vaguely, monstrously, or attractively resembling her, or at least her more important and obvious features. Therefore she was the earth, the moon, the sea, the planet Venus, certain stars, wells, lakes, mines, caves; besides such other works of nature as the fig, the pear, the pomegranate, the shell, the lily, wheat or any grain, Night or any kind of darkness, any seed pod at all; above all, once for all, the Rose.

The Rose. What could be more flattering? But wait. It was the flower of Venus, of Aurora, a talisman against witchcraft, and the emblem, when white, and suspended over a banquet
table, of friendly confidence: one spoke and acted freely under the rose, for all present were bound to silence afterward. It was the flower of the Blessed Virgin, herself the Mystical Rose; symbol of the female genitals, and the Gothic disk of celestial color set in the brows of great cathedrals. For Christian mystics the five red petals stood for the five wounds of Christ; for the pagans, the blood of Venus who stepped on a thorn while hurrying to the aid of Narcissus. It is the most subtle and aristocratic of flowers, yet the most varied of all within its breed, most easily corruptible in form, most susceptible to the changes of soil and climate. It is the badge of kings, and the wreath to crown every year the French girl chosen by her village as the most virtuous:
La Rosière. Le Spectre de la Rose
: a perverted image. No young girl ever dreamed of her lover in the form of a rose. She is herself the rose. . . .

The rose gives its name to the prayer-beads themselves slipped millions of times a day all over the world between prayerful fingers: these beads are still sometimes made of the dried hardened paste of rose petals. The simple flower is beloved of kings and peasants, children, saints, artists, and prisoners, and then all those numberless devoted beings who grow them so faithfully in little plots of gardens everywhere. It is a fragile flower that can survive for seventy-five years draped over a rail fence in a deserted farm otherwise gone to jungle; it blooms by the natural exaltation of pure being in a tin, with its roots strangling it to death; yet it is by nature the grossest feeder among flowers. With very few exceptions among wild roses, they thrive best, any good gardener will tell you, in deep trenches bedded with aged cow manure. One famous grower of Old Roses (Francis E. Lester,
My Friend the Rose
, 1942) advises one to bury a big beef bone, cooked or raw, deep under the new plant, so that its growing roots may in time descend, embrace and feed slowly upon this decayed animal stuff in the private darkness. Above, meanwhile, it brings to light its young pure buds, opening shyly as the breasts of virgins. (See: Lyric Poetry: Through the Ages.) Aside from the bloom, out of this tranced absorption with the rot and heat and moisture of the earth, there is distilled the perfume of perfumes from this flower of flowers.

(The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not
positively erotic, of all our unruly members. I remember a kind old nun, rebuking me for my delight in the spectacle of this world saying, “Beware of the concupiscence of the eye!” I had never heard the word, but I knew what she meant. Then what about the ear? The pores of the skin, the tips of the fingers? We are getting on quicksand. Back, back to the rose, that tempts every mortal sense except the ear, lends itself to every pleasure, and helps by its presence or even its memory, to assuage every mortal grief.)

The rose: its perfume. It is—ten to one—the odor of sanctity that rises from the corpses of holy women, and the oil with which Laïs the Corinthian anoints herself after her bath. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux is shown holding a sheaf of roses, promising her faithful to shower them with roses—that is to say, blessings. The women in Minsky’s old Burlesque Theater on the Bowery pinned large red cotton velvet roses over their abused breasts and public thighs, forming a triangle. They then waggled themselves as obscenely as they knew how; they did know how, and it was obscene; and the helpless caricatures of roses would waggle too: the symbol being brought to the final depths of aesthetic and moral imbecility.

“A rose said, ‘I am the marvel of the universe. Can it be that a perfume maker shall have the courage to cause me suffering?’” Yes, it is possible. “A nightingale answered, ‘One day of joy prepares a year of tears.’” (Note: My translation of a stanza of Omar Khayyam’s from the French version.)

This divine perfume from the bone-devouring rose is sometimes got by distilling, a process of purification. The petals are mixed with the proper amount of water, put in the alembic, and the sweetness is sweated out, drop by drop, with death and resurrection for the rose in every drop. Or, and this must be a very old way of doing, one takes the sweet petals, picked tenderly in the morning unbruised, with the dew on them, and lays them gently on a thick bed of fat, beef fat, pork fat, or perhaps oil, just so it is pure, and fat. The perfume seeps from the veins of the rose into the fat, which in turn is mingled with alcohol which takes the fragrance to itself, and there you are. . . . Thinking it over, I am certain there is a great deal more to the art of extracting perfume from petals than this. I got my information from a small French household book,
published in 1830, which gives receipts for making all sorts of fascinating messes: liqueurs, bleaching pastes for the complexion, waters of beauty—invariably based on rosewater or rose oil, hair dyes, lip salves, infusions of herbs and flowers, perfumes, heaven knows what. They look plausible on the page, while reading I trust them implicitly, and have never dared to try one of them. One important point the perfume receipt omitted: it did not say you must begin with Damask Roses. In India, in the Balkans, in the south of France, wherever the art of making rosewater and attar of rose is still practiced, as in ancient Cyrenaica whose rose perfume was “the sweetest in the world,” there is one only rose used: Rosa Damascena, five-petaled in the Balkans and in India, thirty-petaled in Grasse, and called the Provence Rose. In this Rose of Provence there is perhaps a mixture with Rosa Centifolia, native of the Caucasus—Cabbage Rose to us, to those of us who ever saw it, and smelled it—next to the Damask, the most deeply, warmly perfumed. Once in California, in a nursery, lost in a jungle of strange roses, I asked an old gardener, no doubt a shade too wistfully, “Haven’t you a Cabbage Rose, or a Damask, or a Moss Rose?” He straightened up and looked at me wonderingly and said, “Why, my God, I haven’t even heard those names for thirty years! Do you actually know those roses?” I told him yes, I did, I had been brought up with them. Slowly, slowly, slowly like moisture being squeezed out of an oak, his eyes filled with tears. “So was I,” he said, and the tears dried back to their source without falling. We walked then among the roses, some of them very fine, very beautiful, of honorable breed and proved courage, but the roses which for me are the very heart of the rose were not there, nor had ever been.

They have as many pests as sheep, or bees, two notoriously afflicted races. Aphis, mildew, rust, caterpillars, saw-flies, leafcutting bees, thrips, canker worms, beetles, and so on. Spraying has become the bane of rose growers, for the new sorts of roses seem to be more susceptible than the old. I remember my grandmother occasionally out among her roses with a little bowl of soapy water and a small rag. She would wash the backs of a few leaves and dry them tenderly as if they were children’s
fingers. That was all I ever saw her do in that way, and her roses were celebrated.

Mankind early learned that the rose, except for its thorns, is a benevolent useful flower. It was good to eat, to drink, to smell, to wear, to cure many ailments, to wash and perfume with, to look at, to meditate upon, to offer in homage, piety, or love; in religion it has always been a practical assistant in the working of miracles. It was good to write poetry about, to paint, to draw, to carve in wood, stone, marble; to work in tapestry, plaster, clay, jewels, and precious metals. Besides roseleaf jam, still made in England, one may enjoy candied rose leaves, rose honey, rose oil—good for the bath
or
for flavoring cakes and pastries; infusion of roses, a delicious tea once prescribed for many ills; above all, rose-hip syrup, an old valuable remedy in medieval pharmacies, manufactured by monks and housewives. The Spanish Mission fathers brought the Damask Rose—which they called the Rose of Castile—to America and planted it in their dispensary gardens. Rose-hip syrup was one of their great remedies. It was known to cure aches and pains, collywobbles in the midriff, a pallid condition, general distemper, or ill-assortedness. And why not? Modern medical science has in this instance proved once more that ancient herbalists were not just old grannies out pulling weeds and pronouncing charms over them. Rose-hip syrup, say British medical men, contains something like four hundred times more of vitamin C, measure for measure, than oranges or black currants, and whoever drinks freely of it will be largely benefited, if he needs vitamin C, as most of us do, no doubt. They needed it in medieval times, too, and it is pleasant to think that quite large numbers of them got it.

Bear’s grease mixed with pounded rose petals made a hopeful hair restorer. The ancient Persians made a rose wine so powerful yet so benign it softened the hardest heart, and put the most miserable wretch to sleep. In Elizabethan England they made a rose liqueur warranted to “wash the mulligrubs out of a moody brain.” Mulligrubs is a good word yet in my part of the country, the South, to describe that state of lowered resistance to life now known generally as the “blues.” In turn, “blues,” in its exact present sense, was a good word in
seventeenth-century England, and was brought to America by the early Virginia settlers. Whether they brought roses at first I do not know, nor whether they found any here; but there is a most beautiful rose, single, large-petaled, streaked red and white, called the Cherokee Rose, of a heavenly perfume, which is perfectly at home here. It came from Asia by way of England, however, a long time ago, and has not a drop of Indian blood in it. Maybe the Virginians did bring it—it flourishes best in the Southern states.

The celebrated botanists, rose growers, collectors, hybridizers, perfume makers, as well as the scientific or commercial exploiters of the rose, have all been men; so far as I know, not a woman among them. And naturally in such a large company we find a few who labor restlessly to grow a rose with a six-foot stem; with a thousand petals, and a face broad as a plate; to color them blue, or black, or violet. The rose being by nature a shrub they could not rest until they made a tree of it. In the same spirit, there are those who embalm them in wax, dip them in dye-stuffs, manufacture them in colored paper, and sprinkle them with synthetic perfume. This is not real wickedness but something worse, sheer poverty of feeling and misdirected energy with effrontery, a combination found in all vulgarizers. The “arrangers” of great music, the “editors” of literary masterpieces, the re-painters of great pictures, the falsifiers of noble ideas—that whole race of the monkey-minded and monkey-fingered “adapters”; the rose too has been their victim. Remy de Gourmont cursed all women in the name of the rose, with the ferocity of perverted love; and aesthetic hypersensibility turned not to hatred but to something even more painful, disgust, nausea, at the weight of false symbol, the hypocritical associations, the sickly sentiment which appeared to have overwhelmed it. With the wild logic of bitterness and disillusion, he cursed the rose, that is, woman, and through it, all those things which had degraded it in his eyes, concluding that the rose itself is vile by nature, and attracts vileness. Only a disappointed lover behaves so unreasonably. He got a brilliant poem out of it, however (
Litanies de la Rose
).

Women have been the treasurers of seedlings and cuttings; they are the ones who will root a single slip in a bottle of water in the corner of a closet; or set out, as the pioneer American
women did, on their bitter journeys to the Carolinas, to Kentucky, to Texas, to California, the Middle West, the Indian territories, guarding who knows how their priceless little store of seeds and roots of apples, plums, pears, grapes, and roses—always roses. China Rose, Bengal Rose, Musk Rose, Moss Rose, Briar Rose, Damask Rose—in how many places those very same pioneer rose bushes are blooming yet. But where did all those hedges of wild roses spring from? Were they always there? Gloire de Dijon, Cup of Hebe, Old Blush, Roger Lambelin, Cherokee, Maréchal Niel, Cramoisy—these are some names I remember from gardens I knew; and Noisette, a small perfect rose, result of the first crossbreeding in this country, a century and a quarter ago. . . . Where did I see that little story about someone advertising a place for sale as an earthly paradise, “the only drawbacks being the litter of rose petals and the noise of nightingales”?

The rose is sacred to religion, to human love, and to the arts. It is associated with the longing for earthly joy, and for eternal life. There is a noticeable absence of them, or flowers of any kind, in the textbooks of magic, witchcraft, the Black Arts by any name. The world of evil is mechanistic, furnished with alembics, retorts, ovens, grinding stones; herbs, mainly poisonous; the wheel, but not the rose; hollow circles, zones of safety for the conjuror. The alchemist with his madness for gold—for what did they devote all that hermetic wisdom, that moral grandeur, that spiritual purity they professed but to the dream of making gold? Or of turning pebbles into jewels, as St. John was said to have done? A slander, I do believe, unless taken symbolically. But the evidence is against this: the alchemists meant to make real gold. It is the most grotesquely materialistic of all ends. The witch, with her blood vows and her grave robbing and her animal rites and transformations, how stupid and poor her activities and aims! Where can pictures more coarse and gross and debased be found than in books of magic: they cannot even rouse horror except in the offended eye.