I took this photo of an amaryllis (ok, actually it’s probably not truly an amaryllis, but actually Hippeastrum) recently and when I looked at it once I’d uploaded it to my mac, it brought back to my mind a Hermann Hesse fairy tale I read back in my teens (yep, well over three decades ago!). Sometimes you read a novel, or a story, or a poem and it makes such an impression that it stays with you for life. I read a lot of Hesse when I was a teenager and one of my most favourite was (and still is) his collection of fairy stories – “Strange News from Another Star”. One of the stories in that collection is “Iris”. What I remember about that story is how the young boy imagines a whole world inside the Iris flower in the garden and later in life when he has lost touch with that whole way of experiencing life he falls for a woman named “Iris” who challenges him to go back and find what he had lost. I got my old copy off the bookshelf and the moment I started to read, the old magical feeling came back.
In the morning when he came out of the house, fresh from sleep and dreams and strange worlds, there stood the garden waiting for him, never lost yet always new, and where yesterday there had been the hard blue point of a blossom tightly rolled, staring out of its green sheath, now hung thin and blue as air a young petal with a tongue and a lip, tentatively searching for the curving form of which it had long dreamed. At the very bottom where it was still engaged in a noiseless struggle with its sheath, delicate yellow growth was already in preparation, the bright veined path and the far-off fragrant abyss of the soul. Perhaps as early as midday, perhaps by evening, it would open, the blue silk tent would unfold over the golden forest, and her first dreams, thoughts, and songs would be breathed silently out of the magical abyss.
I don’t think I ever looked at a flower the same way after reading that. Oh how I love those images – of the flower “tentatively searching for the curving form of which it had long dreamed” and of it “breathing silently out” its’ dreams, thoughts and songs.
When he stared into her chalice and in absorption allowed his thoughts to follow that bright dreamlike path between the marvellous yellow shrubbery towards the twilight interior of the flower, then his sole looked through the gate where appearance becomes a paradox and seeing a surmise. Sometimes at night too he dreamed of this flowery chalice, saw it opening gigantically in front of him, like the gate of a heavenly palace, and through it he would ride on horseback, would fly on swans, and with him flew and rode and glided gently the whole world drawn by magic into the lovely abyss, inward and downward, where every expectation had to find fulfilment and every intimation came true.
Each phenomenon on earth is an allegory, and each allegory is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can pass into the interior of the world where you and I and day and night are all one. In the course of his life, every human being comes upon that open gate, here or there along the way; everyone is sometime assailed by the thought that everything visible is an allegory and that behind that allegory live spirit and eternal life. Few, to be sure, pass through the gate and give up the beautiful illusion for the surmised reality of what lies within.
Goodness, it is so many years since I last read those words but they feel as vibrant, stimulating and inspiring as they ever did. What a fabulous capacity we human beings have for imagination and creativity! How amazing is the tool of “allegory”? Isn’t it incredible how it turns what seems to be into something so much more? How it unlocks the potential that lies in everything. Wonderful! I’m off to re-read some more Hesse!
Meanwhile, here are a couple of other lily family photos I’ve taken – an iris I saw in Holland once, and a daylily from Rodin’s garden in Paris – hey, that should inspire your imagination a bit!
