"Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick"

This fun, fairly aged mixed media piece comes from a small burp of joyous expectation in my life - looking forward to agreat weekend with dear company - during an otherwise glum, powerless, and uninspiring era of my life. This was long before I managed to slough off a lot of what proved uneccessarily paralyzing in my life.

William Blake instantly came to mind, especially since the last rose of Summer lies there, next to the mirror, encased in epoxy resin - andnot faring too well, colour-wise.

An allegory of what happens when you try so damned hard to hold onto dead, dying things, when you hash over the memory of, in your life, over andover, things that came to their natural cycle and then are meant to go underground? We all do that a bit, no doubt -

But mainly I have often been rather fond of Blake, as far as 1998 when I sort of felt what he spoke of when he begins:

O Rose, thou art sick!
The Invisible worm,

That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed

Of Crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

I have lived much of my life through the modality above described. As I worked on this painting, I ran across Camille Paglia's interpretation of Blake in general and this poem in particular: in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Female genitals are traditionally symbolized by the queen of flowers, from the medieval Mystic Rose of Mary to

the rock classic, "Sally, go Round the Roses." Blake sees solipsism as the danger in female sexuality. The rose's exclusiveness blends fear, shame, and pride. Its layered petals are a form of self-population. That the rose's "bed of crimson joy"

suggests masturbatory pleasure is well accepted by critics. For Blake the rose's self-completion is perverse and sterile. The rose is a sexual schismatic, making division where there should be wholeness and unity in nature. It is this an early version of the solipsistic hermaphrodites of Blake's prophetic books.

Blake's masturbatory rose belongs to the tradition begun in Egypt where autoreroticism is a method of cosmogony. Blake sees a sexually private world as a prison cell. The rose is sick because, she thinks, the communion of sex drains and obliterates her identity. Blake's own ambivalence toward sex produces the cryptic duality in the poem.

...

Blake thinks the being living alone and for itself is sick because it rejects the strife of contraries by which energy evolves [...] Blake regards virginity as a perverse fetish. [...] Like Sade, Blake sees chastity as unnatural, energy-killing. But in urging Thel, a sick rose, to cure herself by surrendering to communion, Blake is closer to Shakespeare of the comedies, where all are given in marriage, than he is to his fellow Romantic poets, for whom solitude is imaginative perfection.

Why do I post this?

1. The sex and eroticism described (and which I make reference to) are being used here in an allegorical sense, where masturbation/autoeroticism = narcissism/solipcism, and where sexual union/congress = joining the human fold, participating in life. As such, both the poem and the analysis are dear to my heart as representing the fundamental struggle of my existence, and that of many.
2. I've been lately transitioning from journal keeper/diarist to online blogger/participator. Once again, this shows the transition from narcissistic, sterile rose to someone/something brave enough to get out there and allow others' access to one's inner workings. Pain and danger and criticism are all possible here - but a better life and chances to GROW all exist there as well.
3. The rose in the painting, close to a decade old, was a bizarre relic that never quite got tossed away - found in a box years later - that sort of thing. It had occurred at a time when I had weirdly given my heart to another. The experience turned out mostly to my detriment (as such things do), though, like in Camille Paglia's analysis, the experience was INSTRUMENTAL in opening me up to the world. Before this experience my psyche very much was "narcissistically convoluted", and I had inhabited a self-complete, but perverse and sterile inner world. The experience of thus loving someone else who can hurt you and open you up falls under this rubric (also taken from Paglia): "Woman's flirtatious arts of self-concealment mean man's approach must take the form of rape. The phallus becomes the conquerer worm, death's agent." Openness and emotional maturity come at a cost which feels much like a violation. Taken literally, it all seems crassly sexist and downright perverse; taken allegorically, it very much is a process to which not even men are immune.