‘Continual Departures’

A single rose, it’s every rose
and this one—the irreplaceable one,
the perfect one—a supple spoken word
framed by the text of things.

How could we ever speak without her
of what our hopes were,
and of the tender moments
in the continual departure.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Roses, No. VI. Translated from the French by David Need.

Here’s a picture of the first rose to bloom in my DMZ garden this year.  It’s a species rose that’s native to Korea, China, and Mongolia called Rosa xanthina, aka the ‘Manchu Rose’. It’s unusual in several ways. First of all, it’s yellow, which is very rare in species roses, especially in occidental roses.  It’s also unlike most species’ roses in being ‘semi-double’, that is, each flower has more than nine petals, although the flowers themselves are small – only about 5cm wide. It only blossoms once a year, in late April or early May. As this year it’s been unseasonably chilly and wet, it blossomed on May 1st. This makes it the very first rose – species or cultivar – to blossom.  The Manchu Rose isn’t common. I was very surprised to find specimens for sale in a Seoul nursery. I’ve certainly never seen it growing wild. Last year my wife pruned it back too severely and it refused to flower. But this year it’s putting on a wonderful display.

Soon all the blooms will have gone. But as I’ve taken this photograph of the very first blossom, I’ve preserved it, and can share its beauty with you.

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Tens of thousands of years ago, humans came up with the idea of making images. They chose to represent the animals with which they shared their environment, and by making images of them they effectively removed the animals from the flow of time and captured them. But this was obviously only an imaginary seizure. A fiction. It occurred in the mind and was externalized through a visual representation. The fact that the images were often painted on cave walls that were normally in complete darkness, so it was necessary to illuminate them with a torch or lamp, suggests that the cave itself was envisioned by these people as a metaphor for the mind within which images are fabricated. For them, learning to make images must have produced the consoling and confidence-building  feeling that the mutable world had, in a certain sense, been taken into safe custody and controlled.

As a result, it seems certain that Upper Paleolithic humans greatly enhanced their feelings of self-efficacy, their belief in their ability to complete tasks and achieve goals. This was a level of control and domination that was impossible in the real world in which they were confronted with all manner of unforeseeable dangers and risks. But because of their limited knowledge and primitive tools the cave-painters could never lose sight of the obvious fact that the control they possessed through images was fictional, only a temporary reprieve from a real world that they knew was fundamentally uncontrollable.

They were acting out what the contemporary German sociologist Hartmut Rosa in his book The Uncontrollability of the World (2020) calls the ‘irresolvable tension between our efforts and desire to make things and events predictable, manageable, and controllable and our intuition or longing to simply let “life” happen, to listen to it and then respond to it spontaneously and creatively.’  (p. 60).  In other words, human relationships to the world are torn between violence and aggression, on the one hand, because we are motivated by the will for mastery and control, and on the other, a more open and accepting attitude imbued with the desire for uncontrolled interplay with the world. 

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It only took about 35,000 years for us to make the journey from painting the walls of caves to taking digital photographs with smartphones of roses,. A camera allows us to make the world knowable, accessible, manageable and useful by turning it into an image. Thanks to the extraordinary developments associated with modernity, we have hugely increased our store of knowledge and technological capacity, and we have become very successful at exerting our dominance over the world.. But Rosa stresses that this sense of mastery has come at a very high price. Paradoxically, our very ability to impose such a high level of control has led to a way of life that is all too often characterized by profound alienation, one in which we are inwardly disconnected from other people and outwardly disconnected from the world.

In contrast to a life of alienation, Rosa describes our most cherished experiences as involving what he calls ‘resonance’: a responsive openness to being affected by the world, to being touched, moved, or ‘called’. When we have a resonant relationship to the world, it feels like an oasis. But when we are alienated, it becomes a desert. Any attempt to control a situation, an object, or a person, in the sense of making them knowable, accessible, manageable, and useful, will automatically destroy the possibility of having a resonant relationship with that particular portion of the world, and pushes us towards alienation.

The possibility of experiencing resonance depends on what kind of society we live in, what opportunities are given us to respond to the world, and for the world to ‘respond’ to our desirous approaches. We are constantly being offered visions of better, more resonant worlds, and we seek them out in situations ranging from love affairs, art galleries, favourite restaurants, and roses bloom in our gardens or public parks. But the potential for these situations  to actually offer resonance are constantly being thwarted by our compulsion to take control of them. Our society is systemically driven to exert maximum control over the world.

A primary reason why we so avidly photograph seemingly almost everything these days is because we think the camera can help us experience resonance through increasing our control of the world. But in the very act of successfully ‘capturing’ the moment we risk ruining any chance of feeling its resonance. For in taking a photograph we substitute for the uncontrollably limitless real  three-dimensional world of lived experience a controllable, fictional, miniaturized, two-dimensional world of the digital image.  In the process we forget how to ‘simply let “life” happen’, choosing instead to inhabit a world in which we believe things and events are more or less totally predictable, manageable, and controllable.  

The experience of resonance is like a fish in the fast-flowing river that eludes all our best efforts to grasp it and hold it in our hands. But we are increasingly reluctant to listen to the world and ‘respond to it spontaneously and creatively’.   For what makes our time with roses ‘tender moments’, as Rilke puts it in his beautiful poem, is precisely the fact that we have accepted that we exist in a world characterized by ‘continual departure.’  

Notes

David Need’s translations of Rilke’s ‘Roses’ was published by Horse and Buggy Press in 2018.

 My book, ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’ was published by Oneworld Publishing in 2020.

 Hartmut Rosa’s books are translated into English by Polity Press.