O, the lowly carnation. How poorly we regard it. In our enthusiasm for exotic flower arrangements these days, I suspect we forgot the most critical factor in a flower is its smell. Wedding bouquets, I’m told, were created to mask (or more like blend with) the odor of excited humans. I remember distinctly, the times my glandular reactions to people became unignorably present. Carnations smell great by comparison, in tandem, with and without purpose.
Air plants, succulents, and the great array of new straw flowers and daisies with which we adorn bouquets today in the information age, do not smell like anything. I find this hugely allegorical. In fact I hear that the virtue of air plants and succulents, is in their air-purifying, antiseptic qualities. I can’t help but remember the aloe plants I kept in various California homes, with no hope of surviving New York when I moved toward further vacuums of natural excretion. Plants as purifiers; we value not only an absence of scent but a vacuum thereof. The plants we want in our homes negate the erotic signification of flowers.
O, the lowly carnation. Cheap scented lotions, saccharine lip balm, a trace of street fairs in fried onions, variations on savory sauces atomized in big group meals, old books and wet metal. I smell flowers. I want to code my feelings within a signature so you know ontologically that this was me. I was here. We have every opportunity to make each other breathe, and I will say for the hundredth time that I can feel my mouth full with the entirety of your body. I smell flowers, the cheapest ones in the brightest shade of yellow, filthy only because we live in an age of the vacuum, vortex, vicissitudes, my voice listen to my voice my vulgar voice, one step away from the final and only venus. I’m telling you, my dear carnation. I could swallow you whole forever.