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| Rosa 'Crazy Love' 20 May 2024 |
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| Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' 20 May 2024 |
The Golem - First stanza
Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by James Honzik
If (as affirms the Greek in the Cratylus)
the name is archetype of the thing,
in the letters of “rose” is the rose,
and all the Nile flows through the word. Jorge Luís Borges - 1958
Si (como afirma el griego en el Cratilo)
el nombre es arquetipo de la cosa
en las letras de 'rosa' está la rosa
y todo el Nilo en la palabra 'Nilo'.
Because in 1962 my philosophy instructor, Ramón Xirau, for two years at Mexico City College stressed the importance of Plato I have been almost obsessed with Plato’s world of ideas that puts some men inside a cave looking at a wall in front of them. Behind them is a fire and behind the fire a tunnel that leads to the outside world. Plato explained that what the men were seeing inside their cave was their reality. Perfect, unfiltered reality was outside and not be seen by them.
In 1967 I travelled to San Francisco and I went to a Jefferson Airplane concert. By the bar, in a corner was a young woman looking into a glass on what probably was crème the menthe. She was staring at what she thought was an absolute and pefect colour. Perhaps she had taken LSD.
In 1968 my Rosemary and I would drive our VW Beatle from Mexico City to Veracruz where my mother lived. As soon as we got to Orizaba (almost sea level) we would open our windows. In those evenings the smell of jungle humidity was as perfect as we could imagine.
This Platonic concept of perfection which according to Aldous Huxley could be seen by using mescaline in his book The Doors of Perception, is one that I keep reading over and over and thinking about as I look at the almost 50 roses in my Kitsilano garden. With The Borges quote I was intrigued as to who Cratylus was:
Cratylus (/ˈkrætɪləs/ KRAT-il-əs; Ancient Greek: Κρατύλος, Kratylos) was an ancient Athenian philosopher from the mid-late 5th century BC, known mostly through his portrayal in Plato's dialogue Cratylus. Wikipedia
Furthermore I found out that: The Cratylus is the only Platonic dialogue devoted exclusively to language and its relation to reality.
That is most appropriate for my blog subject – The Name of a Rose.
The rose illustrated here is an English Rose, Darcey Bussell introduced in 2006 and incredibly it has been discontinued because it seems to be subject to rose diseases.
Today Rosa ‘Darcey Bussell, which consistently hs been one of my best roses, had 12 blooms. I cut only six as I know the limit that my Epson scanner will accommodate.
This rose is named after one of England’s best known ballerinas. Who like my own rose is still with us.
English rose grower David Austin (who died in 2018) named the rose. For me the naming of a rose and knowing the history behind the name is one more reason for liking roses. I think that the naming of roses is not much different from the task that Adam and Eve had to name things, plants and animals.
The other rose scan is of a rose I purchased today at Richmond’s Phoenix Perennials. I bought it in spite of its terrible name which does not conjure any history or personality.
But both roses, if we go along with Borges and Cratylus, have names that are inherently what they are and the perfection that they are.
They are the rose.
