Flying Saucer Flower of Wonder!
Look at this flower! I mean, LOOK AT IT! How does it even exist in our weary world?—strutting its unapologetic stuff, ‘I am beautiful! I dare you to look away from my unabashed glory! You cannot!’
A couple of weeks ago, I encountered these flying saucer-sized (no lie) blood-red disks: a perennial hibiscus in bloom on the coast of New England.
Such magnificent beauty!
I’m absolutely certain it is the most spectacular flower I have ever seen. The essayist and literature prof, Elaine Scarry (academic girl crush) writes:
‘the beautiful thing fills the mind and breaks all frames that gives the “never before in the history of the world” feeling’ and ‘suddenly turns up in your arms arrayed in full beauty’ (Scarry, 16, 11).
Arrayed!
I have never before seen such a ridiculously amazing flower!—it cannot have ever existed in such splendor before this very moment!
Beauty also desires replication—a kind of generative, rhizomatic, ‘I must do this too! I must propagate beauty everywhere!’
‘Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.’ (Scarry, 3).
This little missive itself is an attempt at begetting a copy of Scarry’s sublime expression—a kind of meta-beauty convo: I want to write a brilliant and beautiful treatise on beauty like Elaine Scarry!
My Last Cicada song and music video aspires to replicate the outrageous and impossible beauty of Texas wildflowers in bloom.
Scarry says beauty, contrary to its criticism— increases ‘our capacity for fairness by decentering us, enabling us to step outside ourselves…[and] incite in viewers and readers acts of creation, which will then bring new art works and treatises — new objects of beauty — into the world’ (LA Review of Books, interview).
An excerpt from my new music video Solstice Songs: Last Cicada. Trippy Kaiber AI generated from my original video filmed during wildflower season in Houston, Texas.
Solstice Songs: Last Cicada
Full-length original music video
Go find wonder and beauty in ALL THE THINGZ!
References
LA Review of Books, interview with Elaine Scarry (2017) Brad Evans.
Scarry, Elaine (1998). ‘On Beauty and Being Just’. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Delivered at Yale University.