From the lecture notes - 5
ftln 5
“(The flowers in the garden are representative of those in your heart. Treat them both nice.)”
Good evening, everyone. I was very impressed when I received your invitation: the Heart Surgery Ward Gardening Club, Hamburg Hospital. Such an interesting combination…I look forward to talking with you all afterwards.
And I knew immediately which quote I would suspend my lecture from, as a rose upon a trellis. It had to be this one. Shortly after that bit of inspiration, I considered writing a little joke to open with, about wearing a Daniel Hale Williams badge—instead of a Franklin badge, you know—to protect myself in the event that any of you got bored and decided to take a scalpel to me for a little impromptu open-heart surgery. But then I realized there would be a few problems with it—okay, a few chuckles, but discretion was better part of valor in this case—because, besides it not being very funny, I imagine I could do with a bypass or two. “Grandma’s gonna get better, huh.” Or in this case, Grandpa. Unless any of you do those types of operation. “Oh? At your age?...My lands…” Uhh, I guess I’ll start the lecture and we’ll just see. Whatever happens, I’ve had a good run.
So. What would you do, doctors and gardening aficionados, if you had someone stretchered in who had a bunch of flowers growing out of his chest? Sort of like the clowns with the squirty flowers in their lapel who are missing, along with the trapeze artists, the carnies guessing your age, and all the rest, missing from the big tent in Threed. But that’s a subject for another day. Your professional prognosis, now, would it be facilitated or hampered by your knowledge of gardening? Would you identify the plant type—lilies, lilacs, or what have you? would you weed them and water them? stop and smell them? Or would you simply put the guy under and go to work saving his life?—because clearly something would be going very, very wrong in there, with roots threaded through the old ticker.
At least so I’d assume. Maybe someday, though, thanks to brilliant people like you, we’ll all be photosynthetic, make a virtue of necessity with the abundant carbon-dioxide; and on the runways of Paris, living rose lingere will be the season’s must-have; in Shanghai, they’ll graft bonsai into their skin; grass will be the new black.
For now, though, we ought to take the bit about “those in your heart” none too literally. The flowers in the garden are representative of those in your heart, which phrase, “those in your heart,” is in turn a metaphor for…something. Something beautiful; something fresh and pure; something ephemeral, perhaps, but the more precious for that. Something growing. Not physical, not located anywhere in your beating heart, of course, but in some other heart.
To go into all this is silly, I understand. It is abundantly clear what is meant by the sign in Onett. I just think it is interesting, how this distinction between the literal and the metaphorical is in a case like this so evident, how in most instances the two levels get along fine, so much so that we don’t notice it, so there is no distinction to speak of, yet in certain other cases the letter of the law becomes so divorced from its spirit, the spirit becomes so rarified and distant from the living, breathing business of life.
Briefly, then, what is it to “treat them both nice”? In no small measure, it is to do as we usually do. Keep saying things like, “it broke my heart,” or, “my heart goes out to,” to wear “I heart NY” t-shirts, to do this without thinking, to know or rather feel exactly what we mean without having to articulate it any more definitely. It is to be very suspicious of people who tell you severely that none of those things really happen, that your heart won’t break, and so on, because those people, while in a narrow sense correct, are not as smart as they think. They might even be heartless. Still, do your best to treat them nice, and hopefully they’ll grow up.
But I think it is also important, once in a while, to think more critically about it all. In what sense is the best in a person like a flower? or, in what sense is a real, individual flower like the imaginary flower, the abstraction of flowerness, we refer to for this comparison? It has so much to do with how many sides of it you look at—for example, as I said before, a flower might be ephemeral, a single flower “Being once displayed doth fall that very hour”; but each produces seeds, reproduces, adapts, evolves. The idea of justice cannot really be called fragile. And whoever heard of a single flower? What about the earth, the rain, the air, the sun; the other plants, the bees and bugs that pollinate them all; the bacteria and protozoa and stuff; maybe even the gardener. Just so, “no man is an island”—that would be weird. This is to be nice in another sense. Before it meant being goodhearted, nice meant something like “exact”.
You can get along fine, you can beat the game—great phrase—without reading the sign at all. You can read the sign without checking the flowers. If you check, in the game, it’ll tell you “No problem here”. Which might be true. Ness has a heart of gold, and you can stomp on the flowers all you want and never hurt them. But sometimes that feels limited. Why can’t you pick some of the flowers, or water them with DX water, or fertilize them with some compost you scrape off the ground after beating Belch or the Trillionage Sprout? And that's when you turn off the game and join a gardening club.
ftln 5
“(The flowers in the garden are representative of those in your heart. Treat them both nice.)”
Good evening, everyone. I was very impressed when I received your invitation: the Heart Surgery Ward Gardening Club, Hamburg Hospital. Such an interesting combination…I look forward to talking with you all afterwards.
And I knew immediately which quote I would suspend my lecture from, as a rose upon a trellis. It had to be this one. Shortly after that bit of inspiration, I considered writing a little joke to open with, about wearing a Daniel Hale Williams badge—instead of a Franklin badge, you know—to protect myself in the event that any of you got bored and decided to take a scalpel to me for a little impromptu open-heart surgery. But then I realized there would be a few problems with it—okay, a few chuckles, but discretion was better part of valor in this case—because, besides it not being very funny, I imagine I could do with a bypass or two. “Grandma’s gonna get better, huh.” Or in this case, Grandpa. Unless any of you do those types of operation. “Oh? At your age?...My lands…” Uhh, I guess I’ll start the lecture and we’ll just see. Whatever happens, I’ve had a good run.
So. What would you do, doctors and gardening aficionados, if you had someone stretchered in who had a bunch of flowers growing out of his chest? Sort of like the clowns with the squirty flowers in their lapel who are missing, along with the trapeze artists, the carnies guessing your age, and all the rest, missing from the big tent in Threed. But that’s a subject for another day. Your professional prognosis, now, would it be facilitated or hampered by your knowledge of gardening? Would you identify the plant type—lilies, lilacs, or what have you? would you weed them and water them? stop and smell them? Or would you simply put the guy under and go to work saving his life?—because clearly something would be going very, very wrong in there, with roots threaded through the old ticker.
At least so I’d assume. Maybe someday, though, thanks to brilliant people like you, we’ll all be photosynthetic, make a virtue of necessity with the abundant carbon-dioxide; and on the runways of Paris, living rose lingere will be the season’s must-have; in Shanghai, they’ll graft bonsai into their skin; grass will be the new black.
For now, though, we ought to take the bit about “those in your heart” none too literally. The flowers in the garden are representative of those in your heart, which phrase, “those in your heart,” is in turn a metaphor for…something. Something beautiful; something fresh and pure; something ephemeral, perhaps, but the more precious for that. Something growing. Not physical, not located anywhere in your beating heart, of course, but in some other heart.
To go into all this is silly, I understand. It is abundantly clear what is meant by the sign in Onett. I just think it is interesting, how this distinction between the literal and the metaphorical is in a case like this so evident, how in most instances the two levels get along fine, so much so that we don’t notice it, so there is no distinction to speak of, yet in certain other cases the letter of the law becomes so divorced from its spirit, the spirit becomes so rarified and distant from the living, breathing business of life.
Briefly, then, what is it to “treat them both nice”? In no small measure, it is to do as we usually do. Keep saying things like, “it broke my heart,” or, “my heart goes out to,” to wear “I heart NY” t-shirts, to do this without thinking, to know or rather feel exactly what we mean without having to articulate it any more definitely. It is to be very suspicious of people who tell you severely that none of those things really happen, that your heart won’t break, and so on, because those people, while in a narrow sense correct, are not as smart as they think. They might even be heartless. Still, do your best to treat them nice, and hopefully they’ll grow up.
But I think it is also important, once in a while, to think more critically about it all. In what sense is the best in a person like a flower? or, in what sense is a real, individual flower like the imaginary flower, the abstraction of flowerness, we refer to for this comparison? It has so much to do with how many sides of it you look at—for example, as I said before, a flower might be ephemeral, a single flower “Being once displayed doth fall that very hour”; but each produces seeds, reproduces, adapts, evolves. The idea of justice cannot really be called fragile. And whoever heard of a single flower? What about the earth, the rain, the air, the sun; the other plants, the bees and bugs that pollinate them all; the bacteria and protozoa and stuff; maybe even the gardener. Just so, “no man is an island”—that would be weird. This is to be nice in another sense. Before it meant being goodhearted, nice meant something like “exact”.
You can get along fine, you can beat the game—great phrase—without reading the sign at all. You can read the sign without checking the flowers. If you check, in the game, it’ll tell you “No problem here”. Which might be true. Ness has a heart of gold, and you can stomp on the flowers all you want and never hurt them. But sometimes that feels limited. Why can’t you pick some of the flowers, or water them with DX water, or fertilize them with some compost you scrape off the ground after beating Belch or the Trillionage Sprout? And that's when you turn off the game and join a gardening club.
