peleus

The transformation of the tulip from a jewel-box flower to a (virus-free) commodity has made the tulip oddly hard to see. Massed in the landscape, tulips register on us mostly as instances of pure color; they could almost be lollipops or lipsticks in the landscape. At least this is how they used to register on me as eye candy, pleasurable enough but weightless. I am not by nature a great noticer, and for all the years between the time when my parents paid me to plant tulips in our yard and the spring of this writing, the beauty of tulips their specific beauty was lost on me. But I dont think the problem is unique to me.

Beauty always takes place in the particular, the critic Elaine Scarry has written, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down. In a sense, particular tulips are hard to come by because they are so cheap and ubiquitous, thats partly why, but also because their form and color are, more than those of most flowers, peculiarly abstract. Far more than a rose, say, or a peony, an actual, specific tulip closely resembles our preconceived idea of a tulip. By now the tulips parabolic curves are as deeply etched into consciousness as a Coke bottles; with a fidelity that is remarkable (and that is far more typical of a commodity than a thing in nature), the tulips one meets in the world match the tulips resident in ones head. In color, too, tulips are so uniform and faithful (like paint chips) to whatever shade they profess to be that we quickly take it in this idea of yellow or red or white and then move on to consume the next visual treat. Tulips are so tuliplike, so platonically themselves, that they skate past our regard like models on a runway.

-Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire