Hot bath with oils, flowers embedded in the solid blocks of oils... I haven't done this for very long in my life, just the past four or five years; and I've mostly thought of, explained, them as indulgences and as survival: as pleasures that help me get through the northern British winters (and springs and falls, and probably summers too).
But, while reading late Borges on immortality (much influenced by Schopenhauer); after thinking of what to read for Vanessa's memorial next week; while Twelve Monkeys, with its terrible end-of-the-world qualified by a love story, is on television; and after feeling so tired, so weak and generally unable, but more awake the past few days, I feel another meaning to them....
If it is all transient, life and breath and happiness and illness and misery etc. etc., including both the bad and the good, and none of it lasts; then every pleasure, every flower, is spring, is rebirth. Obvious, really, and something many people must find utterly banal: but this is the kind of meaning I, with my obtuse focus on some sort of permanent happiness that is always out of my own reach, would always miss.
But it is obvious: these fragments of flowers in the bath are flowers on the Ganges, are pleasure and spring and joy; and we do these things not to stave off darkness, and not to try to engage in some kind of endless pleasure, but simply because we can always, at every moment, start over – and so why not with spring, with flowers....
Comments