flowers for things
via maria popova tweet [https://x.com/brainpicker/status/1789373158367084572] of her post [https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/08/tucker-nichols-flowers/] on tucker nichols book – Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say: A Tender Painted Lexicon of Consolation and Connection
notes/quotes from post:
“To be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Emily Dickinson wrote.
riot of flowers et al.. not a responsibility.. rather.. the dance
humans have long heavied flowers with the responsibility of holding what we cannot hold, saying what we cannot say — the funeral wreath, the bridal bouquet, Georgia O’Keefe’s calla lilies channeling the divine feminine, the white hyacinth Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman made the emblem of their uncommon love. We need flowers for the same reason we need poems, or paintings, or songs — because what we can feel will always be infinitely vaster and more complex than what we can name, because words will always break under the weight of the immensities we task them with carrying, will never fully answer the soul’s cry for connection, for consolation, for mercy.
lanier beyond words law, rumi words law, idiosyncratic jargon ness, gibran talking law, willard talking law,.. et al
As he fumbled his way to remission, he was saved again and again by the power of human connection, by the many languages of solidarity and sympathy when words fall short.
we so easily forget that everyone is suffering in one way or another, often invisibly, always ultimately alone — and so he began painting flowers for entire categories of human experience r
The result is Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say (public library) — a floral counterpart to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, radiating the recognition that no matter how singular what we feel may seem, and how lonely in its singularity, it is just a garden variety feeling, felt by innumerable others since the dawn of feeling, being felt by someone somewhere right now
His paintings, loose and bright, become analogues of how abstract yet vivid the most interior experiences are — amorphous shapes saturated with feeling, blurry arrangements of contrasting parts of the self.
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all the stars are a riot of flowers
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be you. 