Flowers and Flowers! She must always have flowers
To see a world in blooms of beauty before her eyes
To hold wonders of nature in the palm of her hand
And secrets of heaven in the cabinet of her mind.
Tag: beauty
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Sound and Fury – Two
She is always waiting, and it seems like it is her forte. Like Clytie yearning for Apollo’s love, Iris pines for love as a sublimation of sensuality that is the union of Eros and Psyche. It is different from the religious sense of Agape love that is of a spiritual element only. Iris knows it all, and she is a student of the Nietzschean school of thought believing love is the surrendering of herself to the other in the consummation of desire so pristine and unadulterated of knowing and understanding of the flesh and the soul of her lover. But the tragedy is that she has read all about it, not experiencing it for real. She lives in the reality of her books and thoughts, and it is there she feels safe and comfy without fear of rejection. So, her world of love dwells in her maiden meditation to fancy-free, giving her imagination free rein to the extreme extent without the violent ends of such violent delights. In her mind’s garden, Iris lets her wild horse run her chariot without the goad because otherwise it would rebel against her order of severely restricted movements, which is unnatural to the beast, and drive her into a high cliff and then push her into fathomless Sea of Shadows.
She seems to speak an infinite deal of nothing, but the feeling of existential Cul-del-sac Iris is having weighs as heavy as the celestial heavens that titan Atlas was holding for eternity. People said, “Beauty is only a skin-deep,” but that’s just a lame, piteous excuse and empty consolation for being unattractive, unwanted, unloved. For that matter, at least Oscar Wilde was honest in saying that a woman’s beauty was a form of genius that needed no explanation because it’s like sunlight. Love looked not with the eyes, but with the mind, so said Shakespeare, but it does not seem so to her.
It is the attractiveness that makes people interested in the soul of the beheld. That’s why Iris wants to go to Aphrodite’s Beach somewhere in Cyprus, where it is believed that the goddess of love Aphrodite used to bathe. For it’s said that a woman in want of fairness will be transformed into beauty if she swims naked alone at the beach with no spectators around. Her fierce desire for fairness attests that all women should be told they are pretty and beautiful, even if they aren’t; they have no other reason than being women. Like a madwoman who has such a seething brain that sees beauty as a paradigm of goodness, Iris dwells on the beauty of life, watching the stars and seeing herself running with them in beauty.
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She bewitches Marc Anthony
All about her beggared all description,
For she was none other than herself
Femininity incarnate vested in erudition
That no other woman could ever excel.Her beauty was a perfect federation of
Sensuality and Intelligence dazzlingly
Pleasingly enchanting all in the contact
With the Last Hellenistic Queen of the Nile.One day, she rode in a gilded barge with sails
Dressed as Venus with her entourage as cupids
And nymphs to meet a Roman general who was
Marc Anthony with untamed virility like Hercules.For her own person as Venus, the goddess of love
And beauty, she bewitched the general and made
Him her slave of love with all her charms spelled
With the most delightful voice he had ever heard.AUTHOR’S NOTE: Last night, I read an anecdote of how Cleopatra encountered Marc Anthony for the first time as described by Plutarch in The Lives. The most interesting thing I learned about the proverbially seductive queen was that she was not exactly a gorgeous woman with a face that would launch a thousand ships. Rather it was her demonstration of all-around erudition, intelligence of speaking a variety of languages in such an euphonious voice, and her general demeanor, all of which curiously made her enchanting to anyone in contact with her.
This irresistible charm of Cleopatra corresponds to the principles of aestheticism expounded by Thomas Aquinas, which are: (1) Element of being – her existence as a woman; (2) Actuality of Form – her presence as a woman achieved a higher level of perfection in its form by being beautiful to the degree in which she perfectly attended to the form of femininity; and (3) Actuality of Action – the manifestation of her intelligence contributed to the perfection of her beauty as regards the aforesaid principles by grounding beauty in whatever she did, thus making her being a beautiful person.
I think Cleopatra was more beautiful and real femme fatale than Helen of Troy, who was said to have a face that launched a thousand ships. It seems to me that Cleopatra’s attractiveness will be no less appealing to the eyes of the modern men than those of the ancient men.
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Rose that smells as sweet
Christian Dior, the father of modern women’s fashion, said of a perfume thus: “A woman’s perfume tells more about her than her handwriting. ” How rightly so. A scent is stronger than a sight because it not only creates a certain mystery of ambience but also unlocks a cascade of memory. Hence is my approbation of a certain perfume I have begun to like.This is my first time to wear this historically famed English brand Yardley perfume, and I am already hooked on its enchanting fragrance of English Rose. It is a delightful conflation of rose petals on the top lightly sprinkled with drops of magnolia and violet enveloped in a hint of woody notes as a base. The result is a light, crispy pleasure of convivial sensuality and playful innocence that will make you feel just like it. This perfume is not a tawdry perfume as some of us might suspect just because perfumes are obtainable from Amazon, not department stores or Sephora.
The fragrance is ageless and the effect effortless. This perfume will make you feel prettier all day long with sweet smell and flit in rose garden of your cerebral lobe. Which also brings me to conjure up by sheer dint of the essence of rose the following quotation from Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare: “That which we call rose by any other names will smell as sweet.” This one is called English Rose, and it smells just as sweet.
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Practical Poet
Beauty is a Nature’s Ecstasy,
Calming tempest of chaos,
Lighting the lamps of the eyes
Of all to whom it appears in bareness
With tender and thrilling tensity.
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
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