Karen Whiteson

Rectified Rose

Every dusk-fall, he crosses the lawn, a halting yet swaggering figure whose gait combines the human with the animal.

Stuck as I am on the porch overlooking these grounds, I’ve little to do, but note those who come and go. Apart from our host’s emergence at twilight, there is only my younger sister.  Twice or thrice daily she appears for her constitutional around the evergreen grid of the parterre embedded with tulips, assembled in doubled rows; variegated alternating with self-tulip. It is a layout designed to ensure each bloom stands in regal distinction from the next.

Camouflaged as I am amongst the statuary, she doesn’t recognize me; but, unlike my stony neighbor, I see her as she saunters back and forth before settling upon a bench with a book she’s culled from the palace library.

My older sister is nearby. Though I cannot see her, I infer her presence; some duplicate piece of sighted marble—placed perhaps, just beyond peripheral vision. For ours is a shared fate, delivered in the form of a precise curse, that decreed she and I would become two statues who, under the transformation, were to retain their reason.

The first part of the imperative, that we should become two statues, was more or less a formality, for we were always something of a lump sum. We were this nameless sisterhood whose envy fueled the engine of a fate that did not favor us, but rather, our common rival. If the amalgamation of our envy fueled it then it was surely Belle who instigated it, with her request for a simple rose. This Rose being the most exorbitant object she could have asked for. The way she asked, as if she knew how Father would hear, in the sweetly modest modulation of her tone, a hint he should fetch her a Semper Augustus. Semper Augustus aka a Rose Tulip, so-called for the rose-like effect of its variegation.

There had been a recent attempt to introduce tulip mania to Paris by some stock-jobbers from Amsterdam, but it didn’t gain currency. Instead of generating a wave of price speculation around the bulbs, it merely started a vogue for the blooms and so, tulips as décor caught on amongst all grades of society. For a while, our house was filled with them, especially the variegated types. We never even came even within sniffing distance of a Semper Augustus, but we had, of course, all heard tell how there were but twelve specimens in existence. And, how, on the open market, such a bulb would fetch such and such a sum.

Our sentence did not stop there but went on to specify how, once we had been turned into rational figures, we were to be placed somewhere where we could not help but keep Belle’s happiness within our sight. Within sight i.e. en-videre.

The sentence was so designed in order to cultivate resentment; for this single purpose, we were to remain creatures of reason: that we might come to know ourselves corrected. During its utterance, a putrescent liquor ran through my veins. As fossils are formed by stone marrow, I grew into a marble effigy.

Our ressentiment is a garden, and we are its ornamental monuments.

And so I find myself planted here, beholding her happiness—and it is true that she is happy enough. But then, Belle would think herself fortunate to live anywhere, wherever with anyone whoever; that is, providing she could pursue her favorite pastime. 

Her reading habit developed early, under the tutelage of a succession of Mademoiselles. From the time we reached the age of reason these came and went, according to our income from the compound interest of Father’s capital. Except for one of them, who had a way of recounting an ancient fable that made it stick, I have forgotten all their names, along with almost all the content of their lessons. From her, I’ve retained certain shards, these lodged in my marble skull, along with fragments of speech-acts: echoes set in stone.

Dissever here this welter of grains...

It is the perpetual vista of fucking tulips I truly cannot stand. If all this were mine, I’d have the whole garish parade thoroughly re-landscaped to look less ancien régime, more chic. If I were able, I’d shut my eyes for some respite; but though my eyeballs may swivel omnidirectionally, I cannot close these marble lids. We who can only see cannot choose to not see; nor can we help but speculate on whatever passes before us. We are, to all extent and purposes, a pair of inference machines.

In this place, water calcifies as it springs from the fountain’s mouth: evidence of seed and stone always already commingled in the liquid.

Like my sister Echo, I am voice only, as the bones are turned to stone.

The rarity of the Semper Augustus is twofold. In most rectified tulips, where—by some process mysterious even to the alchemists of the soil who cultivate them—the color is de-solidified by streaks of a second hue which break in continuous, uneven stripes, forming either a feathered or a flamboyant pattern. In Semper Augustus however, Nature Herself is out-glamoured. In The Rose, each streak undergoes a symmetrical fragmentation, which breaks again and again to produce an immaculate laceration of garnet flames flickering along each milken petal.

Earlier, on her final round of the garden for the day, Belle passed by a little closer than usual, and I caught a glimpse of some of the gold lettering spelling out the name along the spine of the book which she held in her hand. A-P-U-L… that sufficed to ring a bell.

Whenever I heard Mademoiselle tell a fable, it was always as if I was hearing it not for the first time; as if I already half-knew it, without knowing that I knew. When I told her this, she told me that the Greek for to read meant literally to again-know—I forget the actual word Mademoiselle said but what has remained with me is her recounting of a certain scene where Venus sets Psyche an impossible task.

She must sort seven different varieties of seeds that lie all strewn together in a heap. It is the culmination of a chain of impossible tasks. Psyche kneels, pores over the ground, squinting to discern the wheat from the lentils from the barley from the millet from the poppyseeds from the beans from the spelt. Her eyes grow small as those quick fellows of the ground, as tiny as ants, as tiny as those very creatures who now scurry to her aid. How, to dissever this welter of grains, Psyche must dissolve into a swarm of particles.

From the twin windows of my marble cell, I watch the tulip border becoming shrouded in a dark blue mist. The vaporous hem of the earth spreads as dusk creeps in. A swift diagonal whooshes by from L to R, goes crashing through the flowerbeds and into the topiary with that stumbling, driven gait of his. The instant of his vanishment into the nocturnal depths of the shadows falling just beyond my field of vision.

Karen Whiteson’s poetry has been published in several anthologies and numerous magazines. She has also written libretti that have been performed at the ICA and the Riverside Studios. Her radio play Tales for Louis was broadcast on Radio 3. Her short stories have appeared in The Edinburgh Review as well as in anthologies published by Penguin, Aurora Metro, Unthank Books, E.R.O.S and Prototype Publishing. Her work can also be found online on inksweatandtears, 3ammagazine, Litro, and The London Magazine. She has taught creative writing at The Poetry School, the Royal College of Art, and Central Saint Martins, among other places. She is a MacDowell fellow and lives in London. She can be found on twitter @KarenWhiteson and on Facebook (as Karen Whiteson).