A Sea of Violets

A sea of violets. The image, so I'm told, of youth and beauty and vitality. A bank of lavender. A vase of sunflowers. Representing the same or something different, depending on the beholder or the narrator who is telling us what the eye beholds. Though perhaps to the narrator it is unclear, they just like the image and have given no or very little thought as to its symbolism, as to how it might be perceived; that is for those who make it their life's work to review, to analyse another's work, and read into it all that may or may not be there, until it becomes the general accepted opinion: this is what the author-narrator was trying to achieve, was attempting to say.
Perhaps all they were suggesting was springtime glory, and the profusion of colour that season brings, and thought only of how their characters might stand out against or amidst such a description of beauty. A picture they thought they could in words do justice to, and thereby enable the reader to see it, to hold it in their mind's eye. It was not meant to suggest anything about the characters, though if such an interpretation was made and it strengthened the narrative so be it.
Should I, the reader, be interpreting every flower? Every plural placement of them in a text? The violets are important. What then do weeds signify?
What a lot of answers I could give! All of them subjective, like, for instance, a muddled mind; the determination of the life force though denied; a less beautiful but robust or hardy character; a persistent irritant, to the eye who wants to see only beauty, to the mind that wants to escape ugliness, to the spirit that wants to be left to its own reasoning. Is that what weeds signify? Perhaps...to myself alone...unless another is specified by the author-narrator or a scholar of theirs to which I will submit for the purposes of this narrative, although I might not altogether, in the general sense, agree. Does it matter if I don't see what they have seen? Or understood something as they're understood it? Or perceived it as central? If I've somehow missed the symbolism? I'm not sure it does if it hasn't marred my reading pleasure and if I've still, for the most part, comprehended all that unfolded: the events as they happened and the relationships, developed or developing or ended, between characters.
So what if some revelations to me, the reader, came later, or perhaps earlier, than they should? Who does it affect but myself?
So what if to me a sea of violets is just a sea of violets, glorious for themselves?

Picture credit: Bouquet of Violets, 1872, Edouard Manet (source: WikiArt).

From journal, written July 2021. See The Italian Romances by George H. Thomson. 

A Woman of da Vinci's

Of watertight compartments I know quite a lot, I feel, though less of others and more of my own. It was therefore reassuring to read of Lucy Honeychurch's, although perhaps she herself was unaware of them, and only an outsider – the narrator or the reader or Mr Beebe – had the luxury of that insight. Maybe it is something you only gain the knowledge of having been told, or maybe only when you are in the possession of leisure i.e. without a regular occupation, and to the dissatisfaction and annoyance of others, can be wholly self-absorbed; perhaps then, you think oh, why is it that, say for example, reading and life do not mingle? And should they? Or even can they? Is that possible?
Mr Beebe holds the theory that watertight compartments will, if the right circumstances force or present themselves, break or wear down, and will prove therefore not so watertight. Life will no longer be separated from them and them from it, and the person who might before have lived rather quietly and appeared without fault, will develop some flaws and become more vocal. But surely the compartmentlist must be complicit? They must secretly, subconsciously, want this: water to get in and wash away any divide.
Compartments, after all, often work, and allow more, not less, satisfaction to be felt, since a protected place or time has been set aside for them, which if they weren't might mean there would be no place or time for them at all, or if there was some it might be hurried, or cause untold problems. And no distinction between compartments can lead to blurring of lines, where lines you did not want to be crossed are crossed, either by yourself or some innocent other; life, in other words, gets in and things get messy, and messiness, if not naturally inclined to, can be, for the compartmentalist, overwhelming, and cause some to act out of, rather than in, character.
Lucy Honeychurch, however, is attempting to compartmentalise more than just music and life, for George Emerson is Florence, Italy and Cecil Vyse, more than any other meeting place, Windy Corner. That the two manage to conjoin is meddlesome Fate, because otherwise Lucy would only think of either of them in their watertight compartments, and so still appear, at least on occasion to admiring eyes, a woman of da Vinci's: loved , as E. M. Forster puts it, 'not so much for herself as for the things she will not tell us.'

Picture credit: Woman's Head, c.1473, Leonardo da Vinci (source: WikiArt).

See A Room With a View by E.M. Forster. Journal entry from July 2021.

Knot

A tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. Of life, that is, as according to old but knowing Mr Emerson, a character of E. M. Forster's, all life is a knot. 'But why should this make us unhappy?' Yes; why? Because we don't in youth realise this is so, and when we do we cannot at first accept it; acceptance comes only in maturer years, when it dawns on us our years of perplexion were useless, quite useless. For some, no, most of us are too consumed, like George, Mr Emerson's son, with asking Why rather than saying Yes. Some will always be so; though some may have begun with saying Yes before asking Why, and in their awakening will revert to again saying Yes and cease to bother with Why at all. Because, of course, the optimist's view or rule is to always say Yes, whereas the pessimist's rule is to always ask Why. And where a being in those two camps falls determines how much of Yes or Why they are. Then, naturally external influences: circumstances or experiences add to those inclinations, and perhaps modify the Yes or Why impulse, curb or promote it. A Yes, therefore, could be become a Why; a Why a Yes. Or it could, of course, tie us into further, albeit smaller, knots.
The mind, in my view, likes something to work on, and is never happier, even if the outward expression is one of perplexion or sorrow, when there's a knot to solve, though it only upon examination seems to grow all the tighter. Some of us are inclined, then, so I'm told, to get muddled, to which Mr Emerson, if such a situation was put to him, might say: “Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.” And to which you might think, if this reply was to yourself directed: What an extraordinary speech! And not known, like Lucy Honeychurch, what to make of it, nor how to begin to apply it.
How exactly does one spread one's thoughts out in sunlight? Do they require a picnic blanket on which to spread themselves? And if so, does it matter to them the colour, the texture or the pattern of the material or the weight of it? Mine, I think, would prefer a thick tartan, with tasselled edges, which, while ruminating, I could twist round a finger, or plait or tie together. Or perhaps the concept of spreading thoughts in sunshine is more equivalent to pegging them to a washing line, where hopefully the sun will purify and a breeze will freshen. But how ever one does it, the meaning of all those thoughts you did not before understand afterwards should be clear. And if not? Well...
Mr Emerson is silent; pack them up again until another airing; until another knot, usually of your own making, needs unpicking. But don't, in the interim, Mr Emerson now chimes in, let it make you unhappy.

Picture credit: Knot, 1966, M.C. Escher (source: WikiArt).

Journal entry, July 2021. See A Room with a View, E.M. Forster.

Isle

Enchanted. A group of them. Each with its own name, its own character. Some with settlers; most visited, at one time or another, by sailors; sailors who may, for one reason or another, be unable to depart once they'd been cast ashore, or who may have chosen to stay, attracted by the isle's free ways i.e. its lawless nature. Some isles more hospitable; some more barren and hostile, suited only to its reptilian natives: slow or fast crawling lizards and ponderous tortoises. The latter naturally bringing more mortal hunters to its shores, for their oil, their meat, their shell. A most precious, and seemingly to the hunters' eyes an inexhaustible, bounty. All isles can at least provide if no more the necessary for temporary shelter: water, food, fuel and bedding, and sightseeing if one is a sentimental voyager, that looking for the romantic: the walks under groves of trees which bear no fruit, and the tops of slopes that command great scenery; or the historical: the evidence of buccaneers, their seats and storing places.
Albemarle. Narborough. Abington. James'. Cowley's. Jervis. Duncan. Crossman's. Brattle. Wood's. Chatham. Barrington. Charles'. Norfolk and Hood's. Though, on occasion, known by other names or linked to other persons. The Dog-King, a Creole adventurer with his bodyguard of dogs; the Spanish-Indian widow, Hunilla, with her 'heart of yearning in a frame of steel'; or the European hermit Oberlus who sought to catch himself some slaves with his pumpkins and potatoes. 
All at some point, if a ship is in their vicinity, call: to the sailor, the runaways, the castaways, the solitaries. Where days will pass; months, and go uncounted.

Picture credit: Sortavala Islands, 1917, Nicholas Roerich (source: WikiArt).

Journal entry, July 2021. See The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles by Herman Melville.