Story of the Rose: While Democracy Stops Revolving (1)

"A customer was looking for a white cloth in a fabric store. The merchant showed him a piece of cloth.

'Sorry, it's grey, not the one I was looking for!' the customer responded.

'It's a white cloth, look it closely,' said the trader, lifting the cloth.

Somewhat confused, the customer asked another customer who was also there, 'Oh, that's a white one!' sais he. 'Yeah, it's white,' replied another one.

Finally he rejected the cloth offered by the trader and left the shop and found out that he was about being cheated, then said, 'Last night I had a dream where I experienced a completely new color, but then I realized, it was just a pigment of my imagination.'

Meanwhile, at the store, the trader said to his two men, 'Don't give up guys, now be ready for more!' while pointing at someone entering the shop."

"Welcome to Indonesia, the land of 'ridiculous revolving-door politics', where the day of love will be the day of death." said the Rose while paying attention to the changing numbers. What's strange was that these numbers only moved at certain levels.

"Why do we give flower to the death?" she continued. "And why do we give flowers to the grieving, the sick, those we love? Flowers are not symbols of power. Flowers are too brief , too frail , to elicit much hope of eternity, says Sharman Apt Russel. We know that flowers are beautiful, but we forget that they are also essential. The themes of the universe may be the elements of beauty. Certainly, they are the elements of flowers. Most flowers are one half of a partnership. They depend on a species extraordinarily different from themselves, someone who will carry their male sperm to another flower and bring compatible sperm to the egg in their ovary. Plants react to the world. Plants have ways of seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing.

I'm a rose, and my origin has quite prehistoric: geologists tell us of the evidence of the rose's existence more than fifty million years ago. The rose is older than Man himself, and its original home can only be surmised. Species of wild roses have been found in all the northern countries from Greenland to Mexico; from northern Russia and Siberia, where are found members of Rosa spinosissima group, of interest to modern gardeners; in the oasis of Sahara from India and to Persia; from Japan, Korea and China, where are the home of so many valuable roses, to Burma from where comes R. gigantea, one of the species important in the pedigree of modern roses. No native wild rose has ever been found in Southern hemisphere, although the introduced roses grow and flower very well in some of these countries.

A sprig of ros like me, has ever been the world's most favourite and unchallenged queen of flowers. From thousands of years now there is probably no flower is a better symbol of love than the rose. Shakespeare mused, 'What is love?' The great bard was not the first to ask. Our ancestors pondered this question a million years ago as they sat around their campfires or lay and watched the stars.

Love is often involved in our highest highs and our deepest lows. And it’s almost always linked to contentment, which frankly is what most of us ultimately want in life. And so we should. It all comes down to love—a bouquet of three roses representing the couple and their shared love; to send the message 'We'll be together forever,' send a bouquet of nine roses. The four-letter word that has more poems, stories, and sermons written about it than any other.

They say, love is blind, and for some, happiness would never come. Such was Qays, the son of a tribal chieftain in ancient Arabia. An Arabic legend, dating to the seventh century A.D., has it that Qays was a beautiful, brilliant boy—until he met Layla, meaning “night” for her jet black hair. So intoxicated was Qays that one day he sprang from his school chair to race through the streets shouting out her name. Henceforth he was known as Majnun, or madman.

In the twelfth century A.D. Chinese fable “The Jade Goddess,” Meilan was the pampered fifteen-year-old daughter of a high official in Kaifeng—until she fell in love with Chang Po, a vivacious lad with long tapered fingers and a gift for carving jade. 'Since the heaven and earth were created, you were made for me and I was made for you and I will not let you go,' Chang Po declared to Meilan one morning in her family’s garden. These lovers were of different classes in China’s rigid, hierarchical social order, however. Desperate, they eloped—then were soon discovered. He escaped. She was buried alive in her father’s garden. But the tale of Meilan still haunts the souls of many Chinese.

Romeo and Juliet, Paris and Helen of Troy, Orpheus and Eurydice, Abelard and Eloise, Troilus and Cressida, Tristan and Iseult, Rara Mendut and Pranacitra, Siti Nurbaya and Samsulbahri, Bandung Bondowoso and Rara Jonggrang,: thousands of romantic poems, songs, and stories come across the centuries from ancestral Europe, as well as the Middle East, Japan, China, India, and every other society that has left written records. Even where people have no written documents, they have left evidence of this passion.

Love—romantic love, that is—remains one of the most thoroughly obsessive topics of our age. Perhaps one could argue that our obsession is itself the product of the fact that we have so glamorized love and so tortured ourselves about it that we have created a confused and illusory need that we could not possibly fulfill or realize. Romantic love, I believe, is one of three primordial brain networks that evolved to direct mating and reproduction, says Helen Fisher.

Some of the great writers on the topic have made love out to be an affliction, a kind of madness, even a fatal illness. And yet, love is real. It is both valuable and attainable. But it is only once we have made our way through the metaphysical fog, the misleading myths and dangerous metaphors that have made love so elusive that romance turns out to be both comprehensible and compatible with a sane, happy life. And yet again, while not for a second taking anything away from the grand passions of love and romance, we should note how remarkable it is that we have elevated this one emotion so far over and above any other in our emotional register.

Emotions come and go. We don’t become emotional about everything; we are not in the grip of emotion all the time, says Paul Ekman. Emotions are reactions to matters that seem to be very important to our welfare, and emotions often begin so quickly that we are not aware of the processes in our mind that set them off. They occur when we sense, rightly or wrongly, that something that seriously affects our welfare, for better or worse, is happening or about to happen. Emotions evolved to prepare us to deal quickly with the most vital events in our lives.

We are born prepared, with an unfolding sensitivity to the events that were relevant to the survival of our species in its ancestral environment as hunters and gatherers. The themes for which the autoappraisers are constantly scanning our environment, typically without our knowing it, were selected over the course of our evolution.

Over the course of our lives, we encounter many specific events that we learn to interpret in such a way as to frighten, anger, disgust, sadden, surprise, or please us, and these are added to the universal antecedent events, expanding on what the automatic appraisers (hereafter, autoappraiser) are alert to. These learned events may closely or distantly resemble the originally stored events. They are elaborations of, or additions to, the universal antecedent events. They are not the same for all people but vary with what we each experience.

Many self-help and business strategy books focus on reducing the role of emotion in financial and business decisions, but emotions actually contribute to the decision making process. Could we benefit from acting more like Star Trek’s purely logical Mr. Spock, and less like the emotional Captain Kirk? According to Justin Reber and Daniel Tranel, emotions, especially negative emotions such as guilt and shame, were considered driving factors in moral decisions. The emotions and basic desires of the id, however, had adversarial roles in Freud’s theory. According to Freud, moral decisions were made when individuals were able to override their immoral base emotions and desires.

Talking about morals, there is an interesting topic between democracy and morals. Democracy is in crisis, says Robert B. Talisse. So we are told by nearly every outlet of political comment, from politicians and pundits to academicians and ordinary citizens. This is not surprising, given that the new millennium seems to be off to a disconcerting and violent start: genocide, torture, assassination, civil war, human rights abuse, poverty, climate change, environmental disaster, and strained international relations all forebode an uncertain tomorrow for democracy. Some hold that democracy is faltering because it has lost the moral clarity necessary to lead in a complicated world. Others hold that 'moral clarity' means little more than moral blindness to the complexity of the contemporary world, and thus that what is needed is more reflection, self-criticism, and humility. Neither side thinks much of the other. Consequently our popular democratic politics is driven by insults, scandal, name-calling, fear-mongering, mistrust, charges of hypocrisy, and worse.

Moreover, what counts as truth is now shaped to a substantial degree by group loyalty and partisanship. We don’t believe—which is to say, take to be true—that anyone on our team could do something illegal or say something deceptive, even when shown proof. That’s because it doesn’t fit our desired storyline. Everywhere, extreme partisan politics seems to be eating away at the truths held in common, by ordinary people as well as experts and representatives of the state, that a robust democratic public sphere ostensibly requires.

Let's finish this episode for now and will move on to the next session, bi' idhnillah."

And before moving on to the next fragment, the rose sang Adele's song,

But there's a side to you

That I never knew, never knew

All the things you'd say

They were never true, never true *)

Citations & References:
- Sharman Apt Russel, Anatomy of a Rose, 2001, Perseus
- Supriya Kumar Bhattacharjee & B. K. Banerji, The Complete Book of Roses, 2010, Aavishkar Publishers
- Robert C. Solomon, About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times, 2001, Madison
- Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, 2004, Owl Books
- Andrew S. Fox, The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, 2018, Oxford University Press
- Robert B. Talisse, Democracy and Moral Conflict, 2009, Cambridge University Press
- Alan F. Hattersley, A Short History of Democracy, 1930, Cambridge University Press
*) "Set Fire to the Rain" written by Adele Adkins & Fraser T Smith
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