the bodega flower theory of beauty
It’s the tail end of tulip season in New York, I think. The idea of tulips spilling from windowsill planters along 9th Street and peeking through the gates of Jefferson Market Garden makes me wistful for early morning walks through the Village, when thin light filters spring colors into cooler hues. Last May, I sat on a bench in Tompkins Square Park and devoured The English Patient next to a bed of tulips as a butterfly fluttered around my book. I hoped the whole scene was a good omen for things to come, and then I saw a rat scrambling for crumbs near my feet.
One of the best parts about tulip season is the way every bodega sets out gigantic plastic tubs overflowing with tulips, modest bouquets positively jammed up against one another. The tulip buckets say, If winter made you believe beauty had any relationship to scarcity, go ahead and forget about that now. Even better: early- to mid- May is the exact point of the year when tulip season overlaps with peony season, which means that bodega vestibules must be absolutely overrun with blooms right about now. And if there is any subspecies of flower that embodies the principle of abundance in beauty, it is the bodega peony.
As a general matter, bodega flowers precariously straddle the restrained and the kitsch. Most bodegas sell at least some flowers in each category, probably in response to the same market forces prompting them to sell freshly baked black-and-white cookies alongside saran-wrapped Fig Newtons. Obviously, tulips and peonies fall in the former category, dyed-blue carnations in the latter. There are important but unspoken norms about flowers which bodegas near-universally observe. Bouquets don’t mix tulip varieties. Peonies must be sold in bundles of three, with one bud, one bloom, and one somewhere in-between, which, as an aside, is the strongest argument I’ve encountered for pacing out pleasure.
We are conditioned to treat flowers as a kind of indulgence—a romantic gesture or a decorative flourish for special occasions (Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself), but not the stuff of everyday life. Flowers are fundamentally inefficient. In Mrs. Dalloway, the most scandalous thing about Sally Seton is not the erotically charged kiss between Sally and Clarissa but rather the fact that Sally cuts the stems off of flowers and leaves the beheaded blooms floating in shallow bowls of water—the waste!
My college roommate bought gorgeous bouquets of flowers to fill our coffee table vase. To me and our other roommates, the arrival of a new arrangement was the source of much delight. We kept plants, but we did not fawn over them. Unlike flowers, plants are aesthetic workhorses. You buy a plant once and, in spite of your sporadic watering habits and the absence of direct sunlight in your bedroom, it brightens your living space, yielding returns on your initial investment. At first, I felt a little melancholy upon seeing my roommate’s flowers droop day after day, losing a petal here, a leaf there. It was too bad that flowers could not last indefinitely. Then, gradually, because of my roommate’s steadfast commitment to new blooms, the act of fading came to signal a new arrangement to come, one bouquet’s end begetting the arrival of another. That one could just keep buying flowers had never occurred to me, until she did.
Her routine was my first encounter with what I now think of as the bodega flower theory of beauty, the notion that joy itself is a practice of everyday life, one that stands apart from the forces of rationality and productivity that govern our daily routines. Stendahl writes, “Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.” Theodor Adorno proposes a similar construction, that art offers a promesse du bonheur. In Aesthetic Theory, he writes:
Art is not only the plenipotentiary of a better praxis than that which has to date predominated, but equally the critique of practice as the rule of brute self-preservation at the heart of the status quo and in its service. It gives the lie to production for production’s sake and opts for a form of praxis beyond the spell of labor. Art's promesse du bonheur means not only that hitherto praxis has blocked happiness, but that happiness is beyond praxis. The force of negativity in the artwork gives the measure of the chasm separating praxis from happiness.
The promise of happiness is a potent negative force. Beauty arrives as the epiphany that one could live differently, and that the value systems we take as given—the predominant praxis—are not as totalizing as we believe them to be. In fact, all the good parts of life lie outside of these systems. There is a better beyond.
What defines the hardened value system of the status quo? It’s characterized, I think, by the way we reflexively justify our decisions upon the grounds of labor and productivity—what Adorno refers to as the praxis of “brute self-preservation.” We work hard, we play hard, the productive output of work excusing our play, and the play just as exhausting and fraught with orthodox routines as the work. When this cycle grinds us down, we engage in “self-care,” a practice that very often looks like buying one product or another in the hopes of restoring our bodies and minds to their optimally productive states. Meanwhile, the cultural products we consume teach us that ecstasy is just around the corner, if only we were worthy, that is, if only we were a little hotter, or even better, a little richer. And what does ecstasy look like, for the lucky few fictional characters granted access to this higher realm? It looks like more of the same: prestige television shows like Mad Men and Succession predominantly feature the workplace.
This structure leaves behind very little room for happiness. Adorno was not writing about the promesse du bonheur of tulips and peonies—he much preferred the aggressive atonality of Schoenberg’s musical compositions—but his point still stands. Capitalism does not teach us how to live well. Real beauty breaks the spell.
What passes for “beauty” today is mostly just some form of exchange value, a currency to be transferred into forms of social, cultural, or economic capital. “Beauty” is sexual desirability for women and art world hype for paintings. The pursuit of “beauty” for travelers is oftentimes the pursuit of thrill, of anecdote, of the perfectly-framed Instagram—the pursuit of cultural capital. The things we consider “beautiful” are often singular, belonging to the realm of shock and awe, which are themselves proxies of scarcity and, by extension, market value. Supply is low, therefore the value must be high, so the economics goes.
The promesse du bonheur—the bodega flower theory of beauty—conceives of happiness entirely outside of the economics of labor and capital or supply and demand. I don’t mean that beauty is merely oversupply or abundance as opposed to scarcity (though an important facet of bodega flowers is that they are, indeed, abundant), but rather that beauty teaches us to encounter that which is already there. You can live a life with peonies, and it will be your life.
I’ve encountered the beautiful only a handful of times in the past few years, each time by accident. Once, on a biting winter day, I dragged my then-boyfriend to the Hayden Planetarium in hopes of sparking some of the romance and whimsy of the scene in La La Land. The planetarium itself was comically underwhelming. We sat elbow-to-elbow with sniffling elementary school children and their haggard parents. Rather than quietly projecting the night sky upon the dome, the planetarium played a documentary prominently featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson’s face as he prattled on about the Big Bang. There is perhaps nothing more romantically underwhelming than a visually immersive experience of Neil deGrasse Tyson. But before the documentary began, and after it ended, my boyfriend and I sat for a few moments in the planetarium with a blank blue screen projected onto its contours. It was the purest experience of blue, the most intense encounter with a single color. The planetarium briefly transformed into a cathedral for the religion of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets blue, Beach House “Lazuli” blue, like when you step into a James Turrell structure for the first time and you’re knocked to your knees by a color, the same color you see everywhere in the world, but now you can finally perceive it. This was beauty.
Another time, I spent a week driving and hiking around Washington with a college roommate—in fact, the same one who supplied our suite with flowers—where she and I, day after day, encountered the genuine sublime. Everywhere we looked resembled a Bierstadt painting. One morning, as we plotted out our intended driving route, we noticed that Google Maps routed us over water (strange, we thought), and in fact, the route required boarding two separate ferries which made no promises they would have space aboard for cars. The scheduling was tight; the prospect of a leisurely morning drive transformed into something out of The Amazing Race, and we proceeded to spend four hours white-knuckled with frenzy. After successfully boarding the second ferry, we stepped out of our car to stretch our legs and bought coffee from the concession stand. I remember clutching a styrofoam cup of burnt drip coffee as we gazed out the windows. It was still morning, and thick fog rolled over the waves. We could not peer through beyond the fog’s milky opacity. To me, that was beauty.
I’m not sure when we began to equate the singular or the novel with the beautiful, or how we learned to incorporate beauty into the flat rationality that swallows up much of our lives. All I know is that I often seek beauty in one place and instead find it elsewhere, submerged beneath shock and awe, constituted in a slightly misshapen form.
Once, over drinks in a little bar in the Lower East Side, everyone packed shoulder-to-shoulder, a friend asked the table, If humans could live forever, would you choose to? The others said, No, it would get boring, and then possibly Sisyphean. Wouldn’t it make you insane, as if you were on a hamster wheel going nowhere?
They were seeking productive novelty, holding the probably correct belief that overtime, the world would lose its generative force. Given enough years, no new experiences would remain.
I said, I would, because there are things that I have done a thousand times that only get better each time.
Like what, he asked.
I thought for a moment. Looking at the flowers at the bodega on Greenwich Avenue on my walk to work. Making my coffee each morning.
I could go on.
12th Street during golden hour. On 12th Street, one must walk along the south sidewalk, because if you look across the street at the right time, you can glimpse, in the window of one town house, a baby grand piano gleaming with good care.
The kitchen in my apartment had a small but mighty south-facing window. Upon the windowsill, I kept a basil plant continuously teetering on the brink of dying. Sometimes, on hot days, I would lean on the counter and guiltily tip open the freezer door, just for a second, and let the cool wash over me as the sun warmed my skin.
All these moments never added up to anything of value, only the whole of a life.