A yellow flower

More twins! Two daffodils prepare to tell their tale.

Having stopped first at the library to gather some more details about Peggy Ashcroft, I made my way to the entrance to the Phys. Ed. building, where I thought I might be more likely to encounter an athletic girl like Kari. Just beside the foot of the winding (ahem) stairway to the second floor, I came upon this splendid plantation of yellow daffodils. I stooped slightly to look into one, and began to brood on the situation I found myself in: desperately longing for a girl I knew I had nothing in common with—so attracted to her, in fact, that once again I considered it "a matter of life and death"—me, who had never before been passionate or awake enough to even dream of thinking in such terms!

As my gaze continued to linger on one of the especially luminous daffodils, I thought of one of Keith's soliloquies from "I'm a Man" (live on Radio Stockholm, 1967), where he says:

Saw my whole world within a tiny yellow flower.

Saw the whole reason why I'm here with you now.

I drifted into vague thoughts of how flowers (not tiny, in this case, but certainly yellow), in order to reproduce themselves, were fashioned in such a way as to attract bees and other pollinators, who would see the large, paler outer petals first, then the deeper, more complex yellow of the inner petals, and then, further within, the stamen and pistil, which, in the daffodil I saw before me, were merged in exquisite harmony to form what looked like a shapely sheaf of wheat, itself a common symbol of fertility.

But we humans have to attract each other in order to reproduce, I thought: we have our outer and inner petals, waving gaily or shyly at each other amid the breezes of life, and they are our everyday selves, our minds and bodies, our beauty, our talents, and our wits that we hope will entice someone toward us so that they (and thereby we) can come to know our rich inner selves—perhaps, ultimately, even our eternal souls. In the best case, then, it wasn't just our reproductive survival we humans were concerned with; it was our spiritual survival as well, for only by opening our inner selves to others and entering into theirs could we ever know ourselves, or really BE our true selves.

I indulged my newfound poetical instincts and absorbed myself in what struck me as an intriguing metaphor. I felt myself very much like a bee or hummingbird being drawn into this flower, or some new thing in this world very much like it. All week I'd been buzzing around, getting closer. Maybe if I finally tasted the nectar I could tell others of its attractions.

We were all looking for nectar, some sort of spiritual or creative or transcendental sustenance, even if we didn't know it. I had it all in my mind for just a second, and it was glittering, beautiful, complete, like a cathedral, with the flowers, the petals, the bees, the nectar, the sheaf of wheat, the pollen—and how they all fit together perfectly. 

And then—poof—it was gone. I had no idea how long I'd been caught up in the enchantment. Turned out to be only five minutes or so. I strode toward the new Coffee Company, muttering and pantomiming in my mind, feeling a bit like a witness trying to reconstruct the circumstances of a complicated accident for a jury in a courtroom.

"Now wait a minute—if the bee is the Holy Spirit, what's the nectar? Are we all flowers, or is this magical experience, this whatever-it-is I'm in, the flower? Are we all attracted to each other through it, pollinating each other's imaginations, or is it using us to pollinate itself?" And so on. It was getting comical by the time I arrived in Mac Hall at the counter of the fabled Coffee Company.

Next Stop: YOU NEVER CAN TELL