Hyacinths as Moral Paragons in the Decadent World

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;    
    They called me the hyacinth girl.”    

          

With these words T. S. Eliot evokes the image of the hyacinth as a symbol of abundant fertility and virility. The phallic flower reaches for the womb of the sky, the petals as soft and vulnerable as a flaccid member, yet combined they are as erect and potent as any adamantium rod. Wet, like the female mucous secretions, both fluids herald fertility and the dawn of new life as like a growing phallus the flower ripens and extends under their lubrication.



However, though an object of serenity and beauty, the noble, erotic hyacinth must live, like each one of us, in the world of the Decadent. How does such a pure expression of the joys of sexual gratification manage to resolve itself philosophically to it's lot in life? The hyacinth must seed, and grow out of the decay that surrounds it. The very earth, the rot of creation and the feculence of nature is the material that most suffuses it with life, with the power to conduct it's virile erection. Growing from the mulch, as we all do, feeding on the decadence and sufferings that always embrace us, the hyacinth is our spiritual parallel. It is in relation to this degeneracy that we find our own life in relation to it; against the incessant backdrop of murder, mutilation, rape and despair we paint the portraits that make up our lives.

Hyacinths accentuate the sexual potency of all that surrounds them, they are nebulous loci of erotic energy. For this reason they have often been enslaved in the service of aphrodisiacs to the impotent and barren. As a spiritual cure they are universally recognised by the medical community as 100% effective, exceeding the effects of Viagra or other herbal remedies sevenfold at minimum. Nevertheless, the disdain the hyacinth holds for all it considers decadent oft extend to fornication, be it of man or beast, and the disgruntled plant will often refuse to grant it's blessing, instead withering to a husk rather than endure another moment of the sweat and slapping flesh of coitus.

Although occasionally intolerant of the intercourse of other, less potent species, the hyacinths are notorious for their own sexual drive. As phallic metaphors, their very purpose is to transcend reality, to become an idea, but also to comment on that very reality that they abandon. They are present everywhere, and nowhere. Their penile similarities are an ethereal construct, and yet they never cease to exist, and in fact do so in abundance, growing into great bouquets of phallic emblems. Like the bouquet held by Eliot's 'hyacinth girl,' they are clenched, sodden and dripping tight to the bosom, as if she, the woman, has mastery over all phallus, and by extension, all men. She holds their virility tight, afraid to lose it as by losing the male potency, she too is robbed of her own fertility; the bouquet drops, the curtain of sterility extends and she becomes as barren as the Waste Land Eliot himself envisions. She is the prostitute unable to conceive, the poisonous Belladonna of the Rocks; no longer the lot of the fertile plant of the ripe flowerbeds, she has become a desert dweller, and the source of all moral poison.

As the infertile life, the Belladonna stands in sharp contrast to the noble hyacinth; it is the crone, the woman who craves even the pain of her menopause, so vapid and vacant is her life. And yet there is hope, their is expiation for us, as still, in some woodland grove, the penile hyacinth rises up to rape the very air of creation! The phallus remains almighty, dripping with liquid and yet strong, mighty and hard, like an iron girder it holds up all creation, the supple flower has become the bedrock of the world. And though it may disdain the world, and seek to escape it, the hyacinth remains the greatest of flowers, and the most intense vision possible of raw and unfettered potency.