I’ll never get over them—I won’t even try. Color, fragrance, notion: lilac. If in New England you come across a stand of them in the woods, you’ll find a cellar hole nearby—someone’s bygone home. Common lilac is native only to the Balkans, so every spring wind’s purple whiff was at some point uprooted and transported to you—unless you live in the Balkans.
Inflorescence: the flowering, so many small lives attached to a central lifeforce, flourishing.
In Missoula, Montana, tall lilac hedges surrounded the house where I lived alone in two small rooms above a clutch of opera singers. In April—cruel, it’s true—only the smell of lilac could drown out Madame Butterfly. If I cried in that town, I cried in spring, on the back stoop, heady with mucus and indole.
Indole (in perfumery): narcotic, floral, animalic, erogenic. Musk, jasmine, feces, decay. Lilac.
Indolent (in medicine): causing no pain.
(But a lilac’s scent might cause pain—if memory pains you.)
In Blackstone, Massachusetts, my own bygone home, two thick crops of lilacs at the end of the driveway, not the cellar, next to the forsythia. They greeted you, they bid you farewell. They thickened with flowers as the days thickened with light. Sun, sun—that region’s dear commodity. They looked, but not at us. They looked outwards, towards the street, not vigilant, not unaware. I didn’t say goodbye. I don’t know if they’re still there.
(They’re still there: Your great puffs of flowers / Are everywhere in this my New England. That’s Amy Lowell.)
—
Of the scent, some have said: like roses, almonds, mimosa. Like lily-of-the-valley. What, then, do roses smell like? Or almonds, mimosa, lily-of-the-valley? Like lilacs? Like one another?
Some have said: strong, sweet, heady, cloying. Green almonds, milky almonds, creamy, velvety, inky, sexy, decayed. Some have said: mild, fresh, soapy. Sweet, but not cloying. Sunny, not sexy. Innocent. Green.
Whitman called the odor mastering. Galway Kinnell, that they opened astonishing furnaces of scent. Do men know how to describe what envelops without invoking control or combustion?
It’s difficult to process lilacs for their oils. (It’s difficult to process lilacs.) They resist enfleurage and steam extraction. They resist us, our effort to steal and keep what they’ve promised to share for only a season. Perfumers approximate with other indoles and clove.
How are we supposed to understand them?
In the language of flowers: first love. But how does one speak that language? Do I name that first love lilac? Do I leave lilacs on his grave? I can’t; he was cremated. I’ll leave lilacs where he was born, which is also where I was born.
(But I won’t. I never make it back there in spring.)
As a college student in Vermont, at the dawn of Facebook, all I put in my first profile’s “About Me” section was this less celebrated lilac from T. S. Eliot: (Slowly twisting the lilac stalks.)
It’s from “Portrait of a Lady,” a poem I’m sure I didn’t understand—but I understood something about that line. Parenthetical, compulsive, the way the lilac obsesses and possesses, a nervous floral tic. I’m sure I wanted only to seem enigmatic, like a poem or a fragrance that sits close to the skin. I wanted to beckon closer.
I wanted to beckon closer, but not so close that one could read the preceding lines: ‘Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know / What life is, you who hold it in your hands.’ Did I read those lines as of me, believing myself the world-weary speaker who knew life better than those who had it all ahead of them? Or did I read them as for me, fearing I was the person who knew not what they held? Probably both. I was arrogant, and I was insecure.
(And youth is cruel, and has no remorse.)
—
On the Poetry Foundation’s website, there are 82 poems containing the word “lilac.” That seems like a lot, but when you consider how many poems are on the Poetry Foundation’s website—and when you consider lilacs, and when you consider poets—it doesn’t seem like nearly enough.
In her poem, “Lilacs,” Amy Lowell calls them false blue. Then white, purple, then color of lilac, which is actually close to the lilac’s own journey through language, which began with Sanskrit and Hindi words for blue: nīla, līl. These words fed the Persian līlak, variation of nīlak: bluish. It’s this blueish that necessitated a new color-name for lilac, this blueish that Lowell calls false. Is an ish—is what’s not quite precise (not quite, not quite)—automatically false? I don’t think so, but still, better what Lowell landed on: color of lilac. Like her bluish sisters, lavender and violet, lilac is self-referential, autological: we know the lilac by its lilac properties. We know the lilac by its lilac-ness.
When my mother retired and moved away from Blackstone, she planted hydrangeas and roses, lavender and bleeding hearts. No lilacs. But she painted “my” room—the room where I stay when I visit—lilac.
(Lowell again: Lilac in me because I am New England.)
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The Impressionist Mary Cassatt painted lilacs, the actual flowers themselves impressionistic—that is, leaving an impression, impressing upon us their lilac-ness (scent, color, season). Their flowers already bright blurs that crystallize as they lure you closer. They say “Lilacs in a Window” is one of Cassatt’s few still-lifes, but is it? The flowers, the vase, the window, the light—they tremble.
Other painters were compelled by the magnitude of lilacs. Monet and Matisse rendered lilacs towering over blurred or shrunken human figures. In one Chagall, two lovers embrace in a surreally large vase of even larger lilacs, while in the background a tiny, perfectly full moon and its reflection straddle a few dark strokes implying a bridge. Van Gogh painted lilacs during his stay at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in St. Rémy. The bush takes up most of the frame, throwing its shadows over a sliver of worn dirt path—the only evidence of human life in the painting.
(Something about lilacs makes us forget ourselves.)
In a letter to his brother, Van Gogh writes that at St. Rémy he has no will or desire for “everything that has to do with ordinary life.” And yet, about his paintings of the asylum’s irises, roses, and lilacs, he writes: “…considering that life happens above all in the garden, it isn’t so sad.”
He stayed in St. Rémy for a year, waiting on the arrival of an idea “for beginning again.” He waited from May 1889 to May 1890—from one lilac time to the next.
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Lilac time: a season, a film, an operetta, a song. But mostly a season. There are festivals all over when the lilacs bloom: Spokane, Rochester, Taos, Mackinac Island. Some select a lilac queen, which sounds to me like a good way to lose your head.
Mackinac Island’s most recent Lilac Queen was crowned by her aunt, herself a former Lilac Queen—and mayor of the island since 1975. She’s the second-longest-serving mayor in the country. What service.
(Something about lilacs makes us give ourselves away.)
Victorians wore lilac during half-mourning, making it the last color before death’s release on the living. I fear it is too easy to say that this is their obsessive quality, their heralding of spring, the birth of life, and the end of winter, the death of death.
Countee Cullen: While white and purple lilacs muster / A strength that bears them to a cluster / Of color and odor; for her sake / All things that slept are now awake.
—
Scent is ephemeral and measured. You can only experience it for the duration of a single breath before you must let it go, so that you can take it in again, then release it again. Every intentional encounter with a scent is a mediation, a sliver of living. If each breath brings us closer to death, let us then breathe lilacs—while they last.
Because maybe that is what obsesses with lilacs, that they live, like poet Hyam Plutzik wrote of them, “these few hours on the hither side of silence.” That they, yes, mix memory and desire, and that there is in each new flush of them, “the greater, remembered beauty” of their ancestors.
Every lilac is a portal.
(And the living and the past give to one another. / There is no door between them.)
—
We call the leaves “heart-shaped,” although, of course, they’re not. They’re shaped like the ideograph of a heart, the ♥︎ we stamp on valentines and press to “like” as we scroll. The ♥︎ borrows its shape, those two curves and single point, from leaves of ivy, as ivy is associated with fidelity. The ♥︎’s love lore is thus rooted in the garden. And here we are again: the lilac’s leaf is shaped like a symbol that is shaped like a symbolic leaf.
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Mahmoud Darwish: I am not a traveler or a dweller / in your lilac night, I am he who was one day / me.
We cannot dwell in lilac time, cannot travel there. We cannot dwell in time, be it of lilacs or shadows, or the shadows of lilacs. We are time: unruly, relative, relatives. Branching, blossoming. So many small lives attached to a central life force, opening.
Lilacs smell like lilacs. They are lilac colored—even when pink, false blue, white. How simple, how impossibly simple, that lilac is the essence of lilac, that we are drawn to that which beckons: scent, art, the living, death. Hither, silence. Hither, breath. All things that slept are now awake.
Lilac time is inflorescent. When we wake to lilacs, we wake to all lilacs, to all that have been or will be. There is no door between them. Let us open. Let us live again—again and among all our gasping, flowering selves.
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