This Final Rose

I have a fantasy.

And though true, it can be uncomfortable committing one’s yearning to the page, at times it must be done. To avoid being consumed by desire or vanishing completely in the rising waters of unacknowledged longing.

My fantasy has two elements—the first volcanic with ancient origins. Harkening back to a misty sea, bodies dragging out of the water and up onto the land, panting hard for that very first time, ready to set off into parts unknown, quivering at the brink of so much never-before-felt sensation. This aspect of my fantasy is primordial and soupy and it also oozes.

The second element stems from a more recent phenomenon and it involves a man and thirty women, or sometimes a woman and thirty men—it all depends on the season. It also involves a television tuned in at primetime for a Monday night ritual of hope, sex, romance, and fuck, we pray, a possibility of l-o-v-e. I share this element of my fantasy with millions of my fellow Americans, all of us gathering apart, because yes, we are animals, born of eruption. Crawled out the tides under a full moon once upon a time, only to be torn from each other in that original separation. Being lost as we are, it’s only natural that we are driven toward the act of procreation, bound by dreams of connection that marry our lives to one another, build villages to defend against the auroch, or even collapse in these days of whirling turmoil.

The setting of my fantasy is a mansion high up in the hills. Creatures lurk below, beings like mountain lions, tagged by the conservationists working overtime to repopulate this species along with all the others who also once roamed here plentiful. The mansion is a wild place, in ways both natural and unnatural—really, it all comes down to one’s reference point. Here lights flicker, as if of some older world. Fountains cascade. And limousines lurch thick across this wet cobblestone—drenched inexplicably, drenched despite the unrelenting California drought.

“It has often been said that our environmental crisis is a crisis of perception. We do not readily see the patterns that would reveal our dependence on the natural world, nor are we commonly aware of the systems within which we are deeply embedded. Our attention, entrained on objects and focused on flat screens, is far removed from the dynamic and animated nonhuman world. We are as good as blind to the wonder at our feet or the daily spectacle of an ever-changing sky.”
Laura Sewall

It’s under this “ever-changing sky” in which, tonight, the constellations happen to be visible, that we meet the man who is this season’s “The Bachelor.” He is from a place like small-town Idaho, where his family works ambiguously in something like farming. Or so we are told. We will never know his politics. Will never know what kind of world he hopes for or what he believes in, aside from, obviously, l-o-v-e in the most obtuse sort of way, untethered by specificity. Still, we’re excited about his possibilities, because we have been taught that only sociopaths don’t love l-o-v-e. That to be falling or have fallen into l-o-v-e is the point of it all.

The farmer’s son is now meeting his thirty women. Serendipitously, one is also from Idaho and “The Bachelor” says something like, “To think I’ve traveled all this way when you were right in my backyard all along!” The rest of the women are from other American towns and cities and each state in the union comes across as this land is your land and it’s as if the whole of the country has blended into blue-red-purple. As if the only variations between New York and Florida come down to drawls, culinary distinctions, and the aesthetics of twilight.

One woman rides in on a horse as proof that she is wilder than the rest. Another will have her elder grandmother emerge from the limo first, to present her granddaughter to the man and America. One woman will slap the farmer’s son playfully and he will like it. Another will kiss him, though not with too much tongue because these are the days of innocence, however fleeting. Yes, we refrain from kissing with our tongues because we want to savor this ephemeral ecstasy, breathe deeply his cologne, and try to get this right. Please, we say, just once let these red roses come to represent commitment lasting and the possibility of eternity.

The Idahoan farmer bumbles and fumbles and the women bumble and fumble, too. Adults from across the vast sprawl of the U.S. brought to gather in these desiccated hills to be rendered toddlers whose knees give out, for whom language conspires against them. Everyone trying to appear under control but really they are quite nervous. But not nervous because they are standing on this inexplicably wet cobblestone stacked atop soil which is further packed atop fossils of all the Life that has gone before. No, they are not considering the fiery innards of the center of our Earth. They are instead nervous about the odds of finding l-o-v-e.

Of course, the horse and the elder are mere props in this scene. Their time to find l-o-v-e either well behind or never to come because they are deemed inferior. No, they don’t matter, not really, because one is animal and the other is old and we’ve been taught well that l-o-v-e is reserved for those who are youthful. Those who walk on two legs and wield fire to light candles in a declaration of romantic intent. We’ve also been taught that we are separate from animals. Yes, l-o-v-e is about the brave young humans, the man and women who have come to the mansion willing to risk what they believe to be it all because they want what every Being wants—a bit of safety, by way of someone to cling to on this spinning rock, someone to stand atop the fossils with and whisper about the horse who just relieved himself on live television.

“Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
Carl Sagan

Now the women introduce themselves to the man. Some remember to say their names, others forget what it is they are called altogether. Some dance, though rarely with any sense of abandon. Some wear costumes, to disguise what was most likely going to remain hidden anyway. It can be cute, at times, watching the man and the women struggle toward this first step in the survival of their species. Nothing like the mating dances of birds, but still.

Inside the mansion, new layers begin to emerge, usually immediately, America treated to a buffet of its anxieties, depressions, insecurities, repressed traumas, disconnection, delusion-hatred-greed, and astonishing sense of entitlement that nevertheless, leaves most people feeling lost, empty, alone, and beyond the reach of l-o-v-e. America also starts to analyze the women, the whole viewership granted honorary psychology degrees: she is broken, she is damaged, she is “the crazy one,” she is an alcoholic, a whore, and look at Daddy Issues there!

Over the days and weeks in the mansion, some of the women go on one-on-one dates with the Idaho farmer, others go on group dates where courtship can be a challenge, and others still unpicked idle about the mansion’s grounds, swimming in the pool but oh, it’s so boring! Nothing but miles upon miles of views of the Santa Monica mountains, nothing but a sky full of shifting clouds across these peaks and valleys that burned in 2018, the mansion almost lost. Nothing but the lone chirp from a fountain where one little bird is trying desperately to cool himself, the labored flutter of his wings managing still to irritate the women, who are wretchedly hungover from a night of petty in-fighting and deep-seated feelings of worthlessness.

“Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.”
Rachel Carson, 1962

“It’s freezing and snowing in New York—we need climate change!”
Donald Trump, 2012

Dating progresses and the women are narrowed down by the man, golden wheat offered roses that separate them from the chaff sent home without blooms. The man rids himself of the clowns, the ultra-serious, and anyone who arrived in costume; sometimes the cruel ones are allowed to remain, for reasons unknown, but all is fair in reality television and the impending threat of planetary demise. This goes on until the man has condensed the thirty women to two.

Then it’s off to a place like Barbados, Vietnam, maybe Thailand. Off to all those low-lying coastal nations so exceptionally vulnerable to rising sea levels and the tropical storms escalating annually in intensity. America and I now learn that this farmer from Idaho and his two potential fiancées are headed to South Africa, to the Cape of Good Hope, and while we want to believe that, yes, there is reason to have Good Hope, the truth is we are worried that the man will choose the wrong woman. But at this point in the saga, we can’t afford to distinguish between Good and Bad Hope, can’t afford to separate wheat hope from chaff hope, because we need all the hope, hope being a thing increasingly difficult to come by, even on television. And so we’re wishing Good Hope for “The Bachelor” and for us all in this game of l-o-v-e; and, of course, Good Hope for Cape Town, too, because they are running out of water and in recent times have run dry. For a moment, we think—if only we could transport all that water used back at the mansion to wet the cobblestone, the water used to make everything sparkle for the cameras, here to Cape Town, but we cannot transport the wasted water because that is not how life works.

“Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope, but I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”
Greta Thunberg

Now we’re off! Off on an elephant! The farmer’s arms around the first woman, hands entwined. There is a kiss and it has tongue, wow, there is definitely tongue, but it’s not wet like it should be. And the elephant looks tired. And oh, it’s really gotten quite hot! Not Africa hot, the way Americans imagine African heat, but something far hotter. In fact, it’s so hot that the man and woman’s tongues have dried out completely, are like two sandpapers rubbing together. The woman becomes light-headed and the scene cuts to a wide shot of the savannah at sunset.

On the man’s date with the second woman—the first had to lie down due to the heat—they go cage-diving with great white sharks in waters chummed with the lifeless bodies of other fish used to attract the greats. The man lets it slip that he thinks the sharks are “beautiful,” which is a thing so strange to hear from him because always, before, when he’s said “beautiful” it’s been in reference to one of the thirty women or possibly a car. Yes, what a peculiar thrill to hear him speak of the shark so! He’s actually blushing and the second woman laughs and now we’re all starting to wonder about the quaint customs of Idaho—perhaps we should plan a trip there because that’s what we do—we tour. Yes, we Americans are the perpetual tourists.

“Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate, sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth…home. My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.”
Edgar Mitchell

The second woman endures the heat to make it to the evening portion of her date with the man. Despite ample roads, their romantic dinner is reached by a helicopter that sputters out PAH (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon) particles, poisoning the air where children both starving and thirsty live; but, as mentioned, we cannot get the water from the mansion’s spigot here to reach them, regrettably. From above, the man and woman look down at all the places where there was once jungle, now razed and populated by livestock who will be razed themselves in due time.

Over plates of red meat and potatoes that always go uneaten to preserve the audio quality of the bumble-fumble dialogue, the man and woman have a conversation, not about the beautiful shark or the elephant or the other woman who passed out from heat stroke, but about l-o-v-e. Yet it derails. For reasons as ambiguous as the man’s family farming operation. All the man can manage to get out is that he has doubts. That he’s struggling to know if “this” is really “it.”

“The very right to be human is denied every day to hundreds of millions of people as a result of poverty, the unavailability of necessities such as food, jobs, water and shelter, education, health care and a healthy environment.”
Nelson Mandela

Now the man is getting frustrated; they are almost to the end of their journey and l-o-v-e doesn’t seem to be working, not like he imagined it would. He stares at the meat, which, of course, is not locally sourced. No, it was flown in from elsewhere, as were the imported red roses and Neil Lane—“The Bachelor’s” engagement ring designer—in first-class, with his briefcase of diamonds. The woman’s décolletage catches the man’s eye because it is shimmering like magic, but actually it’s just body glitter, made of fossil fuels and tested on animals kept in cages barely able to contain the size of their bodies. The dress she’s wearing is fast fashion and every last sequin will wind up in a dumpster because it’s hotter here in Cape Town than it used to be and she’s sweating and her dress is drenched and the cost of dry cleaning is more than the cost of the dress itself, so it will be tossed in a landfill or the ocean where birds will eat these sequins, adding to the plastics filling their bellies causing them to eventually die of starvation.

The man picks up the rose—because it’s time to decide about the woman—but look, he’s crying. Is it about the animals kept in lab cages? Or the birds dying of plastic ingestion? Has he noticed how many fewer there are in the skies? No, his lament—why doesn’t this l-o-v-e feel like enough? He punches the air, accidentally snapping the stem of the red rose he now can’t decide whether or not he wants to give to the woman.

“In this state of total consumerism—which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves—all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.”
Wendell Berry

The man sets off into the fields—did someone tell him about the starving children? Is he off to take his and the woman’s steak to the very hungry ones? That’s not really how this works, but at least he’s waking up. Let’s watch. Wait, no…he’s not thinking of the children, rather he feels unlovable because of some failing of a parent or some sense that he has to be “a man,” the patriarchy’s reign weighing firm upon his shoulders. He’s consumed by all the feelings consumerism insists it can cure—sadness, loneliness, desperation, depression, anxiety, self-loathing, and fear of everything lurking in the corners of our minds, not to mention our hearts. And he hates himself for being weak and for being strong and for everything he is, everything he has been, and everything he might be in the future.

The woman glances out to him with a comforting gaze, but he “NEEDS A MINUTE!” he screams from the razed jungle, heading further into the farmland where a lone cow has been watching this primetime scene unfold. The man’s face is red and reddening still, because yes, even at night, even this late at night, it’s getting hotter here in South Africa and in all the countries with starving children, including America, which has starving children and birds filled with plastic and animals held in cages for testing. The man watches the cow, whose face is not red but white, dappled with black patches, this cow who appears to be staying so still, perhaps as a strategy to beat all this heat, so the man takes a cue to settle himself.

Meanwhile, to give the man space, the woman directs her gaze down at the meal on her plate and ever so slowly, her pinky finger outstretches toward her fork and while I can’t speak for the rest of America, DAMN!, my heart starts to beat like the thunder forming out over the ocean and I am tingling all over at the mere suggestion that this cow on the dinner plate—this mammal who forms deep bonds with her kin, particularly her baby calves who were taken from her at birth—won’t have been born to be slaughtered in vain. That the traumas of the slaughterhouse workers, with their addiction and domestic violence and far-above-average suicide rates. That the carbon cost of getting this flesh to the woman’s plate from whichever continent it was shipped in from won’t all have been for nothing… But, no. Instead the woman just sighs politely, folds her hands in her lap, and looks down at the ground possibly with tears in her eyes. She is, it appears, quite melancholy. Her tears all for this one man out in the field with the white and black cow. And it’s all too clear to me now that no one will be eating.

“Farm animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent? Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been treated with such little respect and kindness just to make more meat.”
Jane Goodall

The man leans against the fence beside the cow, who offers him comfort amid his turmoil through nothing more than her presence. Cows can do that. So can jungles. Even a field filled with grasses can console this man who is so very lost. The cow can feel the man’s suffering and for this reason, she stays put, despite being tired and wanting to rest. She’s not sure if tonight is her last night on Earth as a cow, if tomorrow will be the day that her throat is cut, blood drained, body processed into pieces to be served up as another uneaten meal for befuddled American lovers. Yes, her last moments on Earth may be spent comforting “The Bachelor.”

And yet this cow stays with the man who worries he is too weak or possibly too strong to really l-o-v-e the woman. The cow knows that, really, he is sick because he lacks relation, not to one woman back at a table staring at the floor, but to all of life. Lacks relationship with this cow and this razed field and the jungle that was here before and the lightning out over the ocean and all these storms brewing and all the stillness and the starving children and their parents who don’t have time to cry with a cow because time to grieve is a privilege and luxury and the factory workers who had to sew the sequin dress and slaughter the meal and mine the Earth’s mantel looking for the diamonds in the ring the man now isn’t sure he wants to give the woman because she isn’t relieving every last one of the aches in his heavy heavy heart. He also lacks relation to the elephant they rode across the savannah whose kin are hastening toward extinction and the great white sharks who encircled their cage, who are harvested as sport fishing trophies, and also the rose with the broken stem that he’s just remembered he is still clutching in his hand. This final rose that was flown from Colombia to Cape Town. No, he decides. He can’t give the woman this rose because she isn’t “it.” He tosses the rose to the ground beside the cow, whose eyes brighten, grateful for what appears to be the first gift she’s ever received from a human. What a thing, she moos, to be offered a rose on the last night of one’s life.

The man starts back across the field that was razed and he is so lost and the woman is so lost, and he’s thinking of all that won’t be now. Of the plump children they will not bring into this world and it makes him sad—his heart!—it’s all making him too sad and so he goes back for the final rose, takes it from the cow without even bothering to explain. Yes, the man takes the rose from the cow and gives it to the woman, asking: “[WOMAN], will you please accept this rose?” And [WOMAN] says “Of course!” and music plays to which they are supposed to dance bodies pressed tightly, but, fuck, they are too hot, because it’s hotter than ever before here in Cape Town and they also don’t feel like dancing because trying to l-o-v-e has exhausted them.

“In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”
Baba Dioum

Back in his bungalow, in the stifling night, the man lies awake thinking about the proposal. Is he making the right choice? But, then again, there have been moments along their journey when he has glimpsed completeness. Standing beside the woman, overlooking the jungle. Standing beside her, looking up at the waterfall. Sitting beside her, in the middle of the savannah. Crouched down beside her, petting the stray dog who helped them share their first laugh back in Mexico City. Curled up beside the woman, watching sunsets that reveal the vastness of it all. Yes, maybe it is her that he needs to be complete.

So, the next day, dripping in sweat, he slips the diamond on the woman’s finger—and how it sparkles—this diamond and the sequins of her new dress igniting a disco ball in this wildlife preserve where a mother hippo stands at attention in the river behind them. She is planted firmly between the betrothed and her young hippo, having already lost one baby to a dentist from purple Texas. The man is engaged now and he is happy, he says, and the woman smiles, also happy. Yes. Or at least maybe. Truth is, nobody is sure how they feel, save the hippo mother, who is damn certain of her suspicion of this man and woman in all their imposing brilliance.

Soon after these engaged return to the place they call home, which is so far from Cape Town, the man realizes with horror that nothing feels like it should. That the feeling he had, that glimpse of completion, has vanished. Maybe it’s real life that’s got him down or maybe he feels he’s still too soft or too strong and that the woman is weak tea to fortify or tenderize him as he needs. Should he have chosen the other woman, instead? The so-so dancer who suffered the heat stroke?

The relationship lasts four months, fades away like cologne on the hottest day, which America and I should have seen coming, as the odds of “The Bachelor” have always been terrible—despite 50-plus seasons of wetted cobblestone, untouched meals, helicopter and elephant rides, and all those red roses flown in from the world’s elsewhere, most of the l-o-v-e has vanished.

“The world is reaching the tipping point beyond which climate change may become irreversible. If this happens, we risk denying present and future generations the right to a healthy and sustainable planet—the whole of humanity stands to lose.”
Kofi Annan

* * *

And yet, in my fantasy, this ends differently. The Idahoan farmer and the thirty women find what they came looking for in what they’ve had all along. In what’s been available to them for 13.8 billion years, born of the ooze of that primordial soup from which their first ancestors crawled panting as they climbed forth from the misty sea. The man and the women are made whole for their journey by the jungles, the mountains, the waterfalls, the savannah, the act of compassion that is nurturing a stray dog desperate to avoid the dogcatcher because he wants to live just the same as we all want to live. All these humans find a deeper love of self and other—love for the horse and the elder, for the soil, the water, the air, and the plants and animals who express their deepest fantasies in the simple act of existence, and love for those whose lives we do not know, but who are human and are here and are struggling in a distracted and fading world.

As these ripple effects of awakening spread, America and I begin to consider the cows and starvation and the water running dry in South Africa and the absurdity of flying roses from Colombia to the Cape of Good Hope and that everywhere it is getting hotter. And we allow ourselves to fall completely in l-o-v-e with all life—not one life, but all lives—thereby realizing that never, not once, have we ever been alone. That we are forever in relation, held as part of this fragile eternity that is ours to l-o-v-e and ours to lose.

And we, America, then take this final rose and return the bloom to the earth, pledging:

“Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over…Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush.”
Rainer Maria Rilke