This week, thousands of people queued in Geelong, Victoria, Australia to witness the corpse flower bloom, an event which happens only once in ten years. Close friends woke at 4 am to queue for two hours and the Botanical Garden opened for 24 hours whilst it unfolded and finally released it's famous stench. My socials were full of it's strange and ancient beauty. The live stream too showed children dancing around it's unfurling purple velvet shroud, strange and primal, a botanical marvel in it's beauty and decay.
Yet I can't help feel a sense of phenomenon fatigue. I checked my patience meter against the desire to see this extraordinary botanical event. The needle hovered at zero. Queue with the hundreds? No thanks.
Queuing for spectacles isn't new - it's just the media frenzy has changed. We don't have Victorian broadsheets, we have Facebook. In Victorian Britain, people lined for hours to see the Great Exhibition’s glittering Crystal Palace - some six million people. The opening of the Thames tunnel, or to see an opera singer in concert. The thrill of these spectacles hummed throughout the country, tugging people out of their day to day into shared moments that felt significant, rare, exclusive and extraordinary.
1889 Art Print - Titan Arum Kew Gardens
Yet now I can't help but feel that the way we experience such spectacles has irrevocably changed. We still long to discover for ourselves, to feel a sense of shared wonder, but technology amplifies events in seconds, oversaturating us with the event. Something that should feel like a personal marvel becomes something that feels mass produced and over exposed. I smile at those who gush online, and I'm happy for their happiness, but I can't share in it. It doesn't feel like wonder to me. It feels exhausting and unoriginal.
Perhaps it's just because I don't like crowds. I wonder if I would have flocked with the Victorians descended beneath the river Thames for the sheer novelty. They too were drawn like us to the lure of an unrepeated experience that must be seen, felt, and shared with others. Perhaps I'm just a loner. Perhaps I would have been in the woods instead, searching for rare mushrooms, and feeling a similar sense of wonder and awe all to myself.
I know the significance of witnessing an event firsthand, probably even more so for kids - but I feel uncomfortable about recording it, posting about it, and sharing it instantaneously with others. I might be a spectacle grinch, but for me it takes the magic away. I can’t scroll fast enough past everyone else’s images, feeling resentment that they are shaping how I see something. Of course I’d like to see it myself. But when I’ve already seen it in a million photos, what is left?
The southern lights was another example - or the northern, if you’re over the equator. They once used to be a phenomenon tied to remote, dark skies - but now they have all the lights of millions of screens pointed toward them. Apps predict their visibility, and one social post can spread the word to everyone in the area in seconds. On our coast this year, you’d bump into people in the dark. In 1997 I witnessed the lights putting the bottles out from my job at a bar when I clocked out at midnight. Those standing at the cliffs only saw it because they too were night owls, or perhaps science geeks reading the skies. We weren’t on quests or checking off bucket lists desires. We weren’t risking diminishing the event by flooding people’s feeds with an extraordinary volume of similar photos and videos - none which were guaranteed to not be manipulated to be richer in colour, more spectacular than the faint light we could barely see with the naked eye. The lights suddenly became, for me and others, generic - they were everywhere.
I don’t deny the thrill of shared experience, to know that others have waited, travelled to, or witnessed the same thing. It’s undeniably a buzz. But I feel sad that there feels almost a sense of pressure to capture the moment so that others can see we were there. This compulsion forces the question - are we just marvelling at the spectacle of our collective attention? In Victorian times, the rarity of an extraordinary event meant that being there really mattered. Today, when everything is documented so endlessly, I wonder whether being there, as in actually present is being lost in the performative aspect of being there.
It’s a paradox of the age, I guess. When we’re chasing these moments of wonder, we risk taking the shininess of the awesome magic we’re hunting down. It’s why I haven’t gone to see the corpse flower. In Victorian times, perhaps I would have. They were flocking to see things they might witness only once, their wonder and awe untainted by the constant, relentless retelling through photographs. Don’t misunderstand me - if I was to go (and perhaps I still might) I too may not resist taking a photo and sharing it at least here on HIVE, and likely Instagram, and perhaps I’m only resentful that my hips hurt too much to stand in a line for two hours. But I do feel this impulse to resist joining the throngs to capture every moment through a screen. I’d rather step back and slow down, and allow myself to experience a natural event for what it is - a rare, fleeting, unfiltered marvel.
Perhaps in that way I can capture what the Victorians experienced, long before viral corpse flowers bloomed, or the dark skies were lit up by a million phones.
With Love,
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Most importantly, I think you identify what the real treasure is: not the shiny thing, but wonder itself. Our subjective human experience.
I do think rare events have lost their luster, simply because they aren't rare. The northern lights were everywhere, and you they are still online and available whenever one wants to see them.
But we can wonder and marvel at anything. We can wonder at the seemingly collective urge to be performative. We can marvel that so many of us do want to get out and see the lights.
As Whitman wrote, we can "go to bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked" and become "mad for it to be in contact with me".
Certain things have shifted and become available and commonplace, but our capacity for wonder and joy and the thrill of our human experience is undiminished. If we choose it and nurture it.
Maybe what this time in history can teach us, help us recognize, is that the treasure is inside us. The thing that cannot be replicated by AI or reproduced by a million images is our subjective experience of contact with the world.
And I think Whitman, way back in 1850 when he wrote "Leaves of Grass", was pointing out that it is a choice to be mad for our experience. Certainly not everyone was getting naked and rolling on the riverbank.
It has always been a choice to invite one's soul to observe a spear of summer grass. And we still have that choice.
Yes! It's almost like choosing joy. You have to be open to it, if not a little vulnerable.
I think COVID highlighted that. So many people were seeing nature as if for the first time, if not the first time. It IS the cool thing about people flocking to the corpse flower - we are recognizing the wonder of nature, as if children again.
That is the important distinction you have to make right, did people go there to see the flower, or did they go to capture it and post it so that people can know they saw it? The intention is so important. But I feel this kind of fatigue of oversaturation in every aspect of my life, though. Books, philosophy, articles, and with the whole publish or perish system, writing gets churned out so fast, that there is no way of staying up to date with everything. And if you do, you will already be behind others. Might as well not read it and wait for others to condense it. Sorry for this random insert of undigested thought, hopefully it kind of relates.
I do relate. It's a kind of exhaustion on all levels. And because of the digital age you know what you are missing and are yet to learn and do. Classic FOMO.
I think the intention is to feel or find wonder. Sure, if you are an influencer you'll seek it on purpose for an audience. It's not that I'm blaming individuals or the collective for the saturation - it's just the way of things now, and I personally find it too much. Perhaps it's me that should simply flick the switch and turn off the lights. But we are so intertwined with the digital aren't we, especially in how it tangles with the need to connect.
For sure, and that is the biggest problem: switching it off feels like losing a part of yourself. And for sure, we need to create and cultivate some wonder. But with the oversaturation from all sides, it really feels debilitating in terms of trying to get up and do things some days. But I hear you, and one should try and cultivate spaces where you can still find that sense of wonder, and in which you can limit the saturation. I hope that this makes at least some sense!
It does. I think cultivation is an important practice!
For sure, such an important word and idea.
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I certainly resonate with this, and I think you're correct in linking it to all the pressure to not only see but be seen seeing, enjoying, living. I think it robs us of the experience to an extent that even as it's happening, we're already thinking about being someplace else. The next event. Or talking to someone inside our screens, maybe.
PS: What a name for a flower. I might've gone for that alone
Ha yes it's very gothic! It's quite magnificent really... I would have liked to have seen it. Maybe in another ten years.
You're right. We aren't truly present. I think I prefer my marvels on my own, screen less. Perhaps translating the experience into the very personal medium of language which captures the moment better and is only shared amongst my nearest and dearest, such as people on Hive, but even so, at a later time, when it's been fully marvelled at, digested, mulled over.
And perhaps you should find out the locations of corpse flowers near you? I know there's one at Kew Gardens.
I mean, if I have to, I guess I must head to the UK :P
I just googled, Kew Garden's corpse flower just bloomed in June this year. They say there's bloom every few years
Everytime I go back to the UK I am desperate to go to Kew gardens. When I lived near there I never went. Idiot. It's always such a mission from the MILs though.
You are quoting the late Alan Watts. He was already making note of this phenomena back in the 1940s.
And yes, it has definitely taken the magic out of things. It is specifically why my phone never comes out while I'm outside -- not to take photos of anything, to go online, never
I don't doubt my thought is unoriginal 🤣 - I'm definitely not the only one to lament it. But it's not so much the singular news report but the tsunami of photographs that I find disastrous to feelings of wonder.
I wasn't quoting Watts - wasn't aware he said that. The 1940s is somewhat earlier than mass digital reproduction in seconds in 2024 ;p
It’s definitely something that we are dealing with. The technology we’ve got now is something we may never have had before as a species. It’s hard to say because perhaps painting pictures could be considered similar in some fashion, or the printing press. At any rate though we are still exploring and understanding these new things and how they impact us mentally and psychologically.
I think in the future being physically present with things will be much more important than it ever was. Seeing a picture or video of that flower opening won’t be as important or life changing as being there to experience it firsthand. We have plenty of fake experiences, we need to make sure we have real ones.
No comparison. Digital takes seconds - you can flood the Internet with photos the whole world can see in an instant. When the southern lights happened I swear my whole Facebook feed was pink.
Couldn't agree more!!