Other Men's Flowers

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The tricolon, putting phrases into groups of three, is perennially effective. Once you start to notice these — be they in newspaper articles, politicians’ speeches or TV advertisements (that’s

an example right there) — the little monkeys are everywhere. Lists, in general, work well. Try enumeratio: setting out your points one by one, to give the impression of clarity and command. If a piece of writing feels like a unit, it lends its argument an impression, however spurious, of coherence. The more each clause or sentence relates to those around it, whether in parallel or counterpoint, intellectually Some years ago, when writing a gardening article for an achingly right-on newspaper, I used the expression ‘other men’s flowers’. I cannot now remember in what context but I have not forgotten the sub-editor changing the phrase to ‘other people’s flowers’. I had fool­ishly imagined that, even if my readers did not know Montaigne – ‘I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own’ – they would at least recognize the play on the title of one of the great poetry anthologies of the twentieth century. Some hope.But what makes Montaigne’s meditation so incisive — and such an urgently necessary fine-tuning of how we think of “curation” today — is precisely the emphasis on the thread. This assemblage of existing ideas, he argues, is nothing without the critical thinking of the assembler — the essential faculty examining those ideas to sieve the meaningful from the meaningless, assimilating them into one’s existing system of knowledge, and metabolizing them to nurture a richer understanding of the world. Montaigne writes: Three centuries later, Thoreau — another of humanity’s most quotable and overquoted minds — made a similar point about the perils of mindlessly parroting the ideas of those who came before us, which produces only simulacra of truth. The mindful reflection and expansion upon existing ideas and views, on the other hand, is a wholly different matter — it is the path via which we arrive at more considered opinions of our own, cultivate our critical faculties, and inch closer to truth itself. Montaigne writes:

Rhetoric, simply put, is the study of how language works to persuade. So any writer seeking to make a case, or hold a reader’s attention — which is more or less any writer not in the service of the Democratic of setting two terms in opposition, are ways of labeling what any prose stylist does by habit and instinct. Like the bourgeois gentleman of the playwright Molière — amazed to discover in middle age that We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make it our own. We are in this very like him, who having need of fire, went to a neighbor’s house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any with him home… What good does it do us to have the stomach full of meat, if it do not digest, if it be not incorporated with us, if it does not nourish and support us?

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It does help to keep in mind that, as Aristotle wrote, you have three forms of power over the reader: ethos, pathos and logos. That is, roughly: selling yourself, swaying the emotions and First, consider the three R’s — repetition, repetition and repetition. Richard A. Lanham’s authoritative “A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms” lists no fewer than 36 figures of repetition will want to tell you Y… Big Tobacco will want to tell you Z. But there’s something you can tell Big Tobacco…” Its conclusion can be given a sense of roundness and inevitability with Aristotle ordinarily heaps up a great number of other men’s opinions and beliefs, to compare them with his own, and to let us see how much he has gone beyond them, and how much nearer he approaches to the likelihood of truth; for truth is not to be judged by the authority and testimony of others; which made Epicurus religiously avoid quoting them in his writings. This is the prince of all dogmatists, and yet we are told by him that the more we know the more we have room for doubt. Other Men's Flowers is a portfolio of text-based prints by fifteen London artists curated by Joshua Compston (1970-96). It was printed by Thomas Shaw and Simon Redington and published by Charles Booth-Clibborn under his imprint, The Paragon Press. Compston took the title, Other Men's Flowers, from an anthology of wartime poetry compiled by Field-Marshal Viscount Wavell (1883-1950) of the same title (published 1944). Wavell had derived the phrase from a well-known quotation attributed to French moralist Montaigne (Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533-92), 'I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread which binds them is my own' (quoted in Cooper, p.115). Montaigne's original sentence, published in his Essais ( Essays) in 1580, provided an apparently modest disclaimer, anticipating criticism of the originality of his ideas. For Compston, it provided an apt poetic metaphor for the role of the curator. Other Men's Flowers was launched at a party on 23 June 1994 in a derelict sawmill close to Hoxton Square, East London, a centre for young British artists at that time. Compston wrote in his press release:

What accounted for its success? My guess is that it made poetry respectable for manly men - Wavell's section on war is called "Good Fighting" but his section on love a tongue-tied "Love and All That" - in an age when reciteable poetry still had a popular appeal. Looking at it again this week, my wife remembered how her father could recite all of the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" and Hilaire Belloc's "Do you remember an Inn, Miranda? / Do you remember an Inn?" My own father could do as well with a lot of the Burns and Coleridge. Both our fathers left school at 14. They had uneducated memories compared with Wavell, who wrote in his introduction that while, nearing 60, he couldn't claim he could repeat by heart all the 260 or so poems in the the anthology, he thought he could safely claim that he once could. If the classical orators have modern counterparts in the realm of the written word, pre-eminent among those counterparts are the authors of opinion pieces. Here is persuasion overt, persuasion front and center. The I have held this book, Other Men’s Flowers, close to me for 50 years. In different places and at different times it has been an interest, a companion, a comfort, an inspiration, and a saviour. It was the first volume that came to mind when I let the memory wander through the decades: Cambridge, Sudan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, global travel, UK executive life, career and performance counselling, volunteering and more. I am in love with the book.You might know it already. In 1941, in the darkest days of the Second World War, in the few months between staving off the German assault on the Middle East and then turning to meet the challenge of Japan, Field-Marshal Earl Wavell listed his favourite poems for a ‘family conversation’, a small pleasantry to take their minds off those threatening times. Family members reminded him of others that he knew. Two years later, when he was Viceroy of India, the anthology was published. An instant success. Wavell was clearly an awkward customer. In his introduction, he apologises for his notes on the poems, saying "'The Notes' are not altogether my fault, the publisher asked for them." But he was far from a bluff fool who kept himself going on the march with a few verses of Kipling. He knew that a key to poetry's success - you might say its departed success - was its memorability, but he also knew that that wasn't its only quality. In 1961, 11 years after his death, TS Eliot wrote, "I do not pretend to be a judge of Wavell as a soldier . . . What I do know from personal acquaintance with the man, is that he was a great man. This is not a term I use easily ..." Jeremy Cooper, no FuN without U: the art of Factual Nonsense, London 2000, pp.10, 12, 30, 75-6, 78-9, 89-90, 114-21, 179-80, 184 and 221, reproduced (colour) p.119 The project has produced an exciting and innovative publication that intrinsically embodies the elegant but underused printing technique of letterpress … that has allowed and encouraged many hitherto solely image-based artists an opportunity to operate within the realms of 'copy writing', providing them with a platform from which to sound off any phrase, slang discovery, polemical essay or related literary form … the participants produced works that responded to the given brief of a letterpress printed text piece. (Quoted in Cooper, p.116.) Prose does not scan like poetry. But it shares its effects. One of the most memorable lines in American history, for instance, is the clause in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

Jeremy Cooper, no FuN without U: the art of Factual Nonsense, London 2000, pp.89, 114-21 and 221, reproduced p.118 or musically, the more it will feel like an organic whole. Syntax can do much of the work of sense. A competent reader often discovers in other men’s writings other perfections than the author himself either intended or perceived, a richer sense and more quaint expression. Portrait of Michel de Montaigne by Salvador Dalí, 1947 In the Sudan I shared some of the simpler ones with my local teacher colleagues and the students. The students were learning English language and literature but no poetry, so for them it was an added dimension to the language and culture. In Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays ( public domain; public library) — the same indispensable volume that gave us the great philosopher’s ideas on death and the art of living— he writes:In my last few weeks at Cambridge, knowing that the next few years would see me somewhat isolated in Africa, I bought the book. Why? No idea, and the memory doesn’t help. What is certain is that in 1969 I had no special interest in poetry; I knew little; and I can’t remember wanting to know more. Also, I don’t remember anyone suggesting it.