These flowers are glowing rather brightly, they evoke the experience of looking into headlights, approaching at night, blinding, attention grabbing. The petals, radiating outward from a centre point, nudging the eye towards the centre, dazzling, hypnotising.

Glowing at the height of love, ecstasy, happiness, joy; in a turquoise pool. Life-giving water, all around, a marriage, a consummation, falling in love, floating in love, drifting in love, feeling love, all around. Transformed, changed at the moment of this climax, forever, becoming one spiritually, being with the Father, as one, joining and becoming one, consummating, becoming whole, finding the missing piece, filling the gaping hole.

The moment of climax, the transient moment of ecstasy, short-lived, momentary, temporary, temporal, in time; able to be assumed by the cognitive faculty in a split-second; the whole complex experience assimilated, effortlessly, in a split-second, a pop, a repeating pop, experienced only fully when inter-spaced by intervals of normal time, not sustainable over a long period, an instant pop. The shallows and depths of Pop.

The flower, TS Eliot’s symbol for the experience of sex; pure sex, sex as it was intended, as lovemaking. It evokes the loss, the lost pure experience, and the bitter-sweet longing for paradise, before the corruption, before the fall, into this world.