Dean Kissick on The Food of New World Mall, Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, The Most Magical View of the Most Beautiful City, and more.
June 15, 2021
Dean Kissick is an art writer and the New York Editor for Spike Art Magazine, where his column, The Downward Spiral, comes out on the second Wednesday of each month. For the last five years his column has the covered the topics of our times, such as NFTs, Montez Press Radio, the memeification of reality and politics, ornithology, and how the Summer of Love brought us to this current moment. Whether it’s his Spike column, social media presence, or various podcasts appearances, he always has something interesting to say about art, culture, and the internet. Dean also has great taste and lucky for us, he's here to talk about what he’s been into.
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The Blue Flower, a short perfect novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, was published in London in 1995 when she was 78 years old. It’s a dramatization of Friedrich von Hardenberg’s years as a struggling writer and student, from 1790 to 1797, before he made a name for himself as romantic symbolist poet Novalis, and tells the story of his infatuation with the very ordinary, childish 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn. He meets her when he’s 22 and falls in mystical love at first sight with her. Like many powerful novels, it’s a book of longing. What von Hardenberg really longs for however isn’t Sophie, but the “blue flower” he’s writing about. Some lines from the story he reads aloud:“I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower. It lies incessantly at my heart, and I can imagine and think about nothing else. Never did I feel like this before. It is as if until now I had been dreaming, or as if sleep had carried me into another world.”The blue flower is what he’s been searching for his entire life but cannot find, will never find.What it represents is not explained. It might be understood as a perfect moment of transcendental joy; or the Great Beauty, or the writing that gives meaning to life, the hope, which destroys us, the trembling, skipping longing for the infinite. The flower is different for all of us. The blue has never been seen. We could do with more vaulting romanticism I feel.“The universe, after all,” thinks Friedrich, “is within us.”