In the sixteenth century the first tulip was imported to Turkey from Holland. I know-- I carried it myself.
By 1634 the Dutch were so crazy for this fish-mouthed flower that one collector exchanged a thousand pounds of cheese, four oxen, eight pigs, twelve sheep, a bed and a suit of clothes for a single bulb.
What's so special about a tulip?
Put it this way...
When is a tulip not a tulip?
When it's a Parrot or a Bizarre. When it's variegated or dwarf. When it comes called Beauty's Reward or Heart's Reviver. When it comes called Key of Pleasure or Lover's Dream...
Tulips, every one-- and hundreds more-- each distinctively different, all the same. The attribute of variation that humans and tulips share.
It was Key of Pleasure and Lover's Dream that I carried from Sulyman the Magnificent to Leiden in 1591. To be exact, I strapped them under my trousers...
*(An excerpt from Jeanette Winterson's
The Powerbook...)
If you're interested in wetting your toes with a lovely bit of said author's work, I recommend Oranges are not the only Fruit. It's a semi-biographical or perhaps she might prefer it to be seen as "metabiographical" (See author's website) work that gives honesty a panache which is both painful and delightful. The main character was raised in a working-class evangelical home and she seems destined for christendom greatness as she prepares for missionary work and the pulpit.Unfortunately she finds herself on the other side of the church's right hand when it's discovered she's fallen in love with someone outside the faith-- well, in actuality it wouldn't matter if her amour had been in the faith... she fell in love with another she. Like the vane of a feather, the author skims over trauma and offers humanity with all it's craziness and dysfunctionality, while revealing the power and pain of being true to one's self.
