1

Around mid-morning, the sun begins to warm the shuttered yellow petals, thus increasing the pressure of liquid inside cells that pad the base of each petal. As the cells expand and grow rigid, they cause the flower to unfold. The result is a yellow burst of an open dandelion, or dentes de lion, which means "lion teeth" in French. 

The front yard is a blanket of yellow lions soaking up sun, producing pollen to continue their golden reign across American lawns.

The plants make signals.

The bees respond.

There is no moral system at stake in their communication.

This summer, I did something that is not in my vocabulary. I did something so foreign to the way I know the world that I can speak best about it through the life of green things, particularly, the dandelions in the front yard. 

2

Dandelions close their flowers at night. Staying open has a price, and those flowers who close do to preserve what is possible, what is potential—the protection of pollen from early dew. 

Nyctinasty is the movement of leaves or petals in response to light, this closing of flowers at night. Plants that close include the poppy, the daisy, the tulip, the crocus, and the dandelion. 

3

Different flowers respond to different types of stimuli. Some flowers respond to daylength. They open and close at different times of day depending on the hours of available sunlight. Some open and close in response to weather. This includes humidity, temperature, sunniness/cloudiness. Some open and close at the same time each day. For example, the four o'clock closes in late afternoon while the morning glory.

I turn away to protect myself. I tell my partner to plant a shade tree sapling so we won’t end up like a character in Henry James who finds himself retired without a proper retiring place. A shady tree would grow and grow and give us a look forward into quieter possible days.  The reference goes all the way back to Tolstoy.

4

In a 1980 essay titled “The Jabbering of Social Life,” Michel de Certeau wrote:

“Never has history talked so much or shown so much. Never, indeed, have the gods' ministers made them speak so continuously, in such detail and so inductively as the producers of revelations and rules do today in the name of topicality.... From morning till evening, unceasingly, streets and buildings are haunted by narratives. They articulate our existences by teaching us what they should be. They 'cover the event,' i.e., they make our legends....Our society has become a narrated society in a threefold sense: it is defined by narratives (the fables of our advertising and information), by quotations of them, and by their interminable recitation.”

The dandelions quote themselves in relation to time, which is to say—-the space their motion signifies in the human mind. I can feel my brain seeking stone in this, or craving a way to tie it to lasting significance. There is this statue-like shape that an idea wants to inhabit as I think about signals (their superfluous changeability) and meaning (that abstraction everyone interprets differently).

It seems as if the statue and the virtue signal share aspirational intellectual terrain – both arise from the need to monumentalize one's virtue commitments, both aspire to a sort of static heroism in time, a gesture. Humans believe it is courageous to remain firm in their convictions. Like the evangelical believer, they are not convinced so much as convicted in the verity of their beliefs but they also become petrified (or rock-like), in those beliefs.

Shame emerges in the gap between lived experience an expressed convictions, or the performance of said conviction. 

5

“Once your mind is made up, you have lost your right to grow, you must remain a stock, a statue, the qualities and defects of which are known to everybody." To be knowable is to be predictable, which is to say reliable, assimilated.”

- Lev Shestov in Fragment 100

What can be we be convicted in?

Do we know for certain which signal or brand value will matter in the end?

What is the end - is it the ascension up the ladder of relevance? What has the dream taught you to give to the ambition, and is that dream authorized by the consumption of others? 

For Shestov, morality is not ethics. Instead, morality is stagnant water, the ossified internal sensor, the norm which depends on drawing lines against others, the metric of judgment in a land where we are all consumed by the mortgage, the kitchen remodel, the totality of things we should want.

The norm has always been a bully and one remembers this from the school playground, where your unshaved legs and donated clothes made you laughable - made you something so grotesque the girls could only whisper it to one another in secret.

As an early skeptic of redemptive consumption, Shestov disdained bourgeois commercialism, and expressed mistrust of the things we do to belong or be like or be loved. "Every woodcock praises its own fen," he wrote. Every sanctimony praises the rules which allow it to exclude others.

— But I began with dandelions. And there is a scene I want to describe, a world I walk into with my mom behind my eyes and her meal in my belly. When the slender white sedan slows to a blur, I confront the question I've carried away from the house . . .

6

Bartholemew, James (October 10, 2015). "I invented 'virtue signalling'. Now it's taking over the world". The Spectator. Retrieved 2019-02-23. Wherein James Bartholew credits himself with inventing the term.

7

8

Virtue signals serve the purpose of communicating changed social norms. At their best, they make us aware of prejudice like racism, homophobia, bigotry, etc.— how these things are embodied in everyday language.

The problem with prejudice is that a change of law does not equal a change of heart. Affirmative action policies seek to redress persistent lies by normalizing more equal outcomes (as they should). Such policies institutionalize equality of opportunity, but they cannot “fix” or “correct” racist mentalities and worldviews. A more just outcome, in this sense, does not provide justice (if one takes justice to mean something deeper than outcomes).

[Much of this could, and should, be taken as an argument for reparations, in my opinion.]

[Much of this could also be taken as an attempt to reckon with my grief over the recent Supreme Court decision that undoes decades of college admissions policies without touching the legacy admissions.]

If society is built around the beliefs and worldviews of its most powerful, high-stakes members, then places where racism is deemed abhorrent will strongly discourage racist speech. They will also enforce that discouragement.

Though the percentage of strongly self-identifying racists may be small, there are large groups of polite, latent racists that bring a man like Trump to power.

The first trick to a witch hunt is inventing a witch.

9

One way to tell you’re in the presence of ideology is when an entire industry of opinion exists to bolster and substantiate beliefs that people do not know how to justify on their own. Its nature is to confuse the question of who is thinking for whom and where thought or belief began. Ideology flatters people that their beliefs are their own precisely when they are not, and thus the sort of opinions and analyses that present themselves as ideology’s correctives are in fact its enablers. The consumer of opinion does not ask himself “Why do I believe this?” but “Who can remind me why I believe this?”

- Greg Jackson, “Vicious Cycles: Theses on a Philosophy of News”

Paronomasia is "a kind of verbal plague, a contagious sickness in the world of words…” which shows up in totalitarian countries like Vladimir Nabokov’s Padukgrad “where everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else.” 

In Romanian, paduche means flea.

To stay near the p-sounds, peripeteia is the poet’s final plea, a last request in a vatic voice which borrows the hollowing echo of reeds.