Life & Wisdom Quote by Malcolm De Chazal

De Chazal takes the polite symbol of the flower and drags it back into the body. “A jumble of thighs” isn’t just erotic; it’s deliberately messy, an image of petals as tangled limbs, sexuality as abundance rather than classical symmetry. The shock is part of the method: he wants you to stop seeing botany as decoration and start seeing it as appetite, heat, reproduction, the whole sun-fed machinery of desire.

Calling it “the sun’s harem” turns nature into a courtly, power-laden scene. The sun becomes a possessive sovereign; flowers are the concubines arranged around that authority, opening, closing, performing their color under a gaze. It’s a metaphor that flatters sunlight while also hinting at coercion: harem imagery carries luxury and confinement at once. The line vibrates with that ambivalence, making beauty feel slightly compromised, complicit.

Then he drops “the most oriental thing imaginable,” a phrase that reveals as much about European fantasy as about any place. In De Chazal’s era, “Oriental” often functioned as shorthand for sensuous excess, ornament, and erotic spectacle - an aesthetic category built from colonial projection. The subtext is double-edged: he’s borrowing that exoticizing vocabulary to intensify the flower’s charged strangeness, but in doing so he exposes how easily Western imagination turns “the East” into a mood board for desire.

This is De Chazal’s Surrealist-inflected aim: to make perception unstable, to fuse the natural and the sexual, and to show how metaphor smuggles ideology in with its perfume.