The Flowers trilogy is a saga of human desire and the place where the riddles and the reality of the individual collide. The Flowers, comprised of three parts: Part I, Musical Chairs, Part II, Wanting Souls, and Part III, Mirrored Souls, tells the story of Cardoza's unique and parallel odysseys of mind and body. We follow Cardoza as he makes his way during the collapse of America in the middle and late 21st century in search of love and salvation. His is a forced odyssey or wandering, and sometimes an adventure, as he navigates the cold, new totalitarian world of Deuray and its special incarnation of evil. The Flowers is a story of love, sorrow, the place of courage and resistance, redemption, and maintaining individual humanity in what America has become. Interwoven into Cardoza's story is the story of his g, reat-grandparents, and with it, a portrait of the Arizona plains and the West and its mix of reality and myth, and of the dark history of the White Man who settled America. Somehow the souls of Cardoza and his great-grandmother cannot be told separately. The Flowers is a paean to human life and the music of existence, and a comment upon its ineffable folly. Cardoza's story describes the parallel paths of his journey toward self-knowledge and that of the world as it envelops him. Cardoza believes in his obligation to live life out, and he looks for shelter from the world's harshness in his search for love, sexual fulfillment, and tenderness, in his belief in the individual, and in his endless musings on what he thinks are still relevant and great ideas. His is the classic struggle of the individual toward what beckons us all, the ever-mysterious circumstances of love, sexual fulfillment, freedom, sacrifice, redemption, happiness and death, all of it unfolding during the decline and death of everything America has aspired to or claimed to be. The Flowers is, too, a cold lamentation on the human invention and presence of evil. Cardoza betrays a dreamy hopefulness, but his analytical powers make him skeptical of dreaming. He is determined to live and imagine the possibility of goodness until the end. In The Flowers, Cardoza struggles to find a perspective from which he can believe the world might heal itself, from where we can love and protect our children; but he knows that will take a transformation of the collective soul. The Flowers stands as a prolegomenon for any form of humanities' future. It is not prophesy nor is it a warning; it is merely the description-because Cardoza thinks that is all we can do-of what is likely.
