88:88

[1985]
The Nature of Things
The panther rippled sleek through the proud grasses, green eyes shining, searching.
Beauty and grace and perfect motion, rich, dark fur, a furnace within; green eyes searching, shining.
Nostrils dilating, tail flicking, muscles flowing in swift pounce of death; green eyes searching, finding.

[1991]
I used to believe in the redemptive power of beauty – that if you surrounded yourself with works of art, rich fabrics and furnishings your soul would be uplifted, elevated above every evil act – a Wildean fable of sensuality in which lust masqueraded as sternest purity, a whiff of decadence, of sickliness. It was an impossible ideal, yet continues to exert a fascination. A life purged, incense, bells and embroidery, stained glass, vivid colour. It was never a matter of simple vanity or affectation – in the natural world beauty, the ornamental and the functional are intertwined – shimmering hummingbirds. Artifice is the very perpetuation of nature, its validation – plumage, horns, beaks, extravagant to the point of excess. Good is pallid, sterile. The flush of a wine-warmed cheek, the fingers dripping with balm, these are transient and by virtue of that transience poignant, fragile, in bloom suffused with a sweet and alarming hint of decay, the autumn swirl, how much more intriguing than cold chastity, how much more human.

[2007]
We might have been shabby, but we nurtured compensatory aesthetic sensibilities as we dreamed of the next plate of chocolate porridge (with a sprinkle of cinnamon), trudging through the streets, eyes fixed on the pavement not to avoid the dog-laid landmines, but scanning for dropped coins (or the occasional pound note blowing along the gutter). If we had been a little less proud, we might even have resorted to the tramps’ tactic of visiting phone booths and inserting a probing finger in the returned coins slot in hope of a jackpot. To survive the poverty induced by a corrupt landlord whose eviction method was increasing the rent from one month to the next until the grant money ran out we banished the crude and vulgar from our unheated rooms, retreating behind the glass-panelled door, allowing nothing from the outside to intrude.

The grey relieved only by graffitied initials, peeling paint on neglected walls. Beauty is the dandelion growing from the pavement crack, the buddleia with its butterfly attendants in the gap site, roots anchored in the rubble of demolished dwellings, anarchic, tenacious, surprising.

Labels: autobiography, literary

posted by Chameleon @ 10:11 AM
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