My journey back
home from Fernana is rarely without surprises. Today it was epiphanic.
As the beauty of the landscape was taking hold of me
through and in spite of the dirty window glass, nothing seemed to matter anymore
until I saw the wind play with the skirt of a shepherdess, who was looking at the
cattle, not dreaming, not thinking, not absent minded, not at all a romantic
hero but simply heedless of the ravishing beauty that her tattered skirt
radiated when moved by the mountain breeze.
She had pants underneath her skirt, naturally,
so don’t think of Monroe, or maybe consider the essence of that single
Monronian moment, if essence be… how shall I explain it? It was not the sort of beauty one
might be accustomed to see. Not the fashionable, easy, clean, and plain sort of
beauty. It was beautiful beauty, insolent, violent, and completely unaware of
itself. It had all the ingredients of
ugliness, and yet, I wanted to melt down and evaporate and then get lost into
the wind to play with that infinite skirt for one eternal moment only to fall
into oblivion as the skirt would get torn up into a million dusters, handkerchiefs,
and other stupid useful things.
The train tore me away before the sight could dig a
perfect hole into me. And as I was trying to recover without tears from that
first encounter, a second one came to strip me away of my remaining wits. A dragon,
travelling through dimensions, incidentally passed ours by. The sky,
unbelieving its own eyes, had enough presence of mind to prolong the miracle
and reproduce the rare appearance with the clouds it could gather, by such a sunny
day. The result was breathtaking, and as if that was not enough, the moon chose
to peep on us, defying the sun and taunting the cloudy dragon.
What could one stupid tear do before so much
beauty but choose to put an end to its stupid life while it could. So despite my
aversion of the watery melodramatic beings, I sympathized.
"What could one stupid tear do before so much beauty but choose to put an end to its stupid life while it could."
ReplyDelete"What could [a] stupid [comment] do before so" acute a sense of perception and "much beauty" of words and sensitivity of a budding writer. And although I would think differently of that "one stupid tear" that could only but choose to put an end to its life while it can, and say that such landscape as caught in the eye of a young and sensitive traveler, rather than an ordinary passenger in an ordinary train suddenly struck by the extraordinary beauty of so unfamiliar a life, stripped away from what used to be the shadow of a tear, that meaningless drop of eye-water its "lessness" and gave meaning back to its alleged emptiness so that when it rolls down the cheeks of a piercingly-eyed stranger, it wouldn't be stupid, it would add more harmony to the already overwhelming harmony of the surroundings...
And I wouldn't it think of that beauty as insolent or violent or of its components as the ingredients of ugliness but would rather marvel at the metaphor and wonder: is ugliness another word for the unusual, the unfamiliar, ce qui sort de l'ordinaire, de l'usé, or should we rather find fault with our eyes, that grew so much used to the usual that it tends to mistake beauty for ugliness and vice versa.
And yet, I still can't help reading that passage with infinite amusement:
"She had pants underneath her skirt, naturally, so don’t think of Monroe, or maybe consider the essence of that single Monronian moment, if essence be… how shall I explain it? It was not the sort of beauty one might be accustomed to see. Not the fashionable, easy, clean, and plain sort of beauty. It was beautiful beauty, insolent, violent, and completely unaware of itself. It had all the ingredients of ugliness, and yet, I wanted to melt down and evaporate and then get lost into the wind to play with that infinite skirt for one eternal moment only to fall into oblivion as the skirt would get torn up into a million dusters" that might seem at first glance to judge without judging, or like that sort of beauty it describes, is itself being judgy but "completely unaware of itself" and still invites the humble reader, peering from his neat, glossy, and lightning screens rather than the dirty panes of those trains of long-distances to think the words and rebel against the overused principles of aesthetic.
So, in the end, thank you Miss the writer for this beautifully beautiful moment of Fernanian beauty!
and although.... I still can't help enjoying the image nor suppress the arising admiration at such a lovely thought that put itself in so simple a sentence by so inventive a mind* (the missing part of the first paragraph)
ReplyDeletethat passage that might... (missing word in the second part o my commentary) it seems I was much overwhelmed by the ideas that such a beautiful piece of writing stirred in me that I couldn't clutch at patience for a bit longer to proofread my scrambled thoughts that came out in unfinished sentences!
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