Prose Extract 2.0 - 'Morality for Beautiful Girls.'

"The ground is hard
As hard as stone.
The year is old,
The birds are flown.

And yet the world,
Nevertheless,
Displays a certain
Loveliness--

The beauty of
The bone. Tall God
Must see our souls
This way, and nod."
-- John Updike, "November"


I've been thinking a bit about beauty lately, primarily because it seems to want to throw itself in my face a little bit at the moment. That is, I read everywhere people trying to judge and figure out what it beautiful and what isn't, advising on how to make yourself more beautiful [I haven't seen anywhere yet advice on how to make yourself less beautiful - perhaps there's an opening in the market?] and pretty much selling beauty in a can. Most worryingly, however, I see a constant stream of comments from people, including people I care about very much, to the effect that they don't find any beauty in themselves, and doubt they ever will.

This is particularly worrying for two reasons: firstly, I think I'd be with the majority when I say to these people, "what do you mean you're think you're ugly? I think you're stunning!", and it always hurts me to see people I love with low self-esteem; and secondly, if we were to admit that you lovely people aren't beautiful, what on earth does that say about people like me? I realise I'm not quite hideous, but I'm certainly no Robert Pattinson, and if all of you look as bad as you think, I haven't got a hope!

The particular piece of work this comes from will probably never be completed enough for me to actually use this scene, but after one especially self-deprecating set of thoughts from someone whose beauty really isn't in question whatsoever, I felt like sitting down and putting some propaganda into my character's mouths.

So yes. Something like that.


Extract 2.0 - Morality for Beautiful Girls

When he came into the room, he could see she had been crying. Not a great deal, but enough to have two dark smudges of makeup down the corners of her eyes, and one murky mascara teardrop rolling down toward the end of her nose. He loosened the knot on his tie with a slight feeling of guilt, trying to make it look as if he had not been waiting.

Looking up full into the mirror, she caught sight of his lean frame propped against the doorjamb, and swore with surprising violence. For a moment she looked truly ferocious - then the fire fizzled and she put her head back in her hands. Leaving his tie hanging on the door handle, he sat down on the bed behind her, blinking in some surprise at the wealth of cosmetics spread out on the dressing table.

"I didn't know you owned this much makeup. I didn't know anyone owned this much makeup!"

She tried to snorted indignantly: what came out sounded more like a wet snuffle. "Typical boy. We all have this stuff, you just don't get to see it. You just see a pretty girl and imagine it happens all by itself. Poof! Magic."

The last word was unbearably bitter: he felt something twist in his heart. Not fair.

"Ah, but of course, how silly of me," he said, the gentle sarcasm softened by a smile. "What, after all, is the joy in seeing magic done if you already know the trick, right?" He fell silent for a moment: she, head still lowered protectively, said nothing.

"Let me take a look," he said finally, moving around to perch on the edge of the table. "Whatever disaster you're imagining, I guarantee it's not even half as bad as you think. If that."

"Or you could go away for five minutes while I dispose of the evidence." Her voice was brittle and hard. "Or the bodies. Phone the restaurant, cancel the reservations, order us a chinese or a pizza, something I can eat in jeans and a t-shirt and not feel like a child playing with her mother's makeup." She swore again, with some feeling. "This was such a stupid idea."

"It was a great idea, and it's going to be a great night," he said mildly, resisting the impulse to pat her on the shoulder. "It just needs a little fine-tuning, that's all. Let me take a look. Please?"

The gentle plea in the final word was like a key in a lock. With a sigh of frustration, she took her hands away and turned to face him, wiping a black tear-smudge across her nose in an endearingly childlike gesture. He smiled, remembering his sister again, and thought he caught the barest hint of a reflexive response, quickly stifled.

Her only sin, he thought to himself as he examined the source of her anguish, was trying too hard. Which, his inner companion commented drily, was really more of an inexperienced virtue. He felt, not for the first time, a real surge of anger against the people who should have been there for her, who should have given her more support and self-confidence. Not fair.

"Well, this is barely a problem at all," was all he said aloud. "Nothing that a minute or two won't solve. May I?" he asked, picking up the box of wipes - she nodded meekly, suddenly stuck shy.

"Your problem," he said slowly, gently wiping away some of the dark streaks, "is that you're trying to do a bit too much. You're starting off by assuming you don't look good, and that you're going to need a lot of work to cover that up, when in fact the opposite is true."

"Oh yes, I'm a beautiful butterfly and a unique snowflake," she retorted caustically, turning slightly so he could wipe some of the blush from her cheek. "A fairytale princess who can rise stunning straight from bed and into the world. Not all of us were born to be film stars, you know."

"Being a film star has nothing to do with it." She closed her eyes so he could clean her eyelashes off. "They need just as much work as anyone else, and twice as much upkeep." The wipe was added to the growing pile in the rubbish bin: he selected a fresh one. "They just have more time and money to spend on it than everyone else, that's all."

Finishing up, he examined her face, his head tilted slightly to one side, exactly as he'd watched his brother do a hundred times. The image of the solid and serious young man muttering furiously to himself as he went about his job, younger siblings looking on in wonder brought the smile back to his face, and he was rewarded with the slightest of conspiratorial grins in return. Taking advantage of her momentary attention and good-humour, he sorted through the products on the table, picking a few here and there and arranging them neatly next to him. Finally, with a brief apologetic glance at her apprehensive expression, he started with the lightest layer of the most sheer foundation he could find: she flinched slightly every time the sponge neared her face, finally opting to keep her eyes shut and her hands clenched around the arms of her chair, knuckles whitening as if she expected a slap. He kept up the commentary as he worked his way across her face by gentle degrees, trying to draw the tension out of her spring-loaded frame with the conversation.

"I mean it when I say that you're doing too much. Steven used to say it was the most beautiful models who were the hardest to prepare: at some point there's a limit to what you can do with cosmetics, and while you can slap a whole new face on an average-looking person, with someone naturally pretty you have to be much more selective."

He made a moue of disapproval and rifled through the boxes on the table, looking for a much lighter eyeshadow than the one she had out.

"Society tells you that you have to have makeup on to look your best, and if you want to go along with that, fine: there is a lot you can do with cosmetics, but it's not always a case of 'more-is-better'. That's not society trying to help you look beautiful, it's society trying to get you to buy more crap."

She smiled weakly, but kept her eyes firmly closed. "Why do I get the feeling this isn't the first time you've used this speech - oops, I'm sorry!"

He wiped away the liberal smear she'd inadvertently caused, laughing. "It's not my speech, really, it's more Steven's: he taught my sister everything she needed to know, with Mum not being around." He refused to let his voice shake. Not what I need now, God damn it. "I think it's what got him interested in the beauty industry in the first place."

"Was she a lot like me?" The question was out before she had thought it through. "I mean - " she hesitated. "Did she have the same problems, like this, sometimes?"

He was very still. She desperately wanted to open her eyes. Several long seconds ticked past: his fingers tickled her cheek where he had paused.

"Yes," he replied finally, "yes, she was quite a lot like you, actually." She didn't have to ask which question he had really answered. A gift, of sorts.

He resumed working; she let out a long breath.

"Steven used to tell her," he went on, surprising her, a odd note of affectionate laughter in his voice, "that women were just like food: there is no bad food, just different tastes; if they were bland, they could stand a lot of spicing up to make them appear more appetizing; but if they had enough beauty and character to them already - " he turned her gently in the chair to face the mirror, " - all they needed was the lightest of seasonings. Open your eyes."

It wasn't really a suggestion. Feeling afraid, confused and horribly bare, she complied.

What greeted her was unexpected. Instead of the stranger she hoped to see every time she finished this particular part of getting ready for the day, the face in the mirror was decidedly her own. And yet -

"What did you do?"

The pale arching eyebrows, the dark eyes, the strong nose and firm chin: everything was where it ought to be, but around them was the delicate emphasised line of a jaw and cheekbone leading up into the very faintest hint of red blush and the vague, almost non-existent shadow around her eyes. Her lips were a gentle pink against white, white china skin - why, she wondered suddenly, did I ever wanted to cover that up? - and her eyelashes seemed full and healthy below the barest hint of colour on her eyelids. I look beautiful, she realised very suddenly and, again, I look strong.

"How did you - "

She discovered he had moved: he was by the door, retrieving his tie from the handle. It seemed like a long time ago he had come in without knocking.

"I used a bit of makeup to help you remember how incredibly beautiful you are," he said with a smile, a full-blooded smile that lit up his face and rolled back, for a moment, the years of pain in a life too young to hold them in. "To everything there is a season, right? Just a hint of seasoning - magic."

He finished knotting the tie with a flourish and held out his hand. "Let's go. If we hurry, we can still make those dinner reservations. Between good looks, good food and good company, I think you might just make an evening of it."

She smiled back, a beautiful girl with a beautiful smile and a heart and soul worthy of both, and rose to join him.

Smirisary

There is such power in this place. I had all but forgotten. Whenever I am here, I understand what people mean when they talk about 'the old places of the earth.' It isn't so much defined by absolute age in years or era, it's the knowledge of being in the presence of a power very much other than the ones that govern our everyday lives and set the rules we play by at work, at home, at school: there are times when I feel as if nature is becoming one of these powers, a force we can all but avoid in our normal existence; a beast we have found a way to trammel in and hem about, except for those rare occasions it escapes and wrecks havoc, and we are left picking up the pieces when we should have been better prepared. Here, though, on the edge of reality, nature is very much alive, very much free, and it is fey. It is extraordinary.

I'm a little ahead of myself. The Gortien can do that.

We are on holiday, my family and I, in a little crofting cottage on the west coast of Scotland, about an hour's drive to the coast from Fort William, by the town of Glenuig [for those of you who know your local geography!]. The Gortien is one cottage in what used to be a subsistence farming community called Smirisary - that is, a scattered collection of tiny homesteads that grew enough food to survive and perhaps trade for tools and other supplies, and nothing extra - an isolated existence virtually without money or governance, until the great and savage Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries wiped out and relocated vast swathes of the indigenous Scottish population. Since then the vast majority of such communities have remained abandoned, but Smirisary gained some minor recognition in the '50s when one woman in particular braved the harsh living conditions to document her attempts at an alternative, subsistence lifestyle. Since then, many of the old cottages in the area have been renovated to varying degrees as holiday cottages or private getaways.

The Gortien, my family's particular haunt, sits nestled in a fold in the hills just under ten minutes walk from the rocky coastline. It remains essentially the same building as when it was an isolated homestead a hundred years ago: a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen build out of rough, now white-washed stone and fronted by a simple wooden conservatory erected several years back. There is a tank on the hill collecting rainwater and an enormous Rayburn stove in the kitchen to complement the fireplace in the bedroom for providing central heating, but there is no electricity, no gas or phone lines, no drinkable water - everything you need must be carried the half-mile or so from the nearest road - litres of water, kilograms of coal and bottles of propane, all your food supplies and [of course!] piles of reading material. It is almost barbaric in its simplicity - it is bliss.

I honestly can't describe the experience properly: a failure of vocabulary. Tramping over the hills and through the ferns laden with stuffed backpacks and arms full; sitting out on top of the hill watching the sun set over the sea and ignite the Scottish islands perched on the edge of the horizon; reading by a hot, roaring peat fire smelling of bog and freshly-turned earth, safe in four solid walls of stone as the storms come raging in and as quickly are swept out again; playing cards on the old, scarred kitchen table while my father hums busily at the gigantic coal-fired oven, creating stew or baking bread; chasing sheep off the porch with a clattering of hooves and a chorus of indignant bleating ... so many utterly unique experiences rolled into one unassuming cottage by the sea.

This place brings the world back to life, for me. I could spend an age ranting about the depravities of my concrete mecca of a city, but sat here listening to the short-wave radio murmuring about the weather and the shipping forecast, writing the letters I can't write in the midst of the rattle and hum of reality, writing by candle-light and oil lamp and saying things that matter to the people whom I love and cherish - sitting here watching the red fade to blue to grey to black, I cannot care too much about the place I've come from. That I'll be going back there in a few too-short days is the least meaningful fact I am aware of at this moment: how is it meant to compare to the vital, immediate fact that there is a herd of wild highland cattle and one of deer that will come right up to the house to nibble the long weeds around the window, or the unbelievable truth of precisely how many different shades of blue and white can be seen in one split-second curve of a breaker before it crashes to the shore, or the way that even now the flickering lamp light makes strange, surreal hieroglyphs out of my writing, slanting upward away from the dancing glow of flame on steel nib, up the page and into the gloom. These are facts, essential and incontrovertible, they are everything that defines this moment. On Thursday I will be back at work, listening to the slack-jawed nonentities mumbling damp, meaningless sentences, and while my head nods and my voice makes empty noises of approval, my heart will say, "there is a place - you know it, because you have been there - where your hands and your voice, your eyes and your mind and every other fibre of your being act in concert, and what they do has a meaning that will no wash away in an instant, one that sits untouchable above the floods that wash away the revolting, soulless gestures of these cardboard people and stands exulting in the tumult and storm that rages around their clapboard lives, pulling them to pieces. It is a place of high walls, of deep harbours, of firm foundations in the midst of hurricane and warmth in the midst of gale and rain. It is a knowledge of real beauty, and real fury, and real danger such as we have almost forgotten, a knowledge that sees our pale imitations of these things standing naked before it and accepts that they are not worth the effort of contempt. Out here, beyond the electrical hum pervading our lives, beyond the simpering moral and intellectual rot gnawing at the root of our existence, beyond frightened people locked inside their own skins [and believe me, I know all about that], there is a moment upon cresting the hill and seeing the sun breaking up the rain clouds like fingers of fire shining on the sea, a moment as if coming suddenly to the edge of a thick bank of fog and pulling free of formless grey to see the entire wealth of creation spread out before you. There is that one moment with the sea air in your face like the very breath of God saying, 'here - now - you must understand that you are more real than that which you will return to - never be afraid of what you shall pass through like the fog.'

Well. Too deep for a little stone cottage on the Scottish coast? Then you've never been there. All I can say is that it doesn't matter what god, if any, you believe in, or what version of reality you subscribe to: there is power in this place, out sojourning amidst the very edges of the world. I could write another gospel without ever beginning to crack the secrets of what this place does, and I think that is how it was meant to be: this wild world sends you back a little cleansed, and a little less respectful of the snivelling demons waiting for your return. Come and try it out yourself sometime, would be my only advice: experience what it feels like, even for a second, to approach this mess of a world with the spark of the divine written in thunder and air across your face. I recommend it.

The Bridges of Manchester County

"She always expects
surprise, even here, in the
rows of corn and wheat"
-- Cade, "City of Bridges: A Postcard from Saskatoon"


I have a thing for bridges. I'm not entirely sure why - somehow they have the suggestion of power about them, of standing against something [who knows what? gravity, perhaps, or the elements], of being tall and proud and indomitable. One of the images from Atlas Shrugged that moved me most was the picture of Nat Taggart standing alone and abandonned at sunset, still building his bridge - bridge-builders are great people, I think. There is something rooted in defiance at the core of people like that, people doing the impossible for the ungrateful and the unknowing, people who make connections and forge links. Craftsmen and visionaries share much the same set of tools, I think.
I came across the haiku at the beginning of the entry a couple of years ago, and was immensely moved. My mother comes from Saskatoon, and everything about our holiday visits leads me to agree with the writer wholeheartedly: it is a simple, unassuming prairie city after the old fashion of small, remote Canadian frontier towns, and yet - and yet, you can never be quite sure what you will find. She's quite correct in calling it the 'City of Bridges', too - seven major crossings in a city of just over 200,000 is impressive, and a little bizarre. There is one in particular that holds a place in my heart, the Grand Trunk Bridge on the corner of Sapadina and Power - built in 1907/8, it's a grand old steel-trestled train bridge that straddles the river at its widest point, just south of the city proper. Let me tell you: there is very little better than sitting out on a hot Canadian summer day above the river, legs swinging into space, with a notebook and a pen, completely lost to the world. It is [something I have yet to use it for - oneday!] the perfect spot for a romantic post-dinner evening, sat watching the sun go down over the river, talking about everything and nothing. It is inseperably entwined in my head with perfect hot summers and the endless sweep of the prairies, golden and dusty and beautifully simple. Some things never leave you.

Manchester isn't particularly famous for its bridges - no Golden Gate, no Grand Trunk - just a few functional stone and brick pieces here and there. There's still a certain mystique to some of them, however, as I discovered last night.
Stag parties are not my natural habitat, I'll be honest. I am bad at partying: I have a low tolerance for alcohol, no 'and-then-she-took-it-off-and-she-was-a-MAN!' stories to tell, and roughly zero desire to bring anyone [male or female] from Manchester town home with me. As depressingly cliched as it is, I am far more comfortable curled up with a good book, or at the very least drinking whiskey with a few people I actually know. Crowds of strangers don't scare me like they would have done a few years ago, but they don't excite me either - they just make me feel old and cynical.
As I made my excuses for the second half of the night's revelries and started the hour-long walk home [because the only thing worse than the city centre on a saturday night is the bus leaving it] I did what I do as a defence against the crowds of people hell-bent on seduction and sex, the desperate and the unthinking and the unstable and the whole unpalatable explosion of people's hopelessness and willful ignorance - I set out walking in one direction, any direction, and I kept going until I felt like I could think straight again.

A few miles out of the town centre, down Deansgate and nearly to the motorway, there's a quiet stretch of road the branches out over one of Manchester's innumerable tiny rivers - the bridge that holds it up is fairly recent, probably only a couple of decades old, a classic '80s brick ediface, solid and squat and unimposing. The guardwall is about seven feet high and a foot or two thick, all solid, slightly blackened bricks. Sitting on the top of it, staring out over the sluggish riverlet and the Saturday night revelries going on behind it, I sat there and tried to figure out how I feel about my city. And it is my city, as these things go: thirteen years of my life this summer I will have lived here, including the year I was born; as much as I might identify very strongly with wide-open prairies and the Rocky Mountains [and I do - they are a part of my bones and my blood and if I am away from them too long, those deep and tightly-knit features make themselves known, to my immense spiritual discomfort] there is nowhere else that I can call home in quite the same way I call Manchester home. Let me be very clear: there are plenty of times I wish it wasn't so, but I'm not one of those people who believes you can change where home is just by moving - if you run away, you will have to deal with that struggle sooner or later.
What I thought, looking out on the explosion of blue neon and breathing in the strong, heady smell from the profusion of honeysuckle growing wild all along the banks, was that I hate this place with a passion. It feels like such a natural reaction. Every morning I catch the bus into the centre of town to work, and it strikes me over and over again: the hundredweight of bitter, angry people covering every inch of pavement, snapping into mobile phones with their cigarettes dangling unsmoked, burning their fingers; people's faces are twisted into their public face, their city face, eyes downcast and features set in a neutral, formless expression that says don't notice me, don't talk to me, don't hurt me, don't make my day and more stressful and painful than it already is; the tramps who swear at you when you tell them you don't have any change, the mobile phone salesman and charity workers and public survey monkeys out in droves for your time, your money, your opinion, things they seem to believe inexplicably that they have a right to - when I want to give you my point-of-view, lady, you'll know it, believe me. And coming home at night, exhausted and bone-weary from eight or nine hours of dealing with the whole coffee-drinking, sugar-eating, hyped-up and downtrodden mass of English humanity, it's all the same: middle-aged women with so many shopping bags I'm surprised they don't have a little hired slave to carry it all around with them; teenage girls in layers of makeup shrieking aimless words across the city's squares, boys who don't know what it means to grow-up trying to hard to be men, laughing too quickly and too loudly, instantly in your face and up close and looking for trouble - I've broken a man's skull with a baseball bat, I said to one punk, quietly and with the perfect East-coast accent, I've put a bowie knife through a man's wrist and skewered it to the wall, stood there and laughed while he ripped one of his fingers off trying to get it free. I've put a bullet through a man's eye and felt his blood on my face. What do you want? He must have seen something he didn't like. He left without laughing. Afterward, sitting on the bus and shaking slightly, I thought, "what on earth possesses a sane person to say a thing like that?" I was a little younger then, than I am now. Perhaps that contributed, in some way, to my growing up.

There is a place out on the edge of Northenden, along the Mersey close to where I used to go to school, called Simon's Bridge. It's a little footpath that runs along by the water, little more than a glorified stream at that point, and over an old cast-iron trestle, rusting and slightly green with age. People walk their dogs down through the nearby fields - kids go to make out or smoke weed, whichever vice is more attractive at the time. But at dusk, just before dark and with what little sun the clouds have allowed in lighting up the river, it is quiet and usually abandonned. If you have someone with you, you can play Pooh Sticks, dropping twigs and branches over the one side and spinning around quickly to see which makes it out of sight first - if you are alone, the top of the old, worn abundments makes for a good place to sit and think for a while. I used to go there very occasionally when I lived closer, if I needed some time to myself and my feet happened to take me that way. Now, I'm further away. Things are a little less peaceful out here: the constant wailing of police sirens, the rough barking of stray dogs out in the alleyway, the roars and howls of the lower-middle class creating drama to make their lives interesting. I ought not to complain, of all the ills in the world, of not having a bridge nearby to sit on. But if I am to hate this city a little less, it is important to focus less on its faults, and more on its... inconsistancies. Little victories.

Really, what I think of this place matters very little in the grand scheme of things, or in any smaller schemes for that matter. Manchester will take no note of the boy who dreams of Saskatoon's railway bridge. I live here because there are things and people that I love and because [as much as a rail against the fact sometimes] if I am ever to escape this place - and that is an if - I have some reconciling to do.
The nature of a city is tied to the nature of its people, past and present, and also vice-versa. I can only imagine as much as we try to change this place, hopefully for the better, that as Nietzsche put it, he who battles with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster; when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. It is a quote that applies to a lot of situations. Who am I to tell people how to live?


"Past the derelict mattress
and the overgrown pavement
over the tracks
and through the hole in the fence
Past graffiti-bright buildings
and the junkyard alarm bell
and the screaming police cars
and it's all present tense

It's my beat
In my new town

Past the drunk woman reeling
with her bag of provisions
Down through the tunnel
with the stink-fuming bus
On to the bike path
where it's something like freedom
and the wind in my earring whispers
Trust what you must

It's my beat
In my new town

Ancient and always
The wheel's ever whirling
Today I'm riding
Tomorrow I walk
Step through forever
into this very moment
The heart is pumping
and the heart rocks

It's my beat
In my new town."
-- Bruce Cockburn, "My Beat"