Look, I’m not for straightahead. I’m for elaboration. I’m for decoration. I’m for flounce. If I draw you a picture you’re going to have to stare at it through a magnifying glass before it reveals all its stories. And when I write you a sentence I’m a neo-rococo kind of guy. I want to pack it with embellishments. I want it dripping with grapes and acanthus leaves, hanging with pleated swags and fluting and curlicues and filigree underlacings, with gilded highlights and ruby-red cherries.
But I don’t want putti. No cherubs in any form, and I don’t want angels and nymphs flaunting and denying their smooth as alabaster breasts.
This is the 21st century. Where will we find such innocence ever again, other than in the minds of the depraved?
So. Follow me to the gallows, cherub, your time is up. Like a fat little suckling pig, we’re going to sacrifice you for the orgy, roast you on a spit. We’ll move on relentlessly through our era, when death comes so easily to the young, when the perfect creamy bodies of even women and children have no time to grow wrinkles. Purity is on the way out, it is being offered up by those who preach and pray for it.
The little bit that remains hangs on like the mouldering remnants that cling to the ceilings in empty mansions the world over, dropping to the floor, one fragment at a time, month on month, year on year. And the wind whistles through the broken windows, slices itself into strips on the shattered glass, disturbs the skeleton of the old verdigris-encrusted chandelier and follows the path the soldiers took, the last time they advanced, or retreated, through this forsaken place.
So remember that when you read my words. They are reaching for a place where beauty reigns, but they are not finding it in the future or the past. All they find there is devastation, innocence lost where we have walked. Beauty is where there is no beast. It may be here. It may be now. It may be in the calms and the crannies that cannot be approached. It is assuredly where we are not. And it grows more fugitive every second, as do we who seek it.
To find those rare spaces, the nooks of refuge, we must wade through the taint of war and dereliction, past the empty eyes of the sick, the stricken and the dispossessed. The sight is the same for all of us, whatever divide we cross to get there. We are all seeing our angels fall in these religious wars.
But the dull verdigris of the defunct chandelier swings in the breeze, like a pendulum counting out the hours till the last angel has died, leaving only the one true god to knife himself in the heart, unable to decide which of him to be true to. Meanwhile all the other gods have been blown to kingdom gone and the hills are strewn and the trees festooned with the rags of bright saffron robes and the tatters of turbans from collaterally damaged heads that also can no longer think.
Don’t look up at the ceiling. There are angels and demons there, crumbling, preparing to fall from grace.
But go ahead. In a final effort, let the forces of decency march, but to a different tune. So that we no longer send our young out to die, but to help others live. Then the chandeliers can stop swinging, we can gather up the pieces of plaster, even the cherubs, the pale unhandled breasts of nymphs, and start putting our little world back together.
We are short-term in the face of eternity. But we have a long-term legacy. It is ours to choose whether to decorate it with laurels, or bury it in ashes and dust.