A Love So Strong

Have been up for 20 minutes and already have given myself away as being vain, shallow and dead of mind. I spend a lot of the time trying not to be a wanker. I mean, I make a conscious effort. But you can’t always be fully conscious of ‘what you’re about’, and at such times the ‘real you’ seeps through the cracks in your persona and ruins everything… besides which, there’s very little you can do to escape the need to evacuate your balls...

In the kitchen making a cup of tea with Flatmate Simon. He says he going to go to Goldsmiths College to hear a talk. I tell him I’d like to go – because I ‘have a thing’ about girls who’re artists. So much wrong with this statement. The undisguised lack of engagement with what Simon’s saying, the braggadocio, the automatic ‘what’s in it for me’.

I go to Pimlico to look at the Romantics’ paintings at Tate Britain. Fall in love-lust - on station platform, on tube train, in the gallery café, in the tranquil domed hall where strangers sit in dreamy reflection, and - especially - as I walk across Vauxhall Bridge Road. She is beautiful. But they all are, in that fleeting flurry, between the Turners and the Blakes, and that unmanageable urge towards love-lust, every fucking time I see an attractive girl.

Pale and black

Frantically drunk in Sainsbury's on a Friday night. I see a girl I can't help but be stupified by. She is murderously beautiful. Pale. Black. It can't be right to call her beautiful, or can it?. What does beautiful mean? Is it anything I can talk about with validity after two bottles of wine and two months without intercourse? But what chimeras the supermarket aisles can conjure.
Why not use the word, as impossibly vague as it is? Because I've never had an unsentimental conviction about anything, drunk or sober. I've also been to enough weddings to be familiar with that criminal misrepresentation of the woman as 'beauty'.  Don't tell me beauty is subjective. That doesn't get anyone anywhere. Give me instead a treatise on aesthetics. Give me Burke on the sublime and the beautiful. Give me beauty you can measure. Give me her beauty to measure.