Wednesday, February 16, 1999
Photograph: Sandy at the bathroom mirror in the morning or, as those French
posters or paintings are captioned, "Sandra a sa toilette".
*
A musk. Each morning driven to emerge with a musk. Cosmetic heraldry: the
lipstick, the touches of powder, eye shadow, the hair brushed just so. Does
one highlight what one knows to be true? Look for colors that accurately
illuminate an interior? The way one color will balance with another? Or is
it to cover, to shield, to hide the lonely, etc., self?
It is a question that haunts: the nature of skin its social presence, its
force. The social skin - whether face and fashion, or architecture, or
landscape. What comes to shape from what is molten within? The mere fire,
the mere shape, the mere color, the greater voice. The quality of old crust,
the eruption in which the new cracks enfold the old to enjoin the new:
She who goes with the darkened shadows on a young face =
the (her) fire, its ashes not quite dampened.
One night, while staying in Florida, at 1:30 in the morning, there was a
fire in the hotel. Awakened by the wall shaking sounds of a thundering horn,
about a thousand of us exited by foot down the interior stairs to go outside
to the patio edge of a swimming pool and its adjacent lawns. A pale, thick,
ominous floating pillar of smoke rose into the sky over the hotel's kitchen.
In the dim nightlight, cleansed of make-up - blanched and sleepy-eyed - no
one looked alluring. Nocturnal, barely conscious, one's beauty gone under
(or, perhaps, is it, to feed on an inside fire?). A beauty that will wait
until morning to bring its colors back up.
What does it mean, finally, for any person, place or thing "to become awake
in one's skin"?
- from Crossing the Millennium, 1999 (Project)
Stephen Vincent
Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com
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