cliterature

This is the early stage of my work in progress, Femme. The basic idea is that the immature girl figure is the female ego. The right shoulder will be Lilith, the left Eve. It is about the old angel/harlot dichotomy. When the main options are the ends of a false dichotomy it becomes hard to…. become.

Which is all too deep for me. But once I ad some folliage and a snake I hope it will pass for far more meaningful than it is.  If I was a better write I would throw together some lines like Byron’s “She walks in beauty like the night.”  he was writing about how dark and light can, with innocent and true inner beauty, be effortlessly combined.

He was writing about a beauty seen when he was in mourning, an attraction to a woman who was his cousin, and a love of one woman shortly before he married another.  So maybe it was an ease he yearned for an imagined more than one any person obtains.  Or maybe it was simply that he to had long lost the innocence that allows it.

But we can still appreciate that quality if serenity when seen in others–or imagine it there:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o’er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek and o’er that brow
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,—
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.

I, on the other hand walk headless, with an imaginary Judeo-Christian ancestor in each shoulder. But what’s a girl to do :)