VOLUNTARY COMPLEXITY

To hell (and I don’t mean symbolically) with simplicity, austerity, clarity. I’m tired of minimalist, unadorned, stark, stripped-down, zen-garden bare. To hell with rooms without clutter, poetry without license, art without metaphor, body without magic (the heart a pump, the brain a computer–give me a break), stars without myth (the sun a nuclear reactor), love without mystery (it’s only hormones). I want life intricate, elaborate, rich, too heavy to hold in one hand, too sumptuous to digest in one sitting, life that sounds like a hundred choirs singing different music from a hundred balconies all at once, that looks like sedimentary rock stacked with the history of oceans, that tastes like salt and wine. smells like woods in spring– flowers pushing up through rotting wood, layer upon layer of mould, last year’s mat of leaf and fern; life like a church built on a Roman temple built on a Celtic shrine built on a Neolithic tomb; like my study with its dolls and scripture commentaries, ink pots, angels, rubber chickens; like a huge ancient house inhabited forever by the same clan–Grandma’s books and Great-grandpa’s chair and Great-great Aunt Sophy’s silver, somebody’s threadbare velvet curtains and Persian rugs, somebody’s empty laudanum bottles slipped between the walls, five hundred year old roses in the garden, the roots of trees cracking through the deepest dungeon, a thousand pairs of tattered slippers kicked under the bed.