Coiled up life; stored up energy

Can you discern beauty through ‘taste’? Or does beauty always have to be something visual and tangible?

I’ve been asking myself this over the last few days. The week seems to have been dominated by food. From a trip to a Michelin-starred restaurant as a one-off with friends (verdict: meh; but my mates said it was wasted on a vegetarian). To a meander round Borough Market with the sun on my back.

Rows and rows of gnarled up mushrooms, looking like alien life forms: mottled shades of brown. Some even purple or red or yellowy. A big, bold artichoke, wrapped in spiky, fleshy leaves that clung like petals on a flower. In fact, every stall was just like a flower bed: deep smartings of colour, a rush of aroma. It’s a shame that we don’t tend to think of fruit and vegetables (or food, generally) as art, though we write poems galore about flowers. To me, a wavy, golden pepper is every bit as beautiful as a daffodil; an aubergine as mysterious as a hyacinth.

These things also give us life. They are coiled up sunshine; they are stored up energy. And, god, they taste good.

I ate melt-in-the-mouth Comte and cake and vegetable burgers, and I sipped a hot apple and cinnamon drink that trickled down my throat with a warm, syrupy movement that was comforting and nostalgic – almost like cough medicine (though it tasted a lot better). I swooned, closed my eyes, I murmured appreciatively. But was I dabbling in beauty?

I know most aestheticians and philosophers would say no. But I would argue that to exclude any sense data is to elude a true definition of beauty. When people find something beautiful, it is seldom through eyes alone. When I find a field beautiful, it is because I also smell the lavender; feel the soft, feathery touch of the grass on a leg; maybe I taste the pollen that drifts languidly in the air. And then there is another aspect, a kind of additional sense and I don’t know what I’d call it. That every scene, every detail, and every thing we encounter is coated in context. Maybe that field has extra beauty because it reminds me of country drives in my childhood; when my mum sung along to the radio, and the windows were wound open. Maybe it also makes me think of the scene in A Room with a View: a film I caught late once on TV in my early adolescence. And I stared and I stared at Daniel Day Lewis and Helena Bonham Carter, and I thought I’d never seen a couple more beautiful and sumptuous. And my heart beat fast in my chest and I later came to recognise it as the acceleration of puberty.

Food is beautiful because it also has context: happy meals, happy times. The people I’ve loved who have fed me. Who have fed me out of love and for love.

To me, beauty is anything that transports. Beauty is anything that lifts. Beauty is anything that gives sheen to the humdrum, even if the veil is thin.

Photo courtesy of Nicola photographs flickrstream.

We are full of other people

Sometimes you find beauty in the strangest places.

It was a serendipitous chain of events that led me to book Daniel Kitson’s new show at the Union Chapel in Islington on Wednesday.

I am a compulsive ‘signer upper’ and seem to be continually signing up to mailing lists, competitions and forums online. Something or other, some sort of recommendation, must be what led to me receiving intermittent emails from The Invisible Dot, some sort of comedy/events website.

In October, an email came through about a gig from the comedian, Daniel Kitson. Years ago, someone I worked with told me how great he was live. Some barely functioning synapse in my brain staggered back into life and recalled, hazily, how he had once won the Perrier Award. I looked him up on the net, but didn’t even read about his comedy style. I saw his beard and thought he looked interesting, like an insecure sax player. (It makes sense to me.) Before I knew it, I’d ordered the things. The internet makes it too easy. It’s not like ‘buying’ at all.

Fast forward to a drizzly, sleet-filled day in December and I am sitting in the most beautiful grade-II listed church. It isn’t that it’s ornate – in fact, it’s the opposite. It is carved lovingly out of wood, with an inconspicuous, domed roof, and a single ostentatious arc of stained glass at its centre. I am not religious, but I sit in the pews and find myself hushed, near-reverential. Sometimes I think that people go to church not to worship a god but to worship this ‘thing’: this sense of aesthetic; being locked in against the elements outside; the collective experience; the monumental awe; the sense of reaching, being; the pinnacle of sense itself.
 
I thought the comedy might be incongruous. In fact, it was not. It was complemented.

Daniel Kitson’s comedy show is about death. Although he laughs this off at the beginning as unlikely material, I am obsessed by Woody Allen (the pre-noughties stuff, mind), and so frequently turn to the macabre, the dark, the twistings and turnings of mortality, as kindling for gags.

So although I didn’t find Kitson very novel, he was still very funny. He comes across as a lovable sort of guy. I could relate to his self-deprecation, his very modern loneliness – and he gives it all a fresh twist. He even makes a joke of his “courage” for being a comedian with a fairly bad stutter (I didn’t know he had one before I went), and I did feel a bit guilty, because I had, indeed, thought, “Isn’t he brave for going up there?”. Members of my family have stammers – and I thought it was refreshing to see someone with a stammer being the funny guy, the active – rather than the passive, the one that (less good) comedians find it easy to take the piss of.

But maybe I need to stick to the point. The point is this: sometimes you pick up a book and feel a sense of weight, of significance. You were meant to read it at this time and place. The message speaks to you directly – to the extent that you feel more like a character than a reader.

So it was with this comedy. I felt like something fortuitous had led me to book those tickets, to be sitting on that hard, wooden pew.

Kitson’s show mostly deals with his grief about the death of his aunt Angela – how, when she died, the days seemed to darken and everything was ruined and rotted through by the inevitability of demise.

The show lifts up at the end to reveal the first streaks of daylight: when the sadness ebbs, and you remember the person you loved – not at the end, not even when they were young, but somewhere in the middle.

He remembers how his aunt Angela, who had Down’s syndrome, would say “Greaaaat” every time she had a knickerbocker glory. He says he hears her voice now, whenever he has one.

Daniel Kitson announces: “We are full of other people”.

This could sound a bit like a platitude. I’m sure we’ve all thought similar things, heard similar phrases (if not exactly this).

But something about the way he says it, the way he approaches the sentiment… and something about the setting, and about how I am feeling, and how my mind frequently drifts these days to my nanny, who died around this time last year: her frailty at the end, her mental anguish, the sense of hopelessness. How one day someone can exist in all their complexity, their brain still firing, their heart still beating, their cells still throbbing. Then the next day – nothing.

Something about this: “We are full of other people”. My eyes fill with tears.

The next day I eat some hummus. Something prosaic and mundane. I remember that it was my nanny who first introduced me to hummus. I was about twelve years old. I thought it was gloopy and rough and odd. It left a smear of paste on the top of my gums.

Eventually, I came to like hummus. Not long after that, I was obsessed.I would scoop it out of the container with my fingers. I couldn’t get enough. I would eat it at my nanny (and her husband’s) lovely, warm house in the Somerset countryside. Sitting by the aga with my hands wrapped around a mug of tea. Watching my mum and nanny sit and reminisce and giggle like schoolgirls. The dogs milling about my legs. The clock ticking up high by the ceiling.

All this. Just from hummus.

It makes me smile that even eating hummus can be chocked full of memories. Full of people. I am a walking bank of memory. I am Legion: trembling, heaving, overspilling, with all the people I have ever met and loved or liked and who have ever had an influence. Even people I have never met, but have read their words, or heard their songs, or seen them flicker on the screen at the cinema.

It’s not wholly of comfort – but it’s a little comfort. That somewhere, in here, people live on. As long as I’m here, they will be here too.

It’s a beautiful thought, and makes me like my reflection a little better in the mirror.

When Daniel Kitson left the stage, I wanted to run after him and be his friend. The show didn’t make me screech and howl with laughter, but it was always wry and consistent and amusing and quietly touching and thought-provoking – and you don’t get much comedy that does that.