PHOTOGRAPH: © KAYE DONACHIE, COURTESY MAUREEN PALEY, LONDONI was about eight years old when a girl from somewhere in Scand-
inavia came to our house in Inverness.
I say ‘girl’ because she must have been only about 16 or 17, around
the same ages as my two brothers. She was a friend of a friend of one
of them, or of one of my sisters, I don’t remember now. Anyway, she
sat on the couch in our front-room and she talked, polite and warm,
to our parents about her visit to Scotland, she talked Snoopy with
me (she knew about Snoopy even though she came from so far
away), she laughed at my brothers’ jokes, joined in with my sisters
when they teased my brothers, ate the ham rolls, drank the tea,
watched the TV with us all, and couldn’t take her eyes off the ads in
the commercial breaks on ITV because she came from a country
where there were no adverts on TV.
No adverts on TV! We all found it amazing. We were amazed by
the attention she paid them, and by how she talked about them, like
they were short films in themselves. Her English was strange, sort
of new, even though it was just the same language we all used.
I looked round the room, and it was like we were all here because
of her, though she was just a visitor and here only in passing, but
golden, holding all of us and how we lived and who we were together.
It was as if light came out of her instead of the television. I saw my
brothers basking in it, saw them like I’d never seen them in the light
of beautiful, different Elisabeta, and my sisters too, and my mother
and father, I watched them see their own life, our life and us all anew
in it. She was leaving the next day. My mother sent my father down
to the shops first thing before she left, to buy her a silver Loch Ness
Monster necklace from Silvercraft, a rare honour of a present in our
family and something that happened only for really special guests
(t he si lver monsters were ex pensive).
Nearly 50 years later, my brother sent me a box of old photos from
our father’s house after he died. I picked up a stray square print that
had slipped down the side of the box. I didn’t recognise any of us in
this overexposed picture, no, it wasn’t overexposed, it was a picture
taken into the sun, of a girl with yellow
hair, a girl blurred by sunlight holding
a dandelion clock to her mouth. On the
back it said, in faded felt-tip pen, kisses
from Elisabeta.
I’ve seen beauty in literal action
only a couple of times in my life. About
10 years ago, I was at a party where an
‘Beauty is an ephemeral experience.
The notion of it has shown subtle shifts and
changes throughout history. Our shared
knowledge of the beautiful in images is ever
expanding over time’
Kaye Donachie
actress who was beginning to make a name for herself in Hollywood
movies was one of the throng. But she looked just like everybody
else, really. Then I saw her do this thing, I saw her quite consciously
reveal her beauty to the person she was talking to, literally as if she’d
lifted an invisible veil, a theatre curtain between her and us, and it
was only for a moment, but the effect was devastating, stunning,
made the person she was speaking to into a chosen person and
changed the party into something quite other. Then she lowered it
again, sheathed the beauty. We were all just ourselves.
It reminded me of once when I’d been in the audience in a cinema
at a showing of Pandora’s Box, the great GW Pabst silent film from
1929 starring Louise Brooks, in which she plays Lulu, the vivacious
prostitute and showgirl. At one point Lulu is in court, about to be
tried for murder. There, in front of the lawyers, judge and jury, she
lifts the dark veil that’s been down over her face, a face we’ve already
been watching for the last hour or so, a face that’s not new to us. But
the whole audience in that cinema I was in gasped out loud, like
everybody in the courtroom did too in their silence.
Is that what beauty is – an act of revelation, of seeing, or of
re-seeing as if for the first time?
Recently, I’ve been teaching some undergrad students. I use the
word ‘teaching’ advisedly; mostly, we just talk about what makes
writing and life creative.
One particular group of students I teach are all in love with Keats.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty. They’re new to Keats, or rather, he’s new
to them, a whole new threshold. One of them is in love with
everything to do with poetic rhythm and line-length. One moves
seamlessly between different European languages like she’s an
embodiment of the fact that languages are family. One uses the
power of images exceptionally well in the stories that she writes but
as yet has no real idea that they’re working like they are. At some point,
I thought to myself as I came down the stairs to leave the college
and go home in the evening spring light, she’ ll realise their power.
I closed a door behind me, saw a black and white feather on the
grass at my feet. I thought, God, what a beautiful thing that feather
is on the grass.
Then I laughed at myself. Talk about an education. Things will
never stop lighting themselves unexpectedly up.
That’s the truth of it. That’s the beauty.A REVELATION
Beauty is...
by Ali Smith