The Australian gum is suited to that rich pink dawn, itself a kind of sartorial salute to the coming cleanness of day full, day proper. Streaked and tangled with creamed and fawned colours all, its bark and leaves are dawnlike, wild, gouged, deep but endlessly lightening, their twistedness saved by their graceful extension of limbs, contortions betwixt the cruel world of causality and that of dance, of art. Redeemed.
And so the day begins. It is my birthday. I am heartened by nature, and the nature I see in the people who surround me. Their greenness, freshness, pinkness. Pinkness is a most living trait, a flow, a pulse, a river under the skin. In crumpled, softest babies' skin, tightly wound around a life raft in a finger, a pinkie, as it's so often called, of that life which gave it life. It won't let go. They say that those in the concentration camps used to prick their fingers and pink their cheeks with blood to look healthy enough to work, so as not to be sent to die. Such was their human lust for life, despite the ofttimes horror of the world, its midnight moments, its heart of darkness. Rich blood flows in the dark too, and mostly so; it only dawns as it borders the pale skin, a mere grey barrier without its red embrace. But the cut is not dawn, it is fire. The wound is not begun softly, as an embrace, but violently explodes, as an apocalypse. It is made, it does not gather naturally at the folds of life and seep in, but pierces. There is horror, but there is also beauty there. We lie somewhere between the two. We colour the world with both, as we in turn are coloured.
