If All Things Are Beautiful
Heavy, heavy, the soul hangs over our heads. What shall the Redeemer do to own it?
They were artists. What did that mean in the early sixties, before the killing of Jack Kennedy, in the days just before people began to notice such a spectacle as finally was summed up and pegged for general use in the word hippy?
Ah, but this is a love story. It just happened that they were artists, young, believing that they would be artists all the days of their lives, and not caring to change or to believe they would ever have to change. Give them this: the courage of youth -- the short-sightedness and unpolluted dreams of youth. Give them that. They would not ask for more.
They met, and tuned into a communal household which had no distinction, no aim, and no money, to learn about how America compares with France in frugal living within a "garret" of romantic delusions which might bring them to the high point of their artistic drive -- that, somehow the world was right if they would just live there, so in love, and hopelessly drawn by this fact more even than a desire to paint, into a poor but maybe freer life together.
What is a romantic but one who says in his heart, "I will not be chained away from life,"? They felt that the society of politics was a world away from themselves -- that its force was a lead weight upon the indelible feature of mankind -- and upon his future as a man of the world -- ie that if he could never know the ecstasy of being poor then he would never learn what the unusual man is -- to be condemned in a white jail house, with no trace of the black races which sings a plaintive, soulful song to the same god whom we profess to understand --
Ah, so they lived that way, the way of mournful dreams. The way of black men and ghetto districts, of incredible colors. They took this in. They walked hand in hand down the city. They learned to know, they knew the black people. And the black people knew them.
For Rex & Gay it was more than a game -- though to many it seemed so then. There were so many parties. It seemed life was telling them to celebrate some mystical event -- some joyful revelation.
It continued until it could not last longer. It continued until the very last hours when the mobs began to run the novelty of American youth deep into dark opium dens and deep into dark pits of putrid earth's convulsions. They run.
On the last day of their lives they went down to the sea's edge. Raw sewage signs were nearby, but they did not see it. He came to her alone, asking, after a gentle spell of quiet, "Why did you go away?" She pretended the sand and magnificent gems of belated man's craft were all that mattered. Picking up one of these, she said, "because I am an artist, like you."
He only looked at the tomb-like white stone in his hand, and said nothing more. – from an unpublished MS by Gay Lee Merideth
