Some of my absolute favorite contemporary art came from a series that Damien Hirst did a few years ago called 'Superstition'. It was a series of enormous collages, which from a distance look like stained glass windows, but as you approach you are struck by the realization that they are in fact not composed of slivers of glass, but rather of thousands upon thousands of butterfly wings. Someday I hope to own a piece, but until then Ill make due with this book:
In it, the images of Hirst's collages are interspersed with poems by Philip Larkin which play brilliantly off the two themes in 'Superstition': death and religion. Now on this blog I've posted "this be the verse" which is far and away one of the most amazing poems ever, but I just read another poem of his and it brought me to tears, so I thought I'd share:
High Windows
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives-
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
-Philip Larkin
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