Tonight's Poet Corner: Something Extraordinary

Something Extraordinary
by Belinda Roddie

Many times, observers reflect
on the effects of gravity on a
quarter high-life society - where a sliver of
humanity injects champagne by the flute, and a
greasy chunk of the stranded
survives off the very measly products that
the sliver of humanity creates
in the back room. The soup can
extravagances of lower class existence echoes a
French revolutionary sentiment, when "Let them eat
cake" was derived from the word brioche,
which was really a sweet, buttery bread that
only the bourgeois socialities had the chance to eat.

Now you see why Marie Antoinette said it -
out of ignorance. Thinking that the very
slovenly peasants who shook their sewage-slimy
fists at her could munch on the basic formalities of
her own example of ecstasy. And in truth, the
guillotine didn't serve as a revelation or epiphany to
her, or her husband, or any others pinned down by their
own weight to the floor, fed sweets by ten servants,
questioning where it all went wrong. The truth
was already there to begin with. They already knew.

The fact is,
history is freeze-dried over time, and consequently,
it seems to become far more straightforward the
more you examine it. There's an awful lot of
gray in the middle, but the black and white, the
corners of the clock where the brass pendulum
ricochets, can't be ignored. The rich and the poor. The
establishment and the revolution. The saintly
and the devilish. Love and hate. Life and death.
Unity and division. Status quo and rebellion.
We have been so bred and fed on the in-betweens of
philosophy and abstract - and that's fine. It's
glorious. We have been allowed to think
between the lines. But ultimately,
we have been constructed
from the cardboard cut-outs of something
extraordinary. Where flat facial profiles
border three-dimensional
vitality. Where the spheres all separate into definite
meaning. Where we, after
all the scrounging for mangled reality,
come back to a similar, refreshing conclusion.