I once spent an afternoon in a caravan with a half dozen of the world's top models. Don't ask me what I was doing there but it's almost certainly not what you think. Ok, I can see you are curious - they were doing a photoshoot for an advertisement and I was a young hanger-on who had weasled himself into a minor supporting technical role. The only touching up to be done was with Photoshop and in make-up.
Far from being surrounded by Aphrodite and Venus and beauty too painful to behold, there was no face in the trailer that day that could launch a thousand ships. Models are no more beautiful than anyone else. What they are is photogenic, which means that light reflects from them in satisfying ways when reproduced in print or on camera.
The advert later appeared in magazines, and subway stations and giant posters above city squares. These girls next door had not been reproduced in print, they had been perfected in print - with specialist make up, professional lighting and photography, and Adobe Photoshop image manipulation software. They bore no resemblance to the girls I had poured coffee for in that trailer.
Our homes are, as L'Oreal keep on, 'worth it' too. John and Rachel bought a large Victorian house on the river, and gathered a pile of sumptious glossy magazines with titles such as 'luxury interiors' or 'extravagant homes'. Rachel scanned the internet for blogs on minimalism, feng shui, amazing interiors, quaker furniture, iron aga ovens, italian ceramic tiles, welsh slate, chromium heated towel rails that twisted in artful shapes and could be exhibited in the New York Gallery of Modern Art. John, meanwhile was working hard to pay for the marble flooring and the granite worktops and the hand made tiles and the Architecture and Interiors magazine subscriptions even though this meant he was getting back after dark and only saw son Charlie and daughter Lily in the soft luminescence of their respective night lights.
Artisans and builders and architects and jobbing labourers flooded the building until the dream had been realised and the house was ready. Amazing Interiors Magazine came and did a shoot for a colour spread and Rachel really did have a house like the ones in the magazines. She had created a perfect home.
Unfortunately, the house was soon soiled by the animals that lived within its walls. Newspapers and magazines were not placed perpendicular to the sharp corners of the steel and smoked glass coffee table. Tea bags dripped on granite surfaces as they were passed by spoon from the cup to the waste disposal unit in the sink. Charlie's toys left their sliding oak cupboards and danced around the rooms with wanton abandon. The weave in the rugs were compressed by the weight of person or persons unknown until they fell in all directions. Rachel had built a house so perfect that any minor blemish disturbed her greatly and she ran from room to room all day in an endless quest to right the wrongs. She rarely saw John who was working hard to pay for the leather tiles in the bathroom. She became depressed in her white space with natural stone accents. She was prescribed a course of anti-depressants. Sometimes only her love for her children prevented her from taking her own life.
I visited John and Rachel last summer. They had sold up and were living in a chaotic townhouse where toys lay on the stairs, coats had fallen from their hooks onto the floor below, bikes hugged the walls of the hallways, the walls were plastered by odd pictures and bills and post it notes with various long forgotton reminders about this or that, music and talk radio clashed on the upper landing. The house was chaotic yet Rachel was still, and her smile never faltered. 'Those houses are for magazines, she said, they are not to live in.'
We invent heaven in our minds as a mechanism of surviving and transcending the state we're in. But the state we're in is already perfect because in nature, there is no other form. Rocks are eroded, leaves decay ... purfexshin in their every state, like you.
