When it is a hot and sunny afternoon a lot of things look so superfluous and perch so precariously on the edge of being ugly and beautiful, I do not try to label them as one or the other, and am resigned to categorising them as superfluous aesthetic ecstasy: dead marine invertebrates, discarded plastic, garish cotton, feathers on a kite, the mouth and eyes of a tropical cat, flames from a bonfire, the taste of fatty hot meat, the taste of fatty hot cheese, the smell of pungent smoke.
When we eat fatty food in December when Orion soars in the sky or when we light a fire in late October evenings and enjoy its heat, it is sustenance: not superfluous ecstasy.
I remember one hot and sunny afternoon I went for a walk and I was in a sordid part of a town and the only people I could see were obviously on drugs and perhaps had reached their own version of superfluous ecstasy as they staggered around in shell suits. I walked through a part of the town where the asphalt was melting but this was little superfluous ecstasy because it was muted by the smell of nicotine on polyester carpets (another superfluous ecstasy- worthy of cancer for some) and I saw a twenty foot tiger and its eyes and mouth tasted of a Mars Bar which had melted in an overheated car and which I remembered eating in the 1980s (my earliest memory of superfluous ecstasy) and its eyes were even more of a superfluous ecstasy because they reflected the tawny twilight rather than the raw summer afternoon.
Perhaps this sounds insane, so I should say that it was a fake tiger, in the sense that it was a photograph advertising a brand of petrol. Those long dead micro-organisms in the depths of the sea, cruelly dug up for cars I can't drive but I also appreciate the superfluous ecstasy of the smell of petrol on a hot summer afternoon.
I felt sick looking at its lean flanks which suggested a kind of energy that I could not have, as if my own abdomen had been plunged into freezing water. But I felt ill looking around the billboard which was on a slope covered with nettles, their chatoyancy in the sun a superfluous ecstasy too far and upset my stomach. I also felt ill looking at the brambles which were withered even on the hot summer, choked by inedible nettles. I even felt my tongue get pained by the splinters on the billboard which had been painted black and the paint was splitting because it had drank up superfluous sunshine.
This memory is of something that has never happened to me and probably never will. But it is more vivid than many memories that I do have.
