Of Beauty and Water

[The Magic Pudding]

This is an extract from Tim Winton's book Breathe.
There is an extract here, it is good but not really representative of the book, it introduces the storyteller as an older guy before he starts recounting his past.

Loonie had a nice old limp from his prang but it didn't prevent
him from clambering out across the rocks with me and the girl and
the three-legged-dog to watch the blokes glide by on their boards. 
they hooted and swooped and raced across the bay until they were
like insects twitching in the distance.  The girl, who said she was from
Angelus, gave us apples from her woven bag.  She talked about Iron
Butterfly and plenty of other things I knew as little about and I don't
know how I kept up my end of the conversation because my mind
was firmly elsewhere.  I couldn't take my eyes from those plumes
of spray, the churning shards of light.  Was this what the old man was
afraid of?  I tried to think of poor dead Snowy Muir but death was
hard to imagine when you had these blokes dancing themselves
across the bay with smiles on their faces and the sun in their hair.

I couldn't have put words to it as a boy, but later I understood
what seized my imagination that day.  How strange it was to see
men do something beautiful.  Something pointless and elegant, as
though nobody saw or cared.  In Sawyer, a town of millers and
loggers and dairy farmers, with one butcher and a rep from the rural
bank beside the BP, men did solid, practical things, mostly with
their hands.  Perhaps a baker might have had a chance to make
something as pretty as it was tasty, but our baker was a woman
anyway, a  person as dour and blunt as any boy's father and she
baked loaves like housebricks.  For style we had a couple of local
footballers with a nice leap and a tidy torpedo punt, and I would
concede that my father rowed a wooden boat as sweetly as I'd seen
it done, in a manner that disguised and discounted all effort, but
apart from that and those old coves with plastic teeth and necks
like turtles who go pissed on Anzac Day and sang old songs on
the verandah of  the Riverside before they passed out, there wasn't
much room for beauty in the lives of our men.  The only exception
was the strange Yuri Orlov who carved lovely, old-world toys from
stuff he fossicked up from the forest floor.  But he didn't like to show
his work.  He was shy or careful and people said he was half mad
anyway.  When it came to blokes, his was all the useless beauty the
town could manage.

For all those years when Loonie and I surfed together, having
caught the bug that first morning at the Point, we never spoke about
the business of beauty.  We were mates but there were places our
conversation simply couldn't go.  There was never any doubt about
the primary thrill of surfing, the huge body-rush we got flying down
the line with the wind in our ears.  We didn't know what endorphins
were but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and
how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just
watching.  We talked about skill and courage and luck – we shared
all that, and in time we surfed to fool with death – but for me there
was still the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing
on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do.

We sat on the headland with the girl and the dog until the breeze
turned and everyone paddled in.  We rode into town on the back of
their old Bedford, sunburnt and blissed to the gills.

The old man was furious – he saw the truck, caught sight of Loonie
hauling his warped bike home and figured it out for
himself – but nothing could touch me, no threat, no expression of
disappointment, and certainly no gentle appeal to reason.  I was
hooked.

Loonie and I went back and back and back that summer. We
hitched and rode and walked, begging boards from the Angelus
crew when they paddled in for lunch or at day's end, and week by
week we literally found our feet, wobbling in across the shorebreak,
howling and grinning like maniacs.  Even now, nearly forty years
later, every time I see a kid pop to her feet, arms flailing, all milk-
teeth and shining skin, I'm there; I know her, and some spark of
early promise returns to me like a moment of grace.

I think Tim creates beautiful things, he's 51 years old and still improving.
I suppose some people do beautiful things on water, it's more about being amongst intense beauty for me though.  You don't even have to get wet though it does help, but sitting on a rock in the midst of it can do it for me, start an engine and you'll kill it though.

I'm not sure what I'm inviting you to do here, talk of your feeling for water, a favourite artists words.  Water, liquid, aqua, flow, they are nice words.

[Ecurb Noselrub]

The full, honey-hued moon emerged from the water of the Gulf of Mexico on a clear, star-festooned night in South Padre Island, Texas, this October.  A couple from some Northern European country (Germany? Denmark?) was walking on the beach and did not notice our celestial sister at first, but suddenly the light caught the attention of the woman.  She enthusiastically grabbed her mate to show him the sight.  They embraced, enchanted by the birth that was taking place - the ocean giving life to light.  They did not see me, for I sat in darkness in the sand, but I saw them.  And the moon and the waves saw us, and bewitched us with their splendor.