Another of those little project schemata that I've been pondering is creating short poetic descriptions of pretty girls. Though, in fact, it's not the pretty girls so much as the poetic ones. Some of the most physically attractive girls are actually quite bland in terms of poetic description, whereas girls with style, or with a strange kind of movement, or mannerisms, or speech tones, are very good for poetry. When I say poetry, note, I don't mean anything necessarily concentrating on the metre and rhyme in some formal way; I mean whatever kind of words are most appropriate to the expression, unlimited.

This is a great little idea because, amongst other functions, it exposes one of those societal lacks of good faith. Once I'd thought of the idea, based on a combination of inspiration from Feynman and Coleridge, I figured I'd look at a few girls and scribble down some thoughts and see if there was any value. Immediately I found the first problem was one of craft: you can't just look at girls and write things down about them. At least, you can't do it in an impolite sort of way, so the main basis for observation has to be a really good incidental memory. I had thought about making some more formal study of it, for example posting myself at my library's grand viewpoint and observing and writing there, but that smacks of effort.

It also got me thinking about painting nudes. Feynman talks about painting nudes when he got into his artistic phase. Painting nudes is fine as an art form, but it or any of its equivalents are not what I want to do. If I went into an art class and just asked all the girls if they'd stand up so I could write poems about them (as Feynman noted, “you just ask them?!”), I'd quite likely get a positive response and be able to write some fairly interesting things, but it would be artificial. It'd be people posing for poetry. “Posing”—the word says it all.

It's funny because Feynman actually talks about ogling the girls, and doesn't really say too much in terms of poetic description about it. But if you really analyse your thoughts about people that you see round and about, if you're anything like me you'll find that they have an extremely complex composition bedded in received notions of style and behaviour. One girl today reminded me of a packet of Silk Cut. I don't smoke, and I haven't even seen a box of these things in years, but the packaging is really distinctive. This girl's skin was exceptionally white, and she had dark black hair and a purple dress. It was very Silk Cut. She was, ironically, one of the least attractive of poetically notable girls I saw today; ironic because being compared to a packet of cigarettes would not be regarded as flattering, whereas I like the packaging of Silk Cut and yet I didn't find her attractive.

Another girl, really more into the zone of woman (I've often thought about doing a survey of “a $num year old $girl”, where girl is one of girl, lady, woman, female, etc., to see what the ranges are, descriptively speaking), was one I'd seen before: she had been reading a book about the Iceni queen Boudica, and she looked a bit like the popular vision of Boudica, with her demeanour, choice of dangling earrings, robust age, and that sort of thing. That made the association stick, and so I was able to recognise her again today.

There are many other instances from today that make good examples for poetic awen or muse. A girl with a navy-blue with white-polka-dots top and a flowery flowing skirt (bizarre combination) that was dashing headlong into the toilet; a frightened whilst daydreaming looking short girl who was clutching her books to her bust very tightly whilst wearing an odd low-cut top; a leonine looking girl with dirty blonde hair and slightly Roman features intently reading a book under a tree. Would have been interesting to see what book; if it were something about lions or Romans it would have been a mordant for the image.

It's actually much easier to capture one's personal perspectives in this way when you focus on it. Most of my travels are philosophical in nature (cf. philosophical walks), but generally girls are a very brief tangents to the things that I tend to think about, and I rapidly crystalise very complex interlayered ideas of them and dismiss the whole thing within seconds. Once you just make it more of a primary concern, to write poetry, the power of observation itself actually increases.

One of the main points about this is that it wouldn't be enough to merely photograph people to capture this level of description about them. It's the level of transmogrification that the subjects undergo in the poetic mind that provides the power: it's the conjunction of poetic subject material, poetic reception, and poetic expression that counts.