Experimental: Pain and Beauty

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/photo-challenges/experimental/

This, an experiment with extremes – for the week just ended has brought them in abundance: Atypical heat for November has resulted in swarms of mosquitoes having a final fling at life, their high-pitched whining a sound I have come to dread, profoundly.

Monday night, after a day of open windows and warmth, the mozzies attacked en masse – and I woke (in so far as I actually slept, which is another story) Tuesday with a swollen left arm and wrist and bites galore (two of which I have captured on camera).

The gorgeousness and unseasonal delaying game (as if Winter were hiding shyly in the forest, refusing to be seen) formed an ironic contrast to the fiery pain and, eventually, course of antibiotics when my arm developed a nasty reaction to the mozzy toxins.

And yet – for such is life – beauty swelled also, a tranquil loveliness of colour and form, a skeletal radiance as sun, season and colour raised truce’s white flag to drape shawls over the death of trees.

As I itched and scratched and waged war upon tiny buzzing insects with ineffective tea-towels and poor aim, a sky of such limpid clarity that planes could be seen in roaring miniature, etched against early-morning blue, bloomed and blossomed and blent its palette with that of the more sombre November shades.

And so my images, both photographic and written, are in every sense experimental, fragments of strong emotions and physical feelings and unusual loveliness, latticed, lyricised and luminated by the calligraphy of bright sun.