Dialogue: Youthful destinies written in stone

The youths were writing a message in stones on the empty beach. It was hard labour but the two young men in the prime of the acne-bearing years seemed happy in their work.

Merrily they hauled the rough volcanic stones from distant corners of the beach and carefully they laid them in their allotted places and, without pause to rest their lungs or to lick their scratched hands or to stand back to admire their work, they set off for more stones.

My dogs and I stood together unseen on the hill above to watch.

The message they were writing was nearly a metre high and oriented towards the sea. Had I been aboard one of the yachts anchored bobbing in the soft waters I would have been ideally placed to read the words.

As it was, I had to do so upside down but I was able to make out that so far the boys had written F*** YO.

(If you have just read a string of asterisks be aware that those asterisks belong not to the boys, but to this newspaper's respect for the innocence of your breakfast table.)

Maybe the youths held a grudge against some character who had taken refuge on a yacht and whose water-girt security they resented, but I considered it more likely that they were firing their challenge at the empty sea and at the hills beyond and, indeed, at the world at large. For the adolescent male is a fierce beast. The world is his to conquer.

And as the dusk began to settle like a thin fog, the words on the beach seemed to resemble the great cry of young stags coming into rut, bellowing that their loins are potent and the world should get out of the way or suffer insemination.

And as I pondered thus in the literary critical manner which has always been my wont, the youths completed the seventh letter of their epistle to the universe. It was U.

But even then they did not cease from their labours. They sought more stones.

For one exciting grammatical moment I thought that they were going to build an exclamation mark, but they settled instead for a full stop. Their poem was done.

And what a poem. My literary antennae were all aquiver. Here on this remote beach I had stumbled upon two true voices for the 21st century.

Uncluttered by any redundant notions of artistic tradition or moral probity, here were two offspring of a restrictive society hurling off the restraints of convention and bellowing to the skies with a raw intensity which most of our soi-disant artists can only whistle for.

Here was an expression of self more vivid and intestinal than one would find in a mile of Whitcoulls poetry shelves. Here was the thing itself in all its shocking primacy. The sweet brutality of art.

Just at that moment the smaller of my dogs, friend to everyone, lover of the world, set off down the steep track to say with her tail and squirming torso how thrilled she was to share a planet with these artists. I was not best pleased.

Art is one thing and artists are another. Though I admired the raw passion of the poem, I feared that the youths, their creative faculties aroused, might take to my mongrel with a battery of stones. For, as we critics have long observed, the urge to create contains within it the antithetical forces of destruction. Art is a bloody process.

But I need not have worried. Perhaps because they were spent with the imaginative effort of their work, the boys greeted my dog with apparent affection. Emboldened, I clambered down to the beach.

"Good evening sir," said the larger of the boys.

I could barely refrain from laughter. The delicious deliberate self-conscious irony of the "sir" confirmed what I had suspected from above. Here was the post-modern voice we critics have been seeking in vain for so long.

I summoned my dogs and headed away, knowing that these artists had to be allowed to be and to breathe and to create. Their destiny is written in their blood. We critics must simply stand aside.

I had business the next morning and although the excitement of my discovery resonated in my skull throughout the day, it was not until evening that I was free to return to the beach. I hurried along the track, climbed over the ridge and looked down.

I have barely the words to describe what I saw. The stones lay still upon the beach and they still spelt a message to the sea. But vandals had been at work.

"LOVE YOU" said the stones. Sometimes we critics can only despair.