Is This Beauty
I’ve been thinking lately about beauty. A confounding topic of which there has always been much written, from Plato to Aquinas to scientists and aesthetics; about beauty there is always something to say. Beauty is not self-evident, I believe. Beauty requires a subject, one who experiences the object/s through all gamuts of perception; taken in as radiance: beauty is harmonious and whole. Because of this I would wager to say that there is something universal about beauty, some truths that can be deciphered; truths made known to the subject, by this time, far away from the object/s perceived.
Beauty, to me, is Nature above all. It is in Nature that I experience the radiance, almost like an unearthly force, it sweeps through me as if immersed in a cold bath: exhilaration. Whenever I have perceived beauty in this way I have found it to be under a combustion of circumstances that can neither be calculated beforehand nor determined afterwards, besides of course, the necessary openness to be moved. Nature is beauty, it is openness and it is life.
When I think about beauty, I approach with aggravation what is often taken for beauty: the physically attractive, mostly women. Beauty conceived here is so stifling and narrow; the definitions of what is good-looking and what is not comes from values imposed from the outside: society and the sexuality of man. Men like to call much of their sexuality by instinct—when was the last time you gathered wood? slaughtered a deer with a stone-carved knife?—which is absurd for every other instinct is dead. They also like to put causes and preferences on insinuated fertility, in a world of photoshopping and overpopulation isn’t that stupidity? If we are human because of our brain and heart, women are so much smarter because we actually use them. Confining beauty to ratios of flesh and appearance simply gives more excuses for seeing women as object, like the Other, like a thing.
We do not know what beauty is, what moves us. Scientists have made formulas for faces under the assumption that beauty is static therefore measurable. Who would dare step out into the sunset and report back exactly what it was that moved one? Pick it apart as if it were made of bits and pieces? Pink hues flared the sky as the burning ball tore a golden streak across the devouring ocean. Poetry, art, it’s the best we can do, the nearest approximation. Beauty is for each person a different thing.
Those theories of symmetry are summaries of the average male vision. Average is boredom, normalcy, monotony. My mind certainly does not machinate like the average woman’s: Beauty is not attainable in a mirror. One must step beyond the mirror, into the mirror, if you like. The average woman is trapped by the shallow definition of beauty: their level of physical attractiveness. Once one steps into the mirror, becomes both the reflection and the reflected simultaneously, one simply is.
Beauty has always been for me the transcendence of the physical state. To arrive requires a combustion of circumstances that flame if given enough air to breath. I don’t expect the average male or female—both are to blame—to question the basic word. But neither do I believe beauty to be a question solely for the artist. Beauty is freely given, it is inherent in more than what one can believe. We have all experienced it; we must continue to experience it, truthful to ourselves so we all may experience it forever more.
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