This time of year it is hard not too find oneself pondering. Debating within about lessons learned, and memories of the previous months and years. We’re a people of continuity; yesterday was fine because tomorrow I can continue, taking everything from yesterday with me. And that’s how the majority of us find peace. And that’s how I find peace during the Christmas season. Solace and contention with it as I wait to try and be a better me. Though I always worry (and maybe so does everyone else), there is a strange fearful content within me during these dark snowy nights. What will tomorrow bring? More importantly can I deal with it? And even more importantly if I can, how will I go about it? Will I be bold, brave? Will I fall weak in my time of action? And when I find beauty, will my timing be right? Will I even notice it? I need to start this by asking all these questions because I myself am afraid of answering. I need to be sure what we’re talking about. Even though I am certain I am not. This is going to be difficult.
I am done trying to find beauty in things. I’m sick of disappointment. Every beautiful thing is chained to something unbeautiful. Something sick, disturbed, something that will break my heart and make me reevaluate everything I was so sure of. I cannot blame a girl, or any one else anymore for how I feel. Putting a face to my shame. Though pity has only left me penniless. Take your solace and be content with it. You’re too young to know truth anyway. And then they were right. And beauty, what would I know of it anyway.
I can sense it when I see decay. The death of a rose or a child, the tears of a young girl as she becomes a woman or a woman as she holds onto her youth knowing that its long gone. These have always appealed to me; a broken heart, a ruined car, a Golden temple as it burns, or a starving man with the assumptions of a point. Why though? Because re-birth is not a decision, change has already taken place, and going back is not an option. I guess loss is my idea of beauty. Or at the least it’s something that will make me cry.
The starving artist, was he brilliant or an idiot? Artistry. I can do it; we are allowed to believe in anything. So we do. We paint so that we can make them think differently, and we do paint. Though who’s to say that killing yourself in the process is the right answer, that there is truth in any of our actions. I get it, his body was the canvas, like a dancers. I love entertainers. Though if his actions hold truth and beauty because of it then why don’t we praise Doctors, Astronauts and farmers. Why is it Rock Stars, poets and Jazz Musicians that clutter the covers of our magazines? Maybe I read the wrong magazines. If it was me I’d say the stoics were beautiful; like oak trees, their temperament and endurance to be anything other than human. Though people only notice the starving because it reminds them of their own weakness, and that they are human. And human is beautiful, because it is fleeting, dying, and always imperfect. Sure some will say a starving man is a pathetic man, but give them a dying dog and they will cry. There is no difference between the man and the dog other than his choice. And because of that choice the man will always have more beauty. Pathetic he still can be. Though because he can understand the outcomes of his actions, his beauty lies in his failings.
My eyes are glazed as she asks me to dance. I’m more important than everything she’ll ever experience. I’m on to something tonight, look at my beauty. She will, and I’ll kiss her friend or forget.
Can beauty not be glorious? What it is with this obsession to see it turn to chaos, to see the glory of a Golden temple burn before one’s eyes. What, so that we see it reduced to our level: vile, pathetic, mortal. This must be a modern way of thinking. The Romans did not think like this when they built their coliseum or the Greeks when they constructed Athens. It was the reproduction of the Glory of the Gods they were seeking. And what is that if not only a hope for the Glory of humans. When I see a skyscraper or hear that score, I find proof in human potential. And that’s when I get it. As I watch the movie and listen to that score, I see a boy running towards a girl. He’s running because he has already lost her once. He has felt pain, and understands beauty as truthfully as he can, and it is her. The score represents not his loss but his power to overcome it, to learn and be human. As he runs the music builds and we feel, we feel the power of the human spirit and that is true beauty. And when he kisses her, as we know he will, we cry and swell inside not because a boy loves a girl, but because a boy has found something if only one thing that he knows for certain to be beautiful and hold truth. And that’s when I understand that beauty can be glorious, and that it is not a skyscraper, a huge score, a dead flower, or a broken temple. It is not a boy or a girl, a kiss or a tear. That it is yearning. And it is human. And human is always beautiful.
And then again that is just one take on it. Aesthetics are the one part of philosophy that everybody likes to talk about, though nobody seems to make any sense when doing so. Everything seems pretty under-the-moonlight, or from a distance, or when its in your pocket. But the thing itself never lives up to my standards, she never does. Romance and beauty is to be naive of a thing’s real potential. It’s hormones, endorphins and science. It’s private, and always subjective, impossible to hold, impossible to understand.
And the only difference between the man at the bar, drowning because he can’t be a father and the man who designed the skyscraper are a few man-made adjectives. They are both beautiful, and both can inspire a 14-year old girl.
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