Beauty

I was talking to a very lovely young friend the other day, and she mentioned that she was often uncomfortable when men complimented her, as she was never sure whether or not they did so with "tricky motives."  That started me thinking about beautiful women, and how men react to them.  We talked for awhile on the subject, and I came to some interesting (if not personal) conclusions. It occurred to me that men react to the beauty in a woman in at least three different ways, and that I had probably experienced all three. The first is a possessive reaction - he wants to have her beauty, to keep it, to control it, to take it away from the rest of the world.  Her beauty is an acquisition to be put away on a shelf, like a purloined piece of art, providing him the perverse pleasure of taking it out of the sun, letting it fade and decay, all  his. Even though he may display her beauty on his arm now and again, it is just another gesture of his dominant suppression. If he manages to convince her, she will surrender her beauty to this emotional erosion, giving him the satisfaction of watching it slowly die.

The second doesn't want to possess her beauty, but he does want to be near it.  He wants to admire it, to warm himself in its luster. He may have fleeting fantasies about having her, keeping her beauty for himself, but he knows this is impossible, he wouldn't begin to know what to do with it. The pleasure he knows admiring her eventually is corrupted by the pain of wanting her.  And on a random day, a random issue, a random comment will derail him, and the man she thought of as a close friend will strike out at her briefly and incomprehensibly, then flee in humiliation.

Finally, there is a man who sees her beauty, and wants to bring it in close and  tangle it up elegantly with the good and pure things he feels in his heart. He doesn't want to steal her beauty, or to own it exclusively, only to embrace it, let it connect the disparate constituents of  his soul.  Her beauty will fill the empty parts of his chest, will create the vessel he is meant to be - his soul, her beauty will manifest themselves in the exponential capacity of love. His love, her beauty will be conjoined, and his chest will rise and fall with the softness of a winter's sigh each moment he looks at her.  And if she takes her embrace back from him, he will find he has no internal systems of his own, no network of emotion or grounding rod for his pain - he will once again be hollow, but with the bitter sweet memory of  the consonant corporeal entity he once thought was his heart.

I have been these three men, and I have possessed, admired, and enmeshed the beauty of a woman.  When I finished my thoughts with my young friend, she asked me "which number are you now?"  I thought about it for a bit, then replied........................

The Lure of Beauty, the Pursuit of Truth

Was reading Santayana this morning and came across this term, the lure of beauty, the pursuit of truth.  The symmetry and  disjuncture in this juxtaposition struck me immediately. The difference between being lured and to pursue caused me to think about both processes, and the influence of the destination.  We behave much differently when we are attracted to something than when we seek it out.  I wondered if we are drawn to beauty naturally, and have to work at getting to the truth, maybe even to want to get to the truth. What happens when we fall versus when we chase or climb.  Beauty is clearly not a choice, truth clearly should not be.

Beauty

A beautiful thing draws us to it.  We may not think about why it is beautiful, not need to know what attracts us, we simply feel the need to go to it, be with it, possibly possess it.  We don't get to choose what is beautiful to us, we can't make something so even if we feel we should. We seem unable to share beauty with each other - I don't know how many times I have shared a beautiful song, poem, even a movie with a friend and find myself baffled when that friend "doesn't get it."  I believe we do try to adopt a sense of beauty from others at times, but it is synthetic in that the beauty shared is really the extension of the common friendship and love that motivates us to enhance our connections, to magnify them.  We can connect deeply with another who has independently recognized the beauty of something, but often find that it is our only connection and it is so impalpable that we find little else to share, little else to connect us.

So beauty becomes a very personal thing, a very pure, singular siren that beckons us, and we rarely resist. 

Its call, so clear and compelling, creates an attraction that reconciles the irreconcilable - nothing can keep us from it, and we are abjured from any sin employed to get to it.  Nothing is so concrete yet so abstract; concrete in that we see it, feel it, know it; abstract in that we cannot share it, cannot communicate the attraction we feel, the attraction we are doomed to indulge. Beauty pulls us in, and we no more question the inevitability of our desire to follow,or our  path to get there than does a rock, dropped from a distance, questions gravity.

Truth

Truth needs to be sought, as if it is hidden, obtuse, or elusive.  We know at once that we should chase it even though we may not care for what we discover, and that it might not serve our needs and desires.  Truth is not beautiful, it could not be given its obscurity - beautiful things are drawn to the open, drawn to be admired. We rarely seek it altruistically, more often to support or rationalize a goal or ideology we have already created.  Truth, or the discovery of truth, becomes a task.  A pilgrim, setting out on the path to truth, prepares to humble himself and to be radically changed by the quest, let alone the final acquisition. He knows it will be difficult, and has to steel himself in preparation.  What does that say about truth?  What does it say about us?

Many of us will "seek truth" once we think we have figured out what it is, and by then uncovering it, can utilize it for our own advantage.  Few truly open their minds and hearts and prepare for anything in this quest.  Truth is necessarily relative when mankind relates to it with motive or malice.  It is not a tool to be wielded, but a blueprint to be followed. It is not beauty, cares little how you court it, truth dictates the path with the discipline of logic. One not only needs to come to it, one needs to come to it in the right way - there is no serendipitous passage.  Truth is a severe and meticulous mistress, quickly alienating many a sojourner who unwisely romanticizes her. 

Desire Then

We desire to consummate our attraction to beauty, not to slake it, but to yield to it faithfully.  Desire becomes the pursuit and subsequent communion with beauty, an unending intercourse where pleasure in process and pleasure in culmination coalesce effortlessly and beginning usurps end.  Desire for beauty is to be unleashed.

Desire for truth is less honest, less naive.  We desire truth to explain the world around us, often in a way that grants us advantage, puts us ahead of lesser thinkers.   There is a sublime power in the ability to point out a fact or a truth so cogently that it defies refutation, particularly when it reflects back on you, elevating you above the coarse and limited dialect of the unenlightened. This manipulation has been man's boon and his calamity since first he rested the construction of truth from mythology and its selfish gods.

Love - The Intersection 

We let love pretend to offer us the embrace of beauty and the asylum of truth.  Nothing could be further from the truth - there is no enduring beauty in love, and truth rises and falls in concert with the relative contentment of the relationship. Love is not a warranty, activated by vow or purchase. Desire for beauty and truth does not hasten love, it does not enable it.  Instead, love is the eventual evolution of beauty and truth to the state where two people find beauty in new venues imperceptible to the individual, and truth forged in the mutual sacrifice of two people determined to learn how to acquiesce ego and insecurity. Beauty transcends its adolescent fixations on physique and pulchritude, emerging vividly in the simple unsolicited gestures that hydrate a day. Truth, a devastating weapon in the hands of individual in a competition or rivalry, changes in the equity of love. Truth then, becomes the stubborn essence that survives the relationship, the loophole never engaged, the escape clause never initiated, the technicality never exploited. 

Love does not provide beauty and truth, it is the meridian of both, the reconciliation and purification of two human frailties tempered by the patience of a benevolent God.

An Old Letter, Sadly Never Sent

My Sweet Mind, My Black Heart
You are gone, I know it now, perhaps far later than I should have. Gone, not that you just are no longer mine, but gone in every other sense. The pain is intense and deserved, a masochist's paradise I suppose. Driving away the pain has been an avocation as of late, an effort to find hope, to find a semblance of what I have lost. In this battle, I find my heart and mind perpetually at odds, thwarting my progress. My thoughts are beautiful and magnanimous, my feelings brutish and ugly. Neither seems to prevail.
I once read that it was good to think of all the negatives about someone, that that would help ease the pain. When I try, I fail for many reasons - there were things I resented, things I never reconciled, but they were never worse than those I perpetrated on you, and my sense of equity defeats the exercise. Trying to indict your love, trying to deny or defame it provides no utility either, for I have realized it is not the absence of your love that burns so deeply, it is the burden of my own love for you, no where to place it, no where to lay it down. You opened my heart, taught me how to love for the first time in my life - tragically, you never taught me how to stop.

My mind paints the canvas that should stretch my soul. It is a picture of you, with your new love, your true love. Happy that the woman I loved so much, is happier and loved so well. I see you together, smiling, walking through your days in wonder, as only two people who know they will be together eternally can walk. I want these things desperately for you, and I smile beautifully when I ponder them. But my heart objects, gnaws at the decency of my thoughts. It hurts and wants to hurt, but has no target, no relief. It is not smart, and cannot construct elaborate mechanisms of revenge or malice, I am thankful for that. All it can do, is temporarily derail that which I need to do, want to do.

The pleasure my thoughts bring me is slowly abating the distress my senseless heart interjects. Those perfect, pure images fade slowly now, and return bright and vividly ever more often. I will prevail, and there will be no more letters, no more affirmation of my selfish pain. When that happens, I will be a good man, worthy of the time you gave me, the wonderful gifts you shared with me. A good man.