This day began by locking myself out of where i live at 6:30 am and then waiting the hour and a half + for my hosts to wake; it is their one day of the week to sleep in - the error was mine, not theirs. I then lost 5 hours of the first version of this essay in this bitten off conflagration of a techno world, so why do my hosts seem hostile, or am i projecting my day’s frustrations into a mutable reality? Life is beautiful and everything to the contrary is pushing the rock up hill. I’m oddly at peace, given the violence to my day’s ambitions by my own hand - and there are books written about “intention.” Maybe i should be reading rather than running off at the keyboard. I don’t know what beauty is, even though with my training i’m supposed to be an expert. I do know enough to search for it, as well as be very wary of those who are certain about it and can describe its various states ad nauseam. I’m thinking that somehow it is connected to the empty feeling of recreating a day’s lost effort without loving encouragement - save my own, because sitting here rewriting this lost essay at the end of the kind of day i’ve had is about as beautiful as i have felt in a long time. Excuse me while i go and smoke the last cigarette of the day twenty minutes early - i am weak, but not too ugly to share what i feel; while it gives me great personal satisfaction smoking no more than six cigarettes a day, the beautiful delusion of non-attachment is simply postponed to each of those long awaited moments until the next fix. I will not take the time to finish this piece just now, for i have found it is necessary to impose a period of rest and distraction on myself so i may continue fresh each day with this dubious pursuit of the unknown, or attempt at understanding what cannot be understood; what i strive for is absorption into that egoless state where time does not exist. Speaking of which, where i live has a tradition of honoring the dead, and i find just now in the midst of my self pity, it is a very attractive idea. There are many i have known and lost and many i have lost and never known they were gone, but they all seem closer to me now than those i am surrounded by - more delusion. I wish much succor to all present as well as those in the aether, or wherever it is that we return to after this moment in this miraculous orb of vaporous molecules we call home.
During this festival of the dead, i am finding the honor, respect and awe brought to the process. Based on what i can see from my vantage point it is by and large far truer than any commercial versions available from the media. It is for me a privilege and honor to try and help confirm the beliefs i find and to fortify and enlarge the culture of those who believe. I find beauty in the faith of what is not knowable or quantifiable. Perhaps because i remember as a 2nd grader being brought into the multi-purpose room to witness the launch of John Glenn in the first extra-terrestrial launch from our then oh-so-abundant and powerful home planet. Unfortunately this passing magnificence was soon to be dwarfed by increasingly urgent and doubtful projects intended to punk one nation after another rather than augment and aid the unquenchable expansion of the human spirit. I also find beauty in this myopic limitation, for the alternative is to despair from the mindless arrogance of our species - the real challenge is to parse whether my observation is accurate or another delusion of a defective character and its hunger for aggrandizement. My heritage is an odd admixture of the best and worst of our species which provides me textbook manic/depressive exaltations from the grandiose to basest loathing of self, yet i live in this time which seems to increasingly demand clarity and purpose, not with just each step forward, but each breath - isn’t that beautiful. If happiness can be defined as the absence of greed, hatred and delusion would this logic not also apply to beauty - find what is not ugly and presto, you are in the midst of beauty¿ Therein lies the rub, available scholarship includes the too apt observation from Oscar Wilde - “Ugly may be beautiful, but pretty never.” Syntactically this can be construed to mean ugly can be beautiful, or pretty can never be beautiful - either case is useful, for William Shakespeare said it best (as always) “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Yet to know true beauty one must possess the capacity to embrace the most repugnant of images as worthy of the same fascination one finds in the glint of light off the most sublime of cheeks, or the spectacle of human architecture in the dome of her forehead - whoever “she” may be.
On the morning after the first night of the Dia de Muertos celebration, i stepped outside just prior to dawn; the typical bustle of a city-on-its-way was absent, and in its place lining three of the four directions at my corner as far as the eye could see, were cups every meter or so containing candles - all lit. The quiet impossibility of such an unexpected sight still awes me, though i have learned how much effort and waste was involved for the sake of greeting spectres who may or may not wish to be present at this earth-centric collective prayer. Is it the hunger of our species that defines the essence of beauty, rather than an immutable universal truth, more a dynamic of blossoming and decay inherent in the very physics of our universe - entropy. What is this hunger of ours to possess, either the manifestation, definition or source of that which one’s eye deems beautiful¿ Is it more indoctrination from the wizards of Silicone Valley; are they merely piggybacking on the church’s previous monopoly of all that is sacred with beauty at the core, whip in hand, shouting its cadence “Row, Row, Row!” Isn’t there chapter and verse for the “Beatitudes” in christian dogma? Would humans still be “oppressed by the figures of beauty” - Leonard Cohen, were they devoid of museums and the japing underclass of artists jockeying for a seat at the patron’s table? What concept would replace the sublime joy of waking up to the still sleeping face of your heart’s affection? As a man who has devoted his life to understanding the meaning of beauty, i find myself much less of an authority than i’d have ever imagined, that or not knowing is far more beautiful than i had been trained to believe. I am slowly becoming aware of beauty i never knew existed? What of the duality, is that concept itself an effort to codify the ineffable feeling one gets viewing lit candles at dawn after having comprehended the environmental degradation; the sleeping face of your heart’s affection though you know she’s about to leave; or the dichotomy of inconsolable joy that the death of a suffering loved one has provided them relief, while leaving you in grief? Is this why we proffer knowledge about the unknowable, to allay that sobering doubt that we exist, or that we do exist, but will never know why?
Is there any use for beauty, besides a tax dodge for the egregiously wealthy investor class? I can only speak for myself, but i would not have changed a thing in my life with respect to my own fixations of beauty, including the learning curve arcing from the cruel weight of ridicule for mine own and other’s earnest “pursuit of beauty to its lair” - Arundhati Roy. Is it simply a matter of degree, and the delusion of valuation from a pittance to “priceless” is more a function of what the market will bear, devoid of any valid measure or meaning¿ Do I know more about beauty for my efforts than the man who sweeps the streets of debris exuding from “the hole in our culture” - Leonard Cohen. Michel de Montaigne preferred the wisdom of the working class believing they had not suffered from learning how to think, and we can all see how much ‘merica’s chief exec, Mr. M.T. Suit has benefitted from his ivy league education. I now sit in a gallery whose exclusive purpose is the propagation of things beautiful, but i don’t feel improved, or necessarily relieved from my suffering. Possibly a result of my own discursive thinking; the objects themselves may not adhere my stringent, albeit arbitrary esthetic level of excellence, or Picasso was wrong and art whether understood properly or not, cannot cure the toothache. Cezanne had posited that in the future “a carrot when freshly apprehended, could cause a revolution,” but there is double entendre when one parses apprehend; i’m betting that Mssr. Cezanne as an ironic banker’s son was addressing the “getting and having” aspect of the produce market, more so than any assertion of a universal standard of beauty for objet d’art capable of fomenting worldwide revolution. The captains of industry have indoctrinated an entire planet on the fiction that time is money, yet i can honestly include moments spent in the company of Paul Cezanne’s paintings as amongst the most valuable in my life - go figure.
Then again, i’d jail the bankers; provide universal free health care; cradle to grave free education and a lifetime guaranteed income; not only because it is feasible and practical, but because in my mind’s eye it would be beautiful. Nor am i sure i would ever want to learn the meaning of beauty according to the patrons. No small irony there - i have spent a lifetime working toward a standard of beauty i’d hoped to be irrefutable and of value to the monied class, but have now precluded from ownership those same exemplars of taste and breeding because they represent for me the most base and vulgar in our civilization. It may be from luck or the intersection of perception and experience, but my creature within who knew me to be worthy of the cruelest self contempt has left the building, or like some existential “transformer” is now just a confused old man wondering where his friends and family have gotten to; mine is not really a pitiful condition, but certainly not worthy of contempt, at least i would hope not. Of all the ambitions i have come to know in my life, i feel remarkably fortunate to include the hunt for beauty uppermost in my quests. I don’t know if it is the etherial nature of beauty that i find most attractive or the immutable pleasure it provides in its presence. Nor am i much closer to the ability to create beauty than i was when i first caught its scent oh so long ago, yet anymore i’m not sure who is the hunted and who is the hunter, or whether it much matters. I am certain that our world would be much smaller without beauty or our ability to imagine it. Try as they might, beauty cannot be faked, or as Buddha had remarked “three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth. Maybe truth and beauty are synonymous, i don’t know.
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the beast - a sonnet
I use to avoid my beast like the plague
now we just homies; it comes, laughs and leaves
but not far- close enough to hear, but vague-
one enormous tree where wind rustles leaves
though it never ruled, it made its voice heard,
loudly enough to drive others away,
or smart enough to keep me from the herd.
beastly nor fearsome- t’just seems to sway.
how long it had laid waste to so much
for little more than to just have been seen
an extrovert bigfoot wanting to touch
others, but knowing they are not so keen
past tense is fiction as much as future
tense; so love your hate minus the nurture
jts 11/03/2017
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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