Beauty and the Beast

Beauty, like pain, demands to be witnessed. It is this recognition that affirms the shared experience of being human. As Berkeley wrote, esse est percipi; “to be is to be perceived”. Light is an indifferent mathematical wave-particle that only undergoes alchemy into something of semantic weight when it is seen. And maybe that’s why sharing an aesthetic encounter amplifies it; when awe is jointly felt, it becomes communion. Maybe that’s why art is an antidote for loneliness.

I have always wanted to believe that if there can be unreasonable evil, there can be unreasonable good. I suppose I am in the game of defying the physics of averages. But what a rough beast it is that slouches towards Bethlehem! She is not the girl you marry; she is the girl you write poems about, and then leave. I’ve tried to control her destruction by lighting the pyre myself, but self-immolation is also a form of hiding. To be alive is to be bookmarked by both joy and suffering. This is the necessary salt. To have capacity for the former, we have to look the latter in the eye, and love them both.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.