It
is easy enough to slip into a single-dimensional conception of
beauty, what with all of these glossy images of a certain type of
beauty, constantly being shaped and constructed for us, thrust in
front of us and pressed into our noses, a not-so-subtle suggestion to
follow, strive for, and desire this teleological image of perfect
beauty – oh and this here product can help you get there, I have
just the thing in stock.
This
impoverished conception of beauty acts as a delimiting filter,
cutting out so much information. Everyone is so busy chasing pretty
faces, pretty bodies – well, pretty in a constructed sense, which does have a biological basis, but which is also manipulated –
oblivious of the living reality underneath. Albert Camus, cutting
through our superficial intuitions about beauty, remarks, “Beauty
is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the
glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the
whole of time.”
Statements
like this give us pause. It is often the painful and personal
reckoning with the perpetual birth and death of reality's many forms,
which shatters the artificial and static image, causing a recursive
examination of the fragments in order to reconstitute the image. Upon
closer examination the concept of beauty can go some interesting
ways, and reveal some interesting things.
Yes,
beauty as we conceive of it, say classically beautiful human features
– which are also made beautiful on account of being symbols of
power – or sleek, smooth, and colorful forms of artificial beauty,
are constantly aging and disintegrating, both as exciting objects of
perception and as physical materials.
It
seems a matter of chance that an individual can bond with a beautiful
person, especially in this modern society in which bonds are made and
broken with such rapidity and abandon, yet one is so drawn to them!
And that some beautiful people, acting as bug lights, zap those that
come close, entranced by the bright dazzle of their beauty. And it is a wonder that these
people are doing the zapping, what, being pestered constantly by
those uninterested in the divinity of their person, and much more
interested in the divinity of their own narrow conceptions of beauty
and the pleasures it will bring.
The
beauty is teleological in the sense that it prescribes an action, a
direction. One is to experience its sublimity in intercourse with it.
But what of that stark beauty of a face, regardless of its physical
form? Its animation? The way that life's energies pass over and
through it, lighting it up and changing its colors? Or what of one's
energy as it goes in and becomes reflected back?
I
don't wish to be misunderstood: intercourse is just fine, and nice.
But what about other things? Why does our attention have to exist as
so many fragmented, sharp points, oscillating in and out?
