The Tragedy of Beauty

The tragedy of beauty is that no one can speak its name. She is not persuadable by tongue and he is illusively mute. Why —oh why? We may speak of a beautiful thing, a beautiful collection of things, the spaces between things. Everything we cannot capture in the eyes; feelings that shed themselves on park benches in conspicuous doldrums, when nothing else is calling. But for all the poems and mediums of inspired prose and spoken word, beauty is irrevocably private; forever getting ready in the powder room, but never turning up for the show.

    The beauty of beauty is not merely that we cannot translate 1 to 1 the subjective phenomenological inner world into dialogue or text, but that beauty eludes us in the most existential sense. The act of transcribing her song actually closes the doors and windows of her house. Such that she moves further away on the circumference of my attention. The harder I chase, the more distant her gaze from the window of her country house appears. No, it's only when I am not reaching, not wanting, that I feel her presence settle behind me; the faintest bouquet of her perfume greets me, and when I turn to greet her, only a spectre of that presence lingers. She isn’t ever what I think she is, and she never leaves the same impression twice.
    
    In this sense beauty is forever entwined, composed and born with loss. Beauty may only stay in one dress so long as her image is ripe and untamed. Before our senses collect. Before the tendrils of the mind have her. This ceaseless fleeting and re-emergence is only possible because she is not in ‘things’ as we know them. She wears them. She wears the context of your attention like a cloak —flowing herself through the gauze precisely when your wits and cleverness are down, dormant and vulnerable. It is her vanishing without having touched our minds that leaves the haunting trace that only heightens her allure. I will never find you and know that I have you simultaneously. I lose myself in you when you touch me. You are never truly mine.
    
    “Losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife —is sure to be noticed." —Søren Kierkegaard
    
    When I am intoxicated with you, I am lost. I am a flag in the centre of open space. There is no space to reflect, no time to compose what I know. I am enlivened, but what I know as me is gone. I am as much a human being as the light reflecting off the surface of the sea.
    What I know is always hungry; what I am is like the trace of the bird's wing in the sky.
    
    Somehow my heart is connected to yours. There are strings between us, and the hidden element of this is what you play as your lyre. The distance provides each string unique expression. You are distance without distance. Intimacy without privation.
    
    It is the ungraspabilty of beauty which makes him sweet; he is bashful and unapologetic. He has no rules by which he takes shape. He can be a cat, a can of tomatoes, a condom or an ashtray. The hesitation before speaking. He is the substrate, the catalyst. The life force coursing the spine. The fire in the nerves which allows these eyes to see. Every crease and curve of existence is aligned with him, but you cannot touch him.
    
    Like a gift, there are many layers to him. I appear to see him on the surface, but this is a mirage. What I am really seeing is myself. I am seeing all the world I put between myself and me. Every surface and texture I need to feel, the pressure of body, the ripple of skin, the verve of impulse —desire, and the metronome of time that gives my mystery a home. The light that bounces from one surface back to me. 
    
    But I cannot see me. There is no interior to me I can find. For everywhere I go, there I am — bejewelled and bereft on my throne.