Beauty is something that a lot of people have serious issues with. What we consider beautiful as a culture is often based on concepts which are filtered through ideas, which in turn might be part of an ideology, and by the time you get your beauty to appreciate its been, frankly, dismembered.
And yes, that beauty that you get is beautiful, in my view; it’s just been distorted, contorted, reframed, and cut to pieces and sewn back together as something that will rob people of the feeling of the whole of life being beautiful; it’s been analyzed, decided upon by a team, marketed, and delivered right into your eyeballs through the television, Internet, or spam text you get at 3 am on your cell phone.
And that’s beautiful.
But to those I would consider overcome by mainstream notions of beauty colonizing their minds: why search for beauty in such things, and discard the other 90% of life you don’t consider beautiful? What is it about life that you don’t appreciate? If you would look, you would find beauty in yourself, in everything you do, in the air you breathe, the fire you use to cook your food, in being alive. And you would look at other things that are alive, and find beauty in them too. You would not need someone to tell you what is beautiful (which, to tell the truth, is what I’m doing).
Then, there is ugliness and the mundane, which can be beautiful too, paradoxically. Only by the existence of the ugly and mundane do we know that some things are beautiful. And so, when we desire to experience something more beautiful, and feel the ache inside us to look at a different object as we are overcome by horror or disgust we realize that there is beauty hidden within both the ugly object, and ourselves; because that longing, that disgust: that is a beautiful part of being a living, breathing being. And we find that the ugliness was not ugliness, but a veiled beauty. And we no longer long for anything else, and there is not one thing that we could call ugly anymore, and we see the ability of the ugly to arouse in others that most human emotion of disgust, and find that beautiful.
To me, being a human is a terrible, wonderful, beautiful thing. As a species, humans are capable of doing just about anything imaginable, when they get motivated to do it. And this almost limitless potential for creation and destruction, love and hate, understanding and ignorance is horrifying in its implications, but also has its own beauty, in that these things, these terrible and wonderful things, are a part of living, existing, being part of a chain of chemical reactions that began billions of years ago and have not stopped even now, despite our best efforts.
So, in conclusion, I would like to thank all of the artists who create art that showcases some of these things, whatever they are, and know that whatever it is that you create, I can find beauty in it.
