Resort to Beauty

Flow. Halt. Normalcy. Accident. Order. Chaos. Progress. Slippage. Solution. Obstacle. Crisis. Adaptation. Instigation. Bloodshed. Education. Coping. Surviving. Intact. Dissonant. Sense. Confusion.

A morass of hope and upheaval circumscribes the human experience, the fact of living in the world, at odds with the world, in contention for a patch of sunlight amid overturned ambitions and frustrated ideals. Most severe human conflict emerges from the complexity of such contention. One method of surviving, emotionally, as an intellect, as a human being refusing to give up on humanity, is the resort to beauty.

Mountains sage and lavender in opaline mist. A ruby sun nestled in cool streams of fire, inventive fire of eventide. Small blue avian beings canting eerie recollections of abundance. Mindscape without color, crystalline and teeming with life. Sojourn away from contention, braced by natural fact. Beauty.

Beauty, though mysterious, undefinable, even variable according to subjective experience, is woven into every aspect of life and lived experience. Maybe it is the poet's province alone to take on the burden of working this through, seeing it always, being aware of the most menial, severe and terrible beauties. But the poet's work has resonance because it conjures up a latent awareness of improbable charms, hidden among the tortuous threadwork, the causeways of consciousness.

Life itself, as biological fact, is such a magnificent achievement, it lends a certain quality of beauty and wonder to everything that occurs within it. But beauty as such arises with the consciousness of it; it is a conscious condition, a state of the mind, however sensual, in which one deliberately approves of being in the world, and one's whole self resolves implicitly to continue life's exploration of the living world. And though it overtakes the mind, even steals the breath, beauty (being a conscious experience) is far from absolute. Beauty can be experienced in/as/through joy or pain, in/as/through aspiration or irony, in/as/through victory or defeat.

If one engages the self, the living fullness of one's own existence, if one confronts the tiny absurdities of dwelling within circumstance, if one filters out the jagged edges of social pressure and brings forward the unmasked rhythm of meaning that underscores and gives shape to experience, one finds that around the edges, and at the center, of virtually every body across the plane of fact is the real possibility of beauty, of a recognition that knowing that one exists is in itself the beginning of all joy and connectivity... [Complete Text]