Beauty – Once Again for the
First Time
How do we know beauty but in her
absence? As a night that longs for
a moon we long for her light. With
restless winds that churn through our darknesses beauty wrests us from our abyss,
our history. Where darkness casts
no shadow of hope, there in that vulva, do we await our moment of birth; our
time in the sun. When beauty exists
no more, then do we arrive at our eternal shore; then does that first ray of
light grace our soulless night. We
die no more. We rise for the first
time to what we never knew but what knew us as mother, as lover, as home. My love, how can I have forgotten
you? How could I have lost my
name? I wake to beauty, your
beauty. I love for the first time. Your beauty calls the dead to life they
never knew. You speak my soul to
light. I live, a new sun that
breathes a first archaic light.
Beauty is that which first wakes us into life. Beauty is that which requires it’s
absence so that our mortal deaths can once again arise to the light that spawns
the galaxies and begins anew the love of loves, the truth of stars and flesh
and once again summons the ageless repetition of life, death, rebirth; of love
and loss. Oh woeful tragedy that
yet again must negate our burdened days until we once again can turn our
moments skyward to the heavens where beauty begins for the first time and
lovers first caress as morning suns kiss dew filled forests that eyes never
knew. Beauty is what only lovers
first know and babies first breathe.
To die, to negate, to break one’s heart – all these prepare
the way for our awakening to beauty for the first time.
To
engage in the thought of beauty is to begin again our retreat from beauty. The history that made beauty a Cartesian
idea[i] has vanished and Nietzsche’s
prophecy in “The Birth of Tragedy”[ii] has a strange ring of truth –
the greatness (the beauty) of the Greeks was already beginning to get lost with
the freezing of thought into logic with Plato and Aristotle. The truth of our time, deconstruction,
shows what we already knew – that every construction already carries the
seeds of its undoing, the theme of its deconstruction[iii]. Beauty already insists on its ugly, dark
side; its absence. This does not
cast all beauty into an empty dark shell.
To the contrary, it insists that for beauty to be beauty and not to fall
into absolute emptiness it must undo itself, it must get lost, it must abolish
itself. Only then, can we cast
aside our dead weights of history; our stale being in the world (everydayness)[iv] and for the first time (yet again)
look with infant eyes into the translucent clearing,[v] the event of appropriation[vi] that entices us beyond ourselves and
allows us to first be able to have an idea, a truth, a Plato and Aristotle, or
a Cartesian science and logic. Even
more so, beauty and its essential absence first make possible a love and a
being at home in a world that is thrown void[vii]. Beauty always begins again for the first
time and we are dutifully bound as unfaithful lovers to capture again what
captured us as birth and thus - world.
This eternal recurrence of what we never knew but what we hold in the
thought, ‘beauty’ is perhaps better pointed to in the muse of
poetry – thus the beginning.
A Link to My Other Music and
Poetry: