Mysterious Mystery Be My Eyes to See Beauty
As I was bored at work I adopted complacency and shamelessness, so naturally I started scrolling down Tumblr. Eventually I got to when I last posted and arbitrarily began peering at my own blog; clicking through picture after picture I realized that I haven’t written anything for a while. Actually that is a lie and I write nearly every damn day, but usually I write for my professors whom are impressed mostly by intelligence and not elegance. As I’m about to finish three years of studying philosophy and theology I find that I’m less and less concerned about my knowledge, and instead I’m developing a longing for mystical Beauty. About a thousand conditionals need to be bracketed around that last sentence, but please excuse me as I only mention two. First, education and knowledge and jazz are all great, but my mind is simply saturated by these and I kind of want to dry out. Second, beauty is ambiguous. I don’t know how to define Beauty except by counter-factuals: I don’t mean pretty, I don’t mean attractive, I don’t mean pleasureful, or pleasant, or joyous, or sexy, or material- though at times it may include these attributes. It’s just that these words are not profound enough, and I don’t exactly know why.
Have you ever wondered what makes something beautiful? This is not an easy question to answer. Remind yourself of walking on the sands at Golden Gardens, looking across the salt water, and seeing that marvelous view of the Olympic mountain range. If you are inclined to imagine that view beautiful try to think why. It can’t be the colors or form. Ask yourself why those colors or forms are beautiful and eventually you’ll end with a pathetic, “b-cuz…” Perhaps we are inclined to say that it’d be beautiful because of the “experience.” Again, why is that experience beautiful? It’s not because you are experiencing some sort of euphoria. Nor is it due to a sensation of contentment, because you haven’t received anything so contentment can’t exist there. I’m not lying to you, press why something is beautiful and you can’t answer it. It’s an impossible question. Beauty is intrinsic to its article. Beauty acts like a metaphysical entity instantiating itself to the world through the eyes of persons.
(I know how this sounds, and I’m not trying to say that Beauty is God. God is beautiful, but if God is Beauty and the sunset has Beauty then the sunset has God, and that is usually referred to as monism, which is problematic for other reasons. Still, doesn’t it seem that God has a tight connection with beauty? This would make for a substantial conversation.)
What I’m trying to say is really simple: Beauty is mysterious. It’s not useful for anything, yet it walks hand in hand with purpose. It is felt, yes felt, in material and non-material particulars. A conversation is beautiful and a tree is beautiful, though the two can’t be more different. Yet the same Beauty is within the tree and the conversation and I’ve never been able to exactly pinpoint where. Beauty invades sadness and joy. It permeates thoughts of the future, experience of the present, and memories of the past- notice though that a beautiful present does not eventually translate as a beautiful past. Beauty is invisible, makes not a sound, and takes up no space; though it swims through voices and strokes through vision. Beauty can be sought and captured, yet never contained. We do not know Beauty; however we can’t help but recognize it.
