On Beauty

At some level I knew it all along that it was a falsehood, this idea that "inner beauty" is what actually counts and that no-one cares whether one is outwardly beautiful or not. I believed it because there was a plethora of quotes from eminent, respected people who claimed that beauty is this ineffable, untranslatable Light of some sort that dawns upon one and seizes one with a rapture that is ineffable, untranslatable...

Maybe that's why no one talks about in terms that are more concrete. I have never understood this idea of inner beauty, and I think that it is a pretty lie that has been propagated so that we may manage ourselves during times that are not so beautiful. 

I have just finished reading a novel by Iginio Tarchetti called Fosca. This nineteenth-century, quasi-Gothic Italian novel became the subject of Stephen Sondheim's haunting chamber opera Passion. The novel tells of handsome Giorgio who is having an affair with the equally beautiful (and very married) Clara when he, at an army outpost, meets the desperately ill and desperately ugly Fosca. The novel is an examination of the peculiar powers that are found in both beauty and ugliness. Fosca is sickly, hideous and vile. She milks her ugliness to create this aura of pity and self-concern that is, in a sense, a twisted Black Mass version of how someone may milk their good looks to get their way. One gets the sense that beauty is power, and indeed it is. It is a drug. All these hallucinatory ideas of wanting to die for someone because s/he is so beautiful, of being half-in-love with death, life and nature because they are Sublime...to me, these are symptoms of addiction. You may either be addicted to the effects of beauty, Sublime as they are, or you may be addicted to being the agent of that Sublimity. You either want the drug or want to BE the drug. Fosca creates permutations in which she addicts the drug to its antagonistic agonist. That frightens me, because it tells you how powerful beauty is, even in its absence. 

And how does this pertain to me? I feel this incredible sense of self-loathing every time I go to the gym, mainly because I know why I am doing it. For the shallowest of reasons: to be beautiful. Every time I go to the gym, I find what I once prized as my own exclusive and delicate sensibility to flow down my back as sweat. People go to the gym for various reasons: to be fit, to stay fit, to keep pathologies at bay, but I? I go there to punish myself for being shallow, while engendering a novel aesthetic of pretension! You see, I have begun to equate beauty with goodness, for good things happen to those who are beautiful. Hell, even if Bad things happen to the beautiful, they still appear Good because they feature such an agreeable cast of characters. The travails of the beautiful and the plain are the same: the former's are just so much more involving! I can't be Fosca, and believe me I have tried: she sickens me. She sickens me because she has very carefully crafted her "illness" her "deep melancholy" her "episodes". She reinforces the belief  that ugly is as ugly does. One doesn't need to be that...cerebral when one is beautiful! For what is beauty if not happiness?! Aren't these interchangeable? I have begun to believe that they are. 

IF:

I am beautiful, I shall be able to leave my Spitsbergen for an Eternal City somewhere.

The Eternal City will give me the Romance of opportunity and that of the heart.

I shall be poised, upright, aware, never fumbling and loved in that Eternal City, wherever it may be. 

Life will be...so beautiful, and do you know why? Because I am. Or shall be beautiful! 

It kills me to acknowledge that I, at some level, do truly believe this. I also know them to be libellous, ugly things but I cling to them anyway. I am respiring anaerobically again. I think it's because I am frightened. I think it's because I am foolish. Or, like Fosca, I am addicted to the trippier drug, man!  The selfsame that makes one want to be that phantasm with the hooded-eyes who waits in the tower, one who is hooked on longing. Longing for something ineffable, untranslatable, beautiful. Aren't these such noble ideas? The patience, the waiting, the refined aesthetic of it all? 

Am I being so vile for nothing? O God, God! Please let this mean something, let this amount to something in the end! Let me, in the end, finally see what is beautiful about all this! 

Until the next time,

Gossip Guy.