Dear Beauty

Dear Beauty,

Hello, allow me to introduce myself.

I am shame. I am loneliness. I am anger, I am despair, I am frailty and error and pain and sadness and capacity for evil. I am sin, I am hate, I am error and I am greed. I am, I have and I will.

I write because there is someone sobbing, in the other room, only drywall between us. This human is naked, the flesh of his body in a shallow puddle of his own tears. IN A PUDDLE OF HIS OWN TEARS IN A BATHTUB, there is a giant man, sobbing in the bathtub. Why is he crying? The ceramic is cold. The choices were wrong. The past is stalking us. The body has failed. The future has us by the throat against the wall. There will be costs and there will be lies and there will be pain. He cannot cope with this truth. And So. Tears of great sorrow. Don’t look at me, but never, ever leave me.

The man pleads with me to join him in the bathtub, if I don’t hide in the bathtub with him the house will cave in and, if I don’t pick him up on my back and carry him across town he will not be able to make it. Its his mother’s fault. Manbody childmind, I have made my choice.

I stand on the porch, outside in the cold night air, beneath a sea of stars, alone, my breath and the sound of the gulls for company. The scent of recent rain.

At the treeline, loveliness flits in front of my hobbled steps, eternally ducking behind the bend, cartwheeling behind the smoke-belching factories and languishing in the lagoons, brushing her hair back beneath the sky of clouds in the shape of Mickey Mouse giving us the middle finger, always stalked, never tamed. Loveliness, beauty, truth, love–bohemia. Gypsies clanging tambourines against their red, rushing skirts in the flickering fire light, the smell of liquor clouding the judgement of the abstinent, the pious, the abhorrer of the wild and spell-casting gypsy woman whom they now, in their drunken revelry, cannot deny. Images of beauty flash before the face of the incarcerated man, memories of blue skies and kitten’s whiskers, brown paper packages tied up with string, sunlight drifting through an open window on a lazy afternoon, the shadow patterns of the lace curtains on the kitchen table, the soft rolling of the open sea outside the grass-lined dunes beside the wooden pier, the red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens. So much depends on our attention to these beautiful things, they are not insignificant things. Thing is not a word that applies to life.

A crazy woman passed by our table as we sat outside the restaurant smoking cigarettes muttering, “blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah BLAH, blah blah blah.” I agree with her.
If wisdom’s ways you wisely speak, then these five things observe with care. To whom you speak, of what you speak and when and why and where. That which shatters the silence we call noise, that which enhances the silence we call music. We make a lot of noise, you and Us and I.

“Oh, I tried to convince the people who live beside me to come, they said to me, they said, ‘I ain’t goin’ out there, them people look weird.’ And I said, ‘y’all wanna sit right here and look at the goddamn world through the goddamn winder, well, that’s just fine with me. It looks to me like them weird lookin’ people are havin’ themselves a goddamn good time, and I think I’m gonna go right on ahead and join ’em.”

With my hands I touch the same objects I have touched for years, but they have shifted beneath me. My eyes process similar shapes and patterns, but they are no longer recognizable. What I am looking for now, and what I see and touch and crave, is beauty. I pursue her, we are courting, awkwardly getting to know each other and forgetting our locker combinations.

Get out of my way.

Beauty is resting in the bowels of the earth. Her flame-coiled tongue forking out beneath the sidewalks, beauty and sin are waltzing. Look for her, and she saunters everywhere, languishing in the shade of the oak tree, ignore her, and ugly will fan itself around you before you can utter a sound, moving in as quickly as maggots and mold, termites and disease. Allow her to break down and you will have to fight for her return, with your teeth and with your nails. You think you held her, once, do you? Have you known beauty, incarnate? Have you touched her hand as she walked down the tree-lined path, ravishing in the world around her, head high on her shoulders, feet bare to the earth? She makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t she. With her innocence, you presume.  It isn’t innocence, man. It is choice. It is intelligence. Beauty is great pride.. Value in the sensation of pleasure. Beauty is dangerous, powerful. Dangerous and fabulous, harsh and exciting. Ferocity. Strength. Beauty owns all of these. She keeps them on a velvet-lined shelf, in a glass jar, beside her paintbrushes, and she will shoot you if you touch them.

Besides, human, what are you, balanced on a scale against a daffodil? The silly flower, she is perfect. She is not apologizing. She is what she is. The passionflower knows life and completion for 24 hours.

Beauty is writing to humbly request permission to return to her seat at the head of the table. She will be bringing her friends, Joy, Courage and Truth, and they will make you uncomfortable. They have turned on the fluorescent lights, unplugged the dishwashers and thrown their televisions off the roofs of buildings. They have broken their bones and they have broken their hearts. They know how to sew. They laugh too much. They dress unpredictably and often not at all. They don’t have the proper paperwork. Joy has been sweating and working in the dirt without bathing, and she smells like an animal. Courage has down’s syndrome. Truth uses a walker and pees the bed. None of them have any money. They will track mud onto your carpeting, and their dogs will get hair on your sofa.

They all will be having the Eggs Benedict for breakfast, so we’ll need to make a trip to the store.

Thanks for your time and I look forward to seeing you everywhere I go, never being spiritually parted and encouraging each other by continuing to relish and delight,

Love.