Life is not about the all the beauty that you can find with your bare eye. It’s not about paving your face with lipstick and makeup. This is something some maternal figure could tell you, that beauty fades and rots. Life is about death, decay, the strange way that your dog moves when it is unable to bear the suspense of the arrival of you, or a treat. Life is about the sad things people endure because they must, or they think they must, or they don’t know how not to. Life is about living, playing with fire, or making one settling next to its warmth. Life is about not knowing how to pronounce vituperate or teaching someone how to pronounce vituperate. Life is about these little moments that you never knew you’d find, that no one has ever or could ever describe. Life is about the moment that you realize after a lot of struggle, after years of doubt, that you are where you like and you like who you are. Life is about remembering that profound moment and not being able to relate anymore. Life is about forgetting all of these things and remembering them again. Life has always been the same yet it is always so new. That is why it is a shame to be ruined by something as shallow as beauty.
Beauty is a motivator, an embellishment, a joy and a means to an end, but is never a meaning, an end itself. When you stare into beauty, perfectly pure, you may see that underneath this statue, no one has breathed life. Beauty can’t speak for itself even if it appears so. Eons have changed its face, its voice, but time can never change your chain of response. Beauty cannot be so ugly that you can’t stop staring. It can never not make sense, making you try to figure it out. Beauty is always a simple answer. It can cut you, but it is really you cutting yourself. Beauty is the image of what you imagine it to be like between its shell. As an American, this is something I know well.
We are all ugly underneath, but we hide it. We buy creams and pastes and razors and tweezers so we can look more beautiful than we really are. No one successful is ugly, or at least badly dressed. They pay people to tell us that. We are so focused on living up to that success by softening up our own image because we are taught to be greedy and envious. That is what drives our insane pursuit for success and perfection.
Ugly things are fascinating in their own way, fearsome, a puzzle. We don’t want to see it, but it’s there. If we really look at everything, and not just the statues we’ve built for ourselves, we can find the beauty in hideousness, the hideousness of paradise. When there is nothing left to pursue, we are just waiting to die. When you aren’t allowed to be ugly, you are dead.
