Well, I'll try to disabuse myself of these verbosities eventually. In the meantime, the subject of beauty, human female beauty that is, concerns me here today (yes, okay, just about any day). On first blush (and this can literally still happen to some of us, regardless of age, who see and become aware of being seen by a most comely person of the opposite sex) it seems one of the least likely topics to prove a good training ground for developing writers like myself and for encouraging them to work on their tasks of "simplifying." Yes, there are unparalleled poets who, with concision and divine aid can somehow express and recreate the reality of the precise beauty that their eyes and hearts see, and there are others, sculptors and orators, who can also come close to this acme of literary delight through the particular medium of their true art. But most of us, committed to prose and likely to remain "not pros" must build a tedious and complex house of cards with our words, and are held hostage to this task of constructing a dubious palace of verbiage to shelter the queens in our midst. We cannot put our faith in the old dictum "less is more" or expect that our appreciation of this pulchritude will be understood with a Jimmy Stewart-like taciturnity or an almost inscrutable nod that says "Brava!" by an Eastwood or a McQueen. These icons and their living spiritual descendants, men with their own "beauty", i.e. handsomeness, can well afford to understand and be understood with their particular methods. They, after all, are gods to these goddesses and such unfiltered sexuality needs little or no flowery wordsmithing. We pencil pushers, men of mentation, as libidinally revved up as any "stud" in Hollywood or on the mythical range, but unlike the strong silent types, are charged with describing and circumscribing, painting an image and somehow animating this mimicking visage so that the flutter in our own hearts is reborn a thousandfold in the tickers of readers that thump in solidarity with ours because of our hopefully articulate cry to the heavens of what is incomparable beauty.
We shall fail every time. Our efforts may be praised after death (physically or psychically) which promotes us to that status which non-existence somehow always bestows: an end to rancor and exemption from life's critiques and other barbs. A certain gentleness is finally extended when it is no longer needed and hurting or being hurt are irrelevancies. And there is always a kind of eulogy that remarks that we were at least sincere and had striven mightily. But utterly insurmountable is the mountaintop of the Idea of the Fairer Sex and the flawlessness and exquisiteness of its members whether we beholders of beauty be dead or alive. It is not so much that words fail as that the mind and the body cannot remain too long unconnected, particularly when trying to inscribe or carve a recording of what is so intensely and essentially captivating but can only remain in the end, uncaptured by mere verbiage. Might as well try to grab some stardust and paint a smile on the ether that warms as hopefully (and hopelessly) as the "real live girl" of ancient song. Yes, Da Vinci climbed to this summit but it is so rare a thing and perhaps only his Mona Lisa, certainly not all or even most of his creations, were possessed of this near immortality. What of our Mona Lisas? Are they able to come into this world? Are they attainable? Can they be clasped to our longing bosoms when our artistry is less than god-like, or even when it's the best that is humanly possible? What is the goal, truly? Is it to love the object of beauty and delight, or is it to enfold it with our literary powers, whatever their strengths or weaknesses?
Can one tame a mustang? Ought one to even try? Monroe's Roslyn in "The Misfits" viscerally abhorred the concept and began to crumble into broken bits over the violence she witnessed perpetrated by those around her (all men) for whom the hunt was all, perhaps a hard wired thing deep in the male species. Is a straining writer any different from a cowboy straining to rope, brand and subjugate these horses? There is another facet of the whole question, a very sharp edged one, that I should mention. I do not believe it's an idiosyncrasy of my world view on womankind, but a legitimate issue that all men, and conversely women, deal with in certain cases. There are extremely attractive persons of both sexes, who, because of their remarkable physical attributes incite, intentionally or not, extreme reactions in those for whom their vision serves as very vulnerable portals through which their emotions can be assaulted and easily inflamed by such visual delights. Hostility, animosity, even predation in various forms can be the result, and even the slightest hint of political power or the expression of power through the world of dreams and fantasy (particularly in the field of entertainment) by these persons of beauty, can militarize, as it were, those afflicted by this desire or even lust. These situations are proper occasions for intellectualism (and of course, religion), the former long denigrated in America and the latter only recently so, to come to the fore and encourage, forcefully, the forces of sensationalism and The New Morality (just The Old Immorality) to awaken and search long and earnestly for the personhood of and respect for one and all, even those deemed gods and goddesses for whom the temptation to treat in an ungodly fashion may be severe and which is always wholly unacceptable.
But let's at least try to simplify anyway (novel notion for we inclined towards literary loquaciousness)! What is feminine beauty? Is there a mathematical formula that can explain what delights our senses and moves the mind and body to create, artistically and most profoundly, i.e. divinely through the continuation of our human race? A recent television program explored this science of beauty and attractiveness and seemed to assert that "yes" we have a mechanistic answer to the question: with formulas about the shapes and sizes of human faces and other palpably measurable aspects of the subject. The least strenuous journey to a place where this answer may be found however, includes, I believe, traveling down a road called familiarity: like an old melody that we love and begin to hum in glad comfort when its strains are re-introduced into our brains at a chance meeting say, while strolling past a stranger who is absent-mindedly and not self-consciously doing the same. Similarly, when so-and-so insists he has "the perfect date" for you (and when you wearily read him the subdued but still immutable "riot act" of your personal code of social interactions: "no blind dates"), he softens your hardened heart with a gentle, hope inducing description like "she looks an awful lot like a cross between Jamie Lee Curtis and Mary So-and-so. You remember, that very kind gal with the giggles and freckles? Oh, she's very nice, just like her, extremely friendly and intelligent besides." Something or rather someone, guaranteed to reprise a pleasant spirituality and physicality from the past: is this all one needs for a roadmap to bliss and the essence of beauty? What of gals from Mars (rather, they're from Venus, if anywhere exceedingly exotic, we are told)? Could they be sources providing rapturous and ecstatic experiences for we who seek this paradisiacal conjoining of yin and yang? We mustn't close our minds to the possibility that three heads (attached to one body) may be more beautiful than one. And why mustn't an alabaster bosom have more than two globular glands of pneumatic joyfulness? Well, okay, am guilty if charged for setting up straw men, or lighter-than-feathers women, for the sake of a cheap chuckle. The subject at hand remains, after all, female HUMAN beauty. And, is it not so, that what one loved or gravitated to long ago is what will likeliest, inspire and cheer in the future?
I asked this "beauty" question of a friend very recently (in fact, while preparing this blog). He agreed that there was something inexpressible about the answer to the question, even if understood on a "gut" level. He said that whenever we are listing attributes of a person being focused upon, whether of their physical charms or uniquely loveable character, we are basically declaring that that person is "alive." It seemed facile and not satisfying when he first stated this. But then I thought: "what does it mean to be alive?" Dig slightly deeper below the surface of the usual mundane "take" on such a query and "voila": the undeniable mystery of life itself makes stargazing's cousins: the contemplation of innerspace or the pondering of human existence and how and why an individual is beloved, most profoundly understandable in their inability to be understood, as when the French warm to one of their favorite subjects (or as we tend to stereotype their cultural inclinations): love, and declare that the beloved has that certain "Je ne sais quoi." And to fear not one's perhaps budding francophilia, I hereby declare, relative to that boy-girl thing: "Vive la difference!"
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