Beauty

 Writing from a place of doubt and worry;

I remember an exceptionally long bike ride with Shruthi. She was taking me to write an exam, and we passed most of Kochi behind us. Trees drooped into houses, creepers and climbers spread across abandoned walls with black mold cracks running like veins, houses were inhabited by foliage, and before we knew it, the sky was emboldened with giant grey clouds touching one another in their expansion. We saw them merge, creating a vast expanse of wet burden, as we drove up and out of road clearings. Although the downpour slowed us down, I found myself willing again and again for the forces to collapse, and they did. It rained all through the night. We stood on the steps to someone’s house waiting for it to pass. I realised once again, on this day that nature is not alien to urbanity, as often defined by the dichotomy of the modern human. 

In my mind, beauty exists as a struggle between duality, and its transcendence. As objects fall, dilapidate, and lean to rest over other objects, a passage of time is revealed. It is evident in rust, ruins, and the worn-down. Time passes conspicuously in urbanity; a thin film of dust ages what you leave untouched for long. Beauty, like time, is revealed with effort in the obviously disgusting and the ugly. Over discomfort, beauty exists as potential. 

I believe beauty does not presuppose anything. You require no attitudes of your own to enter the world and realise beauty. Beauty is contained in certain essential moments. There is something ultimately revelatory in the evocation of beauty. Beauty is the realisation of the real, of the matter closest to truth. Truth and proof of the divine are revealed to believers through the extraordinary and the horrific. The other day, someone saw my tattoo and asked me what it means. I explained what it is, and only the classical form remained in her mind. The next day, she came back with specific questions about the Bible, and I found myself in that familiar, misunderstood place. In reality, it is not the form which impacted me, although its nature was extraordinary. It was the symbolic unity of both the beautiful and the ugly. For the truth to appear, God separated the medium of truth from the world’s natural phenomena. In its grotesque and terrifying form, the truth appears comfortably, fulfilling its role. 

Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: 

With two wings they covered their faces, 

with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 

(Isaiah 6:2)

As I looked at the living creatures,
I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its

four faces.
This was the appearance and structure of the wheels:
They sparkled like topaz, and all four looked alike.
Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel.
As they moved, they would go in any one of the

four directions the creatures faced;
the wheels did not change direction as the creatures went.

Their rims were high and awesome, and all

four rims were full of eyes all around.

(Ezekiel 1:15-21)

The fictional Norse demigod Moder is an ancient being who lives in the Appalachian forest and evades being seen. She conducted a cult of fear and awe inside the quiet Swiss mountains, but ultimately she was tamed, by gaze.

The grotesque are mirrors, laterally representing the categories of beauty. Beauty is only as powerful as a contrast; the coexistence and codependence of that which stands in opposition to you. Does beauty begin with love? Once, A wrote to me when we weren’t talking. He said love and beauty are inseparable; one informs the other. He said, you love beautiful things, and you find what you love beautiful. We create our notions of beauty, which become indistinguishable from our objects of desire.

In his autobiography, Yukio Mishima says, “...Excrement is the symbol of the earth, and it was doubtlessly the malevolent love of the Earth Mother that was calling to me.” I read this with delight because my attraction towards repugnant sensations was justified as something natural.

And so, I am drawn to the arbitrary meeting of colours. Colours chipped away and muted. Asymmetry and imperfection. Do you see the cityscape being held together by electric poles and wires, fencing black thresholds for the sky? Beauty places you perfectly within a context by its own nature, and evokes your sense of belonging. 

The nature of everything beautiful is also inseparably tied to its opposite. The negation of beauty is its own affirmation.