don't take my word for it

Seeking to describe beauty is a dangerous thing, it often leads into a marsh of predictable phrases, the lines of another artists’ vision broken into pieces to fit your own, or those of a culture’s tamed and tired standards. You can flit through the indexes of your memory, retrieving phrases or color swatches from favored artists and creating a thoroughly unsatisfying pastiche, calling it art, and perhaps this is a grand sort of test: if you are in fact satisfied with your abominable Frankenstein of art-shards, then most likely you were not truly moved by any new beauty, since being pleased with such an unpalatable and unoriginal expression of that beauty, and the stamp it supposedly made on your spirit, is evidence enough that no true stamp was made. When you are struck by beauty, truly struck to the center of yourself, you’ll know it and artist or not you’ll endure the frustration of seeking an original expression worthy of that beauty: you’ll face sleepless nights and a mind like a mad tangle of crossed wires. The artists are usually the first to get there, if even they succeed, of which there is no guarantee, and some few other stragglers arrive exhausted but lit up like fireflies with the joy of release, of harmony. They have found a suitable voice for their heart’s healing, and in some few cases, it is enough.

The frustration doesn’t truly begin until you’ve thrown out all of your first useless attempts at expression, since the process itself is what can, if you’re fortunate and persistent, lead to the truth. Only by sheer luck or unique genius (and often that is not enough) is such expression achieved in the first try. I doubt even the geniuses’ word when they swear they had little difficulty. And the weary souls who’ve been smitten by beauty -a beauty of any kind, by the way- will all tell you, whether they succeeded or not, that what they sought to describe was something very small, not complex nor vast; a kernel of brilliance, perfection. A perfect melody, phrase, color. A glint, a fleeting moment, a blur of movement flickering in the usual chaos. Irretrievable, never to be replicated. In what regularly repeated things is there much beauty beyond prescribed comforts, the numbness of safety or choking banality? So it is that we all, when so smitten, seek somehow to capture it, to learn its secret for ourselves, to heal the sweet wound or at least endure its embrace and understand the whisper it makes to our soul.

Then again, what the hell do I know?