WHAT IS BEAUTY?

To understand the thing one must eliminate first what it is not.

Foremost, cruelty is not beautiful! All other conclusions derive and follow from this essence. Dirty and unclean, also, are both not beautiful. Dirty lends an impure, negative value to beauty. Unclean multiplies the beautiful thing with (needless) grime and clutter. Thus unclean, which in and of itself is partially dirty, cannot be Beauty. Clean(-liness) is absolute. Kindness is absolute. Any deviations from those ideals, usually due to selfish and self-serving motives, must be considered less than and even a grotesque of the pure form and therefore, not beautiful. And it follows that the medium and method through and by which that deviation from kindness and clean(-liness) occurs, supposing as an example that a man is making the thing, the form that is creating that selfishness, that man is indeed truly ugly. Yes, this is also an absolute: the creation can never be cleaved from the creator! An ugly man, a cruel, unclean, selfish man, can never ever create anything beautiful! Never!

Thus three qualities provide the physical coordinates for beauty: Kind, Clean and Unselfish.

This then brings us to a fourth coordinate: time. In that axis also, Beauty has the absolute position, it is eternal! Therefore mathematically, Beauty is, by definition, “off the charts”! Because in any of the four scales: kind(ness), clean(liness), unselfish(ness) and time, Beauty is at the farthest reaches of all axes. As such the point at which beauty is / maybe located in the space-time continuum is either impossible or unreachable (the four individual values can never be extrapolated to meet at a singular point) by regular science and by so-called “exceptional” (human) faculties.

Which is why it is an ideal!

One may try to reach it, in fact one must give up one’s very own self to attain it (an entirely different discussion), but he must know that that absolute value of beauty is unachievable and impossible, because it may indeed not even exist! To add to this improbability is the scale of Truth. Yes Truth is the fifth axis in (ordinary) “geometry”, the axis that supersedes and perplexes even Time! And yet here too, beauty is absolute. That is, for anything to be beautiful, it cannot in the least, be a lie.

Now you see why Beauty is so painfully rare!

For it is a single point that may reside in theory alone, in the farthest reaches of the universe. One thought, one blink, one event at the confluence of such “mathematical qualities” for which mankind has hardly come up with calibrations! And even if by some future method, man’s mind is able to ascribe values to Kind(ness), Clean(liness), Unselfish(ness), Eternity and Truth(fulness) as he is able to so cunningly able to apply to all lesser measurements of his existence, such as his money and his possessions, even after that, Beauty, by the above proof, shall always remain elusive!

Allow the blasphemy thus: If God is even remotely achievable, then Beauty is equally impossible.

My friend, now if you are that one person, one soul, one quark, who wants to make Beauty, this is what you would have given your life to! But now on to a practical matter: did you suspect that each of those axes are also slippery? That is, you are not just a Sisyphus trying to climb your task one way up. You are trying to climb five hills in the same breath! And each of those hills are oiled and lubed with the grime of existence, the sheer burden of survival, shelter and paying bills! Make no mistake, all five axes will gleefully slide you down at every distraction and pain and loss and sorrows and the worst of them all (if you ask me), failure!

As if all of the above were not frightfully dissuasive, now then, don’t you dare forget that, if by sheer purpose of madness and the violent will of fire —- and yes, that is exactly as uttered and not even one breath slightly deviant from what was spoken —- you choose to make Beauty, my Friend, my Brother, my Sister, my hero, my fearless Kindred Spirit, allow me to whisper these horrid words in your ears:

You still will have mankind to deal with!

And man is the oddest bunch. He might never wait even a few moments, lose a step or two, to see what you tried to make! Aha, so now I ask: do you not see the task which lies in front of you? Even if you (think you) know and worship Beauty, are you so sure you want to (attempt to) make the Beautiful?