Beauty Slays Me

I am just checking in briefly to say that I am okay and enjoying my break from blogging. My new computer arrived three days ago and I've been busy getting it set up and getting to know my way around the new digs. The new computer with its speed and great memory capacity gives me a sense of freedom, and I've been running with that.

However, all is not perfect. I had fooled myself into thinking I was going to be able to run with my book as soon as all responsibilities were over at work, but that hasn't been the case. What I have ended up doing is reading a lot of poetry and going through my notes to shape poems of my own which I hope, in turn, will point me toward a narrative. I was so pleased with the poems I wrote that I sent two to little magazines for consideration.

Enough of that, though. I want to write something about beauty.

On the night of May 8th, after I'd done my last blog entry for a while, I watched the film Harold and Maude again. I've seen this film many times and at different points in my life. Harold and Maude is about an unlikely romance. If you've never seen Harold and Maude, then you should, and that's all I'll say about that.

Watching Harold and Maude on May 8, I noticed what Maude says about beauty, and I was struck suddenly by how easy it is lose our ability to recognize beauty. It is so easy to become blunted.

In Harold and Maude, Maude watches seagulls with Harold. Watching the gulls, Maude tells Harold of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish soldier wrongfully incarcerated on Devil's Island who as a child felt amazement when he first encountered what he thought were the most fantastical birds. Later, Maude says, Dreyfus realized the birds he'd thought were so magical were "only seagulls."

I remember as a child seeing what I thought were the most fantastical flowers. They were orange and tropical and nearly as tall as I was. I told my mother I thought the flowers were pretty (she loved flowers) and she said they were only daylilies, a very common flower which she thought of as nothing more than a weed. I remember the feeling of disappointment that shot through my chest, a feeling that I was being torn apart. Through the years, I've noticed that feeling and have come to associate with it the encroachment of banality, which I want to fight.

This is the challenge of life: to keep one's initial wonderment and ability to see the beauty around us.

I think this was part of my reason for extricating myself from the Internet for a time. I'm not finished with my quest yet to rediscover wonderment and beauty.

Don't you just long to be slain by beauty?

I'll close with a poem about beauty written by Chaucer. Let's say I am reading it tonight and thinking of the "You" in the poem as a muse. What do you look for in a muse? If my muse is a person, I look for one who is courageous, strong, and kind. And one who can slay me with his or her beauty, one who can help me to see beauty, wherever it resides:


Rondel of Merciless Beauty

Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.

Only your word will heal the injury
To my hurt heart, while yet the wound is clean -
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene.

Upon my word, I tell you faithfully
Through life and after death you are my queen;
For with my death the whole truth shall be seen.
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.

Geoffrey Chaucer