Beauty and creases

We fold and unfold beauty along a crease created through our own crumpling of perception.

We say it is in the eye of the beholder because all of us beholders tend to use that same line to confine it.

On one side of this crease is content, also known as filling, substance. The Message.

On the other side is form. The wrapper colourful. The shroud. The Elements of Composition.

My brother says flavour's what matters, vitamins and protein. You are socialist. Forget the lilac curls of smoke out of a cigarette: tobacco is full of toxins! The air in the mattress is what holds you up.

But oh, how delicate the shape "4", lost on a page-forest of equations! A vertical line, an elbow intersecting it, then interrupted. Pale grey, the fresh lead that drew it speaks of the gritty texture of the paper. And then, what possible message can there be in a stripped, dry branch from which countless rain droplets are suspended at noon on a November day? These are things that just are, for sometimes shape comes alone.

In such cases, the temptation can be too strong: beauty wants me to create God. No. My need for explanation does, my fear of the perceived. For how can nature be such a superb aesthete, how can there be such combinations of shapes and sensations without a transcendental meaning to validate them?

And yet, why not? I won't succumb to this need. That incredibly red sunset you'll always remember also means pollutants in the atmosphere. Someone else's lung cancer. Or your own.

You run your index finger on furniture that hasn't been polished in a few days, and it comes out with these tiny, barely perceptible motes of dust attached. They just rest there, till you rub them against your thumb and they disappear, crumbling away beyond detection. So what?

Breathe in, breathe out. Just sensing is enough. Deal with it.

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But I have also come across contempt of content. Basically, your ideas don't matter until you know how to express them, I've heard. Such arrogance!

The girl sitting in the back of the classroom, always quiet, shy. A world behind her eyes, I know. As behind anyone's. Anything's. Yet she's ignored, considered fallow, for she can't cut the pretty lace of words, the subtle technique of fitting word to thought.

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Of course, sometimes form and content are wedded. You don't agree with such institutions? Partnered, then.

In such occasions, ah, perfection is possible.

We've been magnanimous enough to fold beauty. Now we're really looking at something whole, we think.

Such a magnificent orator, such ideas.

Such paintings, this guy did!: social conscience AND a perfect command of composition. What else can one ask for?

But we're fooled, again. This is just the way we've been taught to look, the pattern we've been taught to search for in everything.

‘As is’ is never enough. Not-proven-false won't do for us. We have to call it truth, knowledge. We advertise it that way to ourselves, so that we'll believe it.

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Of course, I need to know how to read.
I must be able to make a point effectively, to argue it.
My apple cake must not only taste good, it must also look it!

It's great to know about keratin when I touch soft hair.
When I look at the stars my yearning wouldn't be the same if I hadn't read there are chances other worlds are circling them.

But I can also stare at Arabic script and simply enjoy its curves and flowing grace.
I may from time to time find myself lost, and wonder at the size of things.
I'll just pile up rice, shredded bits of seaweed and raw fish in the right amounts, and then simply sprinkle the whole with a few drops of soy sauce!

For in the end we can't help striving to understand, and that's precisely why we should rejoice all the more in the challenges of mystery, the new, the yet untheorized.

Without our cortex and the creases that crisscross it we wouldn't be able to think, nor evaluate, nor shape our environment to survive. But sometimes beauty slides down the cracks of so much thinking.