Category: Fiction

I believe it is bad luck to speak of beauty before the fact, or theoretically. This belief doesn’t stop me. I know that there is an alchemical relation between form and function and that this corporation has produced some of the most beautiful objects possible. Marine propellers, for example, or catamarans. Beauty is about sorrow and loss and while this is obvious in, say, Michelangelo’s Pieta, it’s less so in the young, radiantly smiling faces of Audrey Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe.

Caught at exactly the right moment between dawn and sunrise, the sky greets me in layers of sherbet shades — pinks and oranges that steal my breath as surely as they chase away the darkness. Beauty seeps from that moment, offering itself to anyone who takes the time to see it.

To witness Found Beauty, which is subjective, and to use it as the basis for Created Beauty, which is objective, thus creating in the appreciation of the reader the synthesis of both, is the absolute prerogative of the artist.

As I recall, I drift at sea in a fog. I pull on the oars of reading and research and somehow strike land. I have to leave the boat, jump in the water, get cold and wet, and flounder. As I stumble up the beach, I find I was not even close to where I thought I was.

We all, in some way, suffer in relation to beauty: in spite of, alongside, because of, or for its sake. If I had to call beauty one thing, I would call it an aesthetic; a lenient appreciation that is malleable in each creator’s hands, because what’s graceful to some is pure jive to others.