15. November 2006, 09:16
Beauty's True Nature Part Two
One of my livejournal friends recently wrote an entry asking about beauty. Those who have known me for any length of time, know that beauty and figuring it out is a Really Big Deal for me. Those who just met me, are about to find that out.
I started to answer her question, but then I realized that she would probably think I have gone off the deep end. This wasn’t an answer to her questions, this was me trying to solve the puzzle for myself again. She does not need me going off in her journal on my flights of fancy. I decided I would go off on it in my own, keep the nonsense in one place. This entry is something I have been planning to write any way. A re-evaluation of my beliefs on beauty was long overdue.
It all started with my obsession with beauty. In writing. I did not think it was in mine, so somebody asked me to define the true nature of beauty. So I did (you do not have to read that). From then on, that idea became one of my core beliefs and beauty became my chief obsession. Beauty is still my chief obsession,, but I don’t find the conclusion I came to then satisfactory any more. Let me sum up my conclusions. When I was younger and unhappier, I saw beauty in everything. I had a theory then that all beauty, without exception, stems from virtue. That somehow, even something inanimate like a mountain could represent an idea like justice, and that was why we found mountains beautiful.
I still believe that any virtue will beget beauty, but I don’t think beauty is always the product of virtue. A mountain is not justice, cannot inherently represent it, but a mountain is still beautiful.
I don’t see beauty in as many things any more, but… I guess the common platitude is “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but I don’t cling to that. I look at beauty the other way around. Beauty is inherently in many many many things, and sometimes I can see it there and sometimes I can’t. Sometimes other people see the beauty which is in the object in which I cannot see the beauty. But just because I cannot see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I can’t limit beauty. I don’t make a standard of beauty. For me, beauty is something which just is, and the trick is learning to find what is really beautiful and what is not. What is a beautiful thing, and what is something we just have a predisposition to like the looks of? Is that the same thing?
I feel like most people who tend to like, say, pink hair with a blonde and brown coontail, and call it beautiful mean something slightly different from me when I admire the little crystals of snow clinging to blades of grass. Or do they?
What this devolves into for me, is not a question of what is beautiful, but what is beauty? What does beauty mean? What is beauty itself? I don’t think it’s as simple as the definition in a dictionary.
I cannot find the answer. I am trying to. I am searching for it.
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31. October 2006, 20:59
The Parting, The Sorrow
I hate when I shut off my tears. Over all the numerous partings from my boyfriend which I have experienced, I have always felt the most pain for the longest when I don’t let myself cry. Sometimes it isn’t voluntary. I busy myself thinking about something else at the height of my sadness so that I can’t focus on parting and crying; but I end up being sad, lonely, and pining for much longer afterwards. When I cry, I usually cry almost non stop for a day or two. It makes my eyes hurt and it exhausts me, but the exhaustion is good. It’s an outlet. It’s a passionate, active feeling. When I can’t cry, I’m passive. I end up edgy, nervous, sleepless and disconnected. I feel numb. I hate it.
This time, this time… there was just so much to digest… things I wanted to do… I cried a little. Then I shut it off. I might still be able to find my tears. I need to cry. I miss him. This is ok. This feeling is ok to feel. I know this but sometimes it’s just hard to embrace it. I can’t hide it from others and I hate to let them see my tears.
I’m going to go consider my memories now. Digest the past week and everything that happened. Take stock of things. Treasure the dear moments. The moments of love overflow.
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17. October 2006, 13:23
Deteriorate
I’ve been ingesting far too much history. Reading about the constant shift of ideas through this age for hours on end makes my head start to spin because it gets me thinking so hard about what I believe. What I believe isn’t changing, no, rather reading about the set of beliefs that other people set down makes me ponder what I would write down for my exact belief set. I know vaguely, but I think it’s important to really know what you think about things. It gives a person a perspective. I also think a person should be willing to alter their beliefs but don’t we all need a certain measuring stick?
So that would be part of my belief set. I start out with the idea that each person needs to create for themselves a unit of measurement for the rest of their beliefs. A standard. Here are the rules for the sonnet of our lives, they must fit these rules, but within the rules, do and think what you wish. Things which can change and shift and be reshaped. Things which are less important, like your preferences or biases or whether leggings are beautiful or ugly. These are the contents of the sonnet, the words and what they’re about.
Not a terribly unique idea. None of my ideas are unique, but that isn’t why I want to write them down sometime for myself. I just need my own manifesto on life. On art. On fashion. On education. Like my little piece on beauty so many ages ago (such a silly, quaint little thing!). Really, my diary used to be all about doing this and constantly figuring myself and my beliefs out.
I think I’m just bored and cagey. I feel like I need to be creatively productive but I don’t know how to go about with that. I’m not really inspired in any particular direction. Writing manifestos and mottos and maxims of my amalgamation of unoriginal ideas and little Minjaisms would be something to do.
I just keep wishing and longing to write as prolifically and beautifully as I used to. When I tried really hard to write something pretty, I sucked and when I used the thesaraus too often, I sucked, but sometimes I used to write the prettiest things. What’s happened to me? Where did all the beauty go? Am I blind now? I’m uninspired. I’m formulaic. I’m petty. I’m bitter.
What do I write about? What do I write about? What do I write about?
After much skimming through my old diaries the answer arises again:
life. I write about life. Write about it…
Postscript: After more skimming through my old diaries, I am SO glad that I am out of my emotional phase. Oh god, no more nights and days spent sobbing and pining any more. The days I spend crying and/or depressed are very very rare.
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25. June 2006, 17:58
Sanctuary!
Sometimes, I wish my life was more like the novels I read. I don’t want anything wild and grand and adventurous to happen to me… the sort of books I read aren’t wild fantastical adventures. I read about people.
I want something spontaneous and pulsing and passionate and untamed. Something indescribable which is missing from normality. Vibrancy… reckless honesty…
I don’t really know. I’m dreadfully dissatisfied. I think I get too involved when I read. I’m living vicariously through people in my novels. I forget sometimes that I’m myself. I start to think like the heroines… and I feel with them. I feel with them to the greatest heights and depths. My soul pulses alternately with their joy and pain. I want to shape myself into one of them sometime. I’d be me, but I would be a heroine of a sort. Not in the sense that I’m heroic and perfect. Rather in the sense that I’m flawed and terrible and emotional but still wonderful and brilliant in my clumsiness.
That’s all in the words though, isn’t it? It isn’t the life… it’s the words. I just want to become the words themselves. Just a bundle of passionate feeling.
I want something more… something different… I know what I want but I don’t know how to actually get it. Achieve it… Except for gleaning it from books… from people who don’t exist…
I just read too much. I know. I read far far too much.
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28. May 2006, 15:15
Something or Other Cliche About Honesty and Maybe Its Irrelevence
I can’t do this because I can’t be honest any more.
I’ve been poring over old diary entries and wondering where I’ve gone. I have no qualms about putting this out in the open any more, because I’ve found that in later reflection, it is very important for me to have entries where I recoup my writing goals. When I used to write, I felt so tender, so innocent and so beautiful so often that what I felt inside overflowed into what I saw around me. Everything had some fascinating, enrapturing aspect to it, and I had to capture it in my memory and record it like a little naturalist collecting and pinning up butterflies.
I’m just not that way any more. I’m not sure whether that was a phase and what I am now is who I really am, or whether I’m going through a phase now and what I was then is who I really am. I lean towards the latter… which is surprising for the amount of bitterness I carry around these days. Bitterness should say the former, but it won’t.
I’m being stifled by a lot of fears and apprehensions which I don’t want to admit. I don’t feel beautiful inside and I’ve lost my innocence, so I can’t project beauty and I definitely can’t project innocence onto my surroundings. I feel nothing good or bad, so I project nothing; or I feel fearful/malicious/unsentimental/etc etc etc so I project that. The latter would lend itself to the creation of…something, but because I don’t want to admit, I can’t create.
Confused yet? I think I am.
It’s getting to me, but I know now that I really could bottle it up until it all goes away of its own will. I used to think bad feelings kept secret would always make a person explode. I don’t believe that anymore. These feelings inside won’t last forever. I can hide them until they go away. Once they’re long gone, I could reveal them but that just doesn’t do anything for my situation now.
That doesn’t do anything for my writing, rather. Was that the subject of this? I think this discussion has grown into something more than just my diary writing. I prefer it this way.
It isn’t just harming my writing, it’s harming my sleep. If only I could write late at night, I would be prolific. I just can’t sleep lately. I lay down and my eyes stare into my dark room, unable to close. My mind races on so many many different tracks. I toss and turn and toss and turn and think and think and think. I’m usually probably tired, but my mind is far too busy to let my body rest. So many thoughts about so many troubling situations which I don’t care to share. I don’t end up feeling depressed or unhappy. I don’t really think I feel at all. Maybe I just feel frantic about what to do and where to go and how to feel again.
At night, I dream about myself bedridden, my limbs paralyzed by a sickness, and my face upturned to the light of an artifical lamp. I am not myself, but another person looking down upon myself and I see myself as a little flower withering. The bloom fading long before the time has come for it to fade. Nothing left… a poignant picture…
And then I awake and laugh sardonically at my dramatic absurdity.
How can I fade yet? If I were in the position to fade, I am young. Merely Nineteen Years Old. Do you hear that? World? I am only NINETEEN. DIX-NEUF ANS. I am so young still. I am almost still a child. I have this youth on my side. I have the strength which is part of youth on my side. I have a mind, and free will. I have not begun to fade yet, if I were in a position to, then I am also in the position to rescue myself from fading. I have not squandered my youth yet, and I can also steer myself away from doing so if I were on the path to do so.
I AM YOUNG AND I AM NOT FADING. And who says that I am even on the path to fading? How can my mind bring up this charge? How can my subconcious condemn my actions?!
Well I shouldn’t get so worked up about it. I will not fade, I will not let that happen. It will not happen. It will not. My dreams mean nothing. They are the overflow of my busy mind. My mind is busy because my hands are not. I busy my hands, and the worries go away. Idleness breeds malice (a bad corruption! I know!).
Here my mind wanders away from my dreadful metaphors and I am distracted by a little unfinshed chinese lucky star sitting on my desk…
If I am not careful, I am going to begin to be a stream of consciousness writer. A very, very bad one at that. My mind is quieted to feeling and thinking nothing again. I am going back to the busy-ness for my fingers. I have to try harder to write better later. Really, I think I’m just being lazy. So I cover it up with a lot of nonsense.
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14. May 2006, 21:08
This is Just A Day, and I Am Just A Girl
I longed for vacation, and now here it is, and I am already sick of it. When I was at school, there was a motivation to get up out of bed every morning. I was going somewhere, and I was going to walk around. Now, there’s nothing. I’m dreadfully restless. I need to be up on my feet and moving, but there isn’t anything for me to do or anywhere for me to go. It is far too hot to do anything outside and even if it weren’t, it isn’t any fun going outside by yourself. I used to have a backyard with grass and a trampoline to entertain myself with when I didn’t have class, but now I only have a yard of rocks.
I get up and wander, looking for something, but I find nothing. I wander back to my chair and resume staring at my computer screen or the wall. Pining and sighing over nothing.
I’m not depressed or suicidal or such… I just feel… Oh inadequate language! How can anyone express themselves through writing without failing tremendously or misrepresenting themselves terribly?! I am doing the latter terrifically!
This isn’t right at all. I am failing miserably at recreating words which I lost with a wayward mouse click. I sound like I’m talking about one thing when I’m talking about another. Such is life.
This is just a day. Not a happy day, but far from a sad one. It is just a day. There is no word which describes a day that just IS or a feeling that just IS. Fine is the closest one can get and the connotations with that word are not acceptable.
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14. April 2006, 17:33
Scatterbrained
God I hate…some things. Some things are just terrible. I feel sad and weepy for no particular reason. I’m finding the smallest pretenses to be dramatic. I know why I’m doing this, and I hate it because as soon as I try to stop myself, I find myself being weepy because I’m stopping myself from being dramatic. I will totally be the emoest kid on the block if I ever get pregnant. I know it.
I’m so on the edge of launching into this dreadful monologue about the tragedies of the mistakes I’ve made in life and the choices I’ve made and where they’re taking me except I really don’t believe they are tragedies. I just feel like dramatically and dreadfully monologuing. Which would cast me into the Realm of the Sterotypical and Annoying. I would then have to lament about being so typically emotional. It becomes a vicious cycle.
So I’m going to stop it now, and rather than being self indulgently emotional, I am going to be self indulgently vain. The horror!
I feel pretty lately. I honestly do. Like most girls, I have not really had much confidence in my looks for the past seven or so years. But recently I just feel ethereal and lovely. I stand in the sunshine and let a little breeze tousle my hair and soak in the transcendental beauty of the sky and sun and I feel like I’m a little elven sliver of that beauty. My back straightens and my step becomes more deliberate. I do not really care if anyone else thinks I am pretty or not. The point is not to be admired. I just want to feel like I am a little pulsing rhythm in the beauty of nature. I am a good, small part of some grand symphony.
Then the wind changes, blows harder and the dust stirs and I am chased inside, back to complete normality. Living in a dust bowl is not beautiful; it is slovenly and suffocating. Dust, dust, dust everywhere. UGH. The wind is chasing the storm clouds away, and the clouds give way to sunshine, and Easter will be hot and sunny and uneventful.
And egg filled. Every year we color 60 eggs. My dad had a mental lapse and bought eggs at the grocery store besides the flat of 60 from costco. This means we have close to 100 eggs in our refrigerator. We hardboiled and colored 60, as usual. 60 hardboiled eggs to consume. Now all of our fingers are stained, but the eggs are looking mostly fab. I used rubber bands this year to make patterns. I love to try wacky techniques to get beautiful results…no solid colored eggs for me, thank you very much. Next year, I am trying some more elaborate Martha Stewart techniques for the fun of it. Spoilsports cannot stop me.
I feel like meandering off into Virgina Woolfe-like stream of conciousness prose so I am going to quit while I’m ahead. I couldn’t write as pretty as her and I know things would get out of hand…
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27. February 2006, 09:45
Robert Browning and Me
I’ve decided that my life and soul have become a cesspool of flippancy and sarcasm. That’s the whole problem. Beginning to end.
I’m finally a flesh and blood degenerate. All of my glorious dreams for fairy tales and castles in the air have been relegated to a little dirty back alley in my mind where I place them on pedestals and parade them before my darker tendencies. They throw tomatoes and cabbage leaves at the ideals. It’s picturesque in a rather morbid, early fourteenth century sort of way. I do dig the early fourteenth century (or thereabouts).
I figure I’ll have a different solution tomorrow. I pick them out of a hat so I couldn’t tell you what exactly the next one will be. I figure eventually though, I’ll get to the root of whatever’s bothering me and making me so sour. I’ll improve eventually. Just not today.
And I WON’T be melting down into a puddle of tears, I promise you that. This isn’t going to be all airy and floaty and romantic like my previous reshapings have been. This time, I have to mud wrestle with myself and anyone who wants to help me. Sarcasm, skepticism, sailor cursin’ and all(iteration!). Best man wins.
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18. February 2006, 13:48
This is Not About...
pages pages pages past…
Memories are such a very strange thing. When I journey through my memory and revive all the things that once were and were not, I am struck by the courses of events and the way things have changed from then to now. Was that my life then? Were those my thoughts then? Is this what I’ve come to? Is this really who I’ve become?
It happened, I know everything that has, but it seems scarcely believable. The present moment always feels lilke all encompassing eternity.
Just a harmless awestruck musing I suppose, or rather you must suppose. I’m just watching the wheels of life churn forward. Observing the changes made in the mill by the meadow as the factories and mansions go in.
Lunch break is over. Back to the soot and the smoke. And later the mansion which may or may not be my cage.
Ha. God, metaphor feels so absurd. Am I slipping?
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13. December 2005, 12:25
Preface to an Excerpt
I find truths I never wanted to hear in places I didn’t expect to find them. Truths that make me twist and writhe with frustration and black realization. A mirror to show me my sins. Even if you want to argue that I’m wrong though, even if you think I’m misjudging myself, I have seen this before in other people. I think it’s more common in American society today merely because of the way we’re raised and the feel good, be yourself, you can do anything you want mentality we’re programmed with.
The truth is, just because you want something really bad, doesn’t mean you can have it, no matter what people say these days. Commonplaceness is the doom of almost everyone. Not even half the people who want to escape that fate can. We all have to learn to embrace and accept our normality…
This translation is more of a paraphrase of what’s in the translation I have been reading, but it will do. Perhaps it’s better that way, because now it is shorter.
For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine. I think such an individual really does become a type of his own a type of commonplaceness which will not for the world, if it can help it, be contented, but strains and yearns to be something original and independent, without the slightest possibility of being so. To this class of commonplace people belong several characters in this novel; characters which, I admit, I have not drawn very vividly up to now for my reader’s benefit.Such were, for instance, Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsyn, her husband, and her brother, Gavril Ardalionovich.
There is nothing so annoying as to be fairly rich, of a fairly good family, pleasing presence, average education, to be “not stupid,” kind-hearted, and yet to have no talent at all, no originality, not a single idea of one’s own—to be, in fact, “just like everyone else.”
Of such people there are countless numbers in this worldfar more even than appear. They can be divided into two classes as all men can-that is, those of limited intellect, and those who are much cleverer. The former of these classes is the happier.
[...]
Our friend, Ganya, belonged to the other class, to the “much cleverer” persons, though he was from head to foot permeated and saturated with the longing to be original. This class, as I have said above, is far less happy. For the “clever commonplace” person, though he may possibly imagine himself a man of genius and originality, none the less has within his heart the deathless worm of suspicion and doubt; and this doubt sometimes brings a
clever man to despair. (As a rule, however, nothing tragic happens; his liver becomes a little damaged in the course of time, nothing more serious). Such men do not give up their aspirations after originality without a severe struggle, and there have been men who, though good fellows in themselves, and even benefactors to humanity, have sunk to the level of base criminals for the sake of originality.Ganya was a beginner, as it were, upon this road. A deep and unchangeable consciousness of his own lack of talent, combined with a vast longing to be able to persuade himself that he was original, had rankled in his heart, even from childhood.
-The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Part Four, Chapter One