Concerning the Beautiful

One reaches out for the crocus and the busy, dusty-toed bees but cannot grasp them---the moment has passed all that is left is this digital photograph. And this photograph is a number of things but none of which are the crocus and the bee gone since Springtime! In fact what makes the photo appear to be the crocus and bee is my memory or the memory of another viewer---in fact it is this memory that serves to confirm that this particular image is the crocus in my yard.

Now let's take this inquiry back to its starting point, we find ourselves gazing into the early spring sunlight, seeing the purple delicate petals---now full stop---there is no photo---it is just my gaze right up against the phenomenon of the beauty of this crocus shining forth. I have emptied my mind completely and the entire day is revealed to me in this backlit violet petal illumined by the myriad invisible scintillations of the many millioned mile journey of the sun. Let's begin with this particular entity. Let's consider that the harmony of this grasping of the present is 'beauty'.

Beauty, its essence, its truth, has been squandered in subjectivistic philosophies and aesthetics barren of the wonderful fulness of her richness. There is of course subjectivity in terms of individual preferences (you prefer maples, I prefer the crocus), yet this begs the question---there are trees, and all that goes with trees, arborial life, roots, ...soil, leaves, ...sky. In short, individual preferences taken as arbiter of beauty, leads to a discussion of beauty without allowing that beauty has an objective correlate, perhaps or is a 'harmonizing' between a perceiving subject and a perceptible object (the crocus and the bee).

The optimal account includes all of these ingredients: subjectivity. objectivity, harmony---world and individual "take" on this world.

Be that as it may, such a quandary is not of the essence of the matter with this inquiry---it is to see and if possible name this essential beauty that is revealed in the photo of the crocus and the bee!

Allow me to describe this phenomenologically, that is descriptively attempting to make as much as possible the blow by blow experience as it unfolds poetically if you will.

I am up against the limit of my world....it is a gate/// my eyes are glued to the beauty as long as I can stare at her, Is it I alone who sees her? What are everybody looking at all the time anyway.

Check with me right now and I will let you know that I am typing, drinking tea, listening to the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan side 2, I can describe the mowers chopping hum, it is late October, I am telling the truth! Is it actually mower chopping, or helicopter chopping? Is it tea or infusion I drink? I tell you in all honesty, that I am being as honest as possible for me to be.....so, If you asked me what everybody are looking at right now and  put us in a field in front of glimmering golden shimmering red sugar maples, and now stare into the sun buffered by the orange canopy and gaze into the apparent beauty---this is no rare thing---it is Autumn in Pennsylvania such as I have known it since a boy.

(this photo depicts the leaves in the streambed)

Staring right into the heart of the leaf....yes, and the leaf shimmering with scintillations of sunlight, the colorulfness, and keep in mind this is all at once----simultaneous, not in the WWW sense of simultaneous which is rigged, if you ask me. This 'harmony' this 'beauty'!

Now we have found the origin of our inquiry concerning the beautiful.

I will close this post with a poem:

"'Is she beautiful?' he asked,

"why certainly,

Look---see for yourself!"