you feel scared, like it's the music or the way the sack was moving that brought you beauty. you are terrified that beauty depends on violin strings and camera angles. you want to be those things. to stare at the bag and have your mind make it dance, to squeeze a symphony from the synapses. but your head is dry. the fridge is humming. ice crashes in your freezer because a machine is making it.
you walk to your kitchen. your fingers stick to the ice cubes and they clank in the glass. the water you pour inside tastes like metal. you sit down. stare at the glass of the tv. in your head you stare past the glass. see the vacuum tube and the diodes and the circuit board. you follow the cable to the dvd player and worm your way to the disc, to the laser shining on the disc. you become the laser and read the ones and zeros. you decode them. you make the sack dance. you make the music sing.
to your surprise the disc continues well past the movie. the disc has entered the realm of metaphysics, and you watch as the ones and zeros tell you terrible secrets. you want to stop watching, but you are the laser, the unblinking eye, the perceiver of beauty. the disc takes you to the end of time. you watch as the final things are said, and the last light winks out.
it's just you now. the laser. watching for beauty. seeing nothing at all.
2 Comments:
Why does anyone find the 'bag-in-the-wind" video so wonderful? Is it the idea of the invisible force of nature being completely visible through the existence of a man-made material? Is it the constant, unpredictable motion, that chaotic and jaunty movement like some garbage jellyfish in the air?
Is it the reality or the metaphore?
Or is it, as my brain interprets your meaning, the idea of our need to be told that it's beautiful?
Let's throw it all into the "beauty in the eye of the beholder" business and move on to the idea of "melancholy as comfort" that you've written so well.
Thanks Brian; when you begin to wonder if anyone thinks about their feelings anymore, you write a good case study of it.
thanks for taking the time to think about my scribble. as you know, the artistic process is usually a lot more organic than the audience believes. i'm honestly not sure how much of that thing was intentional. but if i gave my subconscious some credit, and i had to come up with a meaning, this would be my shot:
beauty is not a trait an object inherently possesses. at different angles/framerates/zoom factors a given image breaks down, stops being beautiful. to me beauty is like a vague reminder of something Originally Beautiful. my idea for that is of course God. but you can't extract God from things that look beautiful. you can stare at it until the end of time and God's not going to pop out and say "howdy, you found me!" because God is bigger than what we can possibly perceive.
So to say things more concisely, beauty is something that resonates with the Imago Dei within us, reminding us at some primal level of God, but God is beyond comprehension, therefore beauty is always passing/subjective.
hmmm... anybody want a peanut?
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