An obsession with material beauty is in many ways the natural consequence of an embodied psychological experience implicitly oriented by evolutionary momentum towards the possibility of self-reproduction. In this sense we should not be surprised that the most prevalent symbolic and overt (or corollary hidden, unconscious) forces in this all too human world are intrinsically shaped towards self-replication, recursion and endlessly regenerative cycles of constructive entropy, productive diffusion and growth. Even in the persistently unwitting or otherwise inadvertent psychological discontinuities that generate fear, hate or conflict (when writ large as dissociative alienation across nations and global civilisations) the same generative principle of growth and attraction is at work.
We choose (or are perhaps chosen by) a natural bias to low-energy mnemonics and caricatures or diminished information-processing cost as cognitive (and cultural) system continuity to dwell on the surface of things and repetitively fail to recognise that true beauty lies in the abstractions, the shadows and uncertainties of personality, intellect and character. One need not understand physics to appreciate the exquisitely convoluted causal chains that invoke even the possibility of a delicate flower or a little bird on the wing but it could hardly be true or justifiable under any mature philosophical assessment that if one can perceive the depth here, one should not.
Each and every gesture you make, every thought and concept you inhabit (and that, equally, inhabits you) cascades across neurocortical vortices of probabilistic potential and delivers a message and microcosm of Universal beauty so profound that I will not attempt to capture it or ever do more than indirectly reference it in these few hollow words. All material beauty is a pale intimation of that plausibly infinite depth which lies beyond and yet we are all drawn back here to the simple fact of an existential, embodied necessity that calls us to emotional aspiration and desire – even as it drives us (all) further apart. This is my enigma and you, you are the most utterly beautiful human being I have ever encountered.
Daedelus Kite 