Categories
life

Beautiful Faces and Bad Decisions

Having breakfast today and, grateful for a brief respite from wearing surgical masks in the current pandemic context, someone truly eye-catching walked in to order coffee. Young, petite, pretty with clear skin and sparkling eyes that were as yet undulled by the disillusionment of time and age. She was quite naturally beautiful and everyone there […]

Categories
life

Someone, somewhere…

It is kind of hard to believe that there’s someone out there for all of us, somewhere. It’s a nice idea and I even think I know who my “someone” is, regardless that I will for many diverse and complicated reasons never meet her. Perhaps the necessary condition for there to even be the possibility […]

Categories
life

Dark Days

We never think that we know what love is anywhere near so much as when it feels like it has abandoned us and that, that is the mystery: we must lose what we love to realise just how truly and deeply we loved it.

Categories
Philosophy

My Love is a Marionette

My love is a marionette. Dancing on threads that she never controls or owns and like blindfolds in darkness, that I never know. Life’s theatre of pleasure is a labyrinth of pain and were it not that we all refine in game and grammar such intricate strategies of haunted self-deception as pure aspirations to continuing […]

Categories
technology

Beauty, reduced to mere measurement…

Context (but behind a paywall): I asked an AI to tell me how beautiful I am I read today of what appeared to be a technological project and commercial enterprise intent on reducing beauty to an AI-mediated measurement or judgement value system and in the midst of all my horror, some words or observations came […]

Categories
Philosophy

Beauty, set free from all expectation…

My experience of beauty was never one in which I felt any compulsion to own or control. I found a pure and simple fascination in the natural fact and reality that a person authentically and sincerely loved is always and already set free. It is in only in or by recognising our own inner emotional […]

Categories
Philosophy

Love Letter to an Unknown Other

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Beautiful Convergence

Beauty fascinates me although it is not at a purely aesthetic level or in any visceral approximation to emotional experience and desire with which our culturally-mediated experience of self and subjectivity endows us. Consider that there have been a number of cross-cultural and ethnically-diverse academic studies that demonstrate that the faces which are considered to […]

Categories
culture

Beautiful Words and Emptiness

I enjoy the endless Baroque complexity of words far too much to ever settle on a generalised shape or articulated pattern and causal ontology for them. Of course, though, even the absence of pattern is a kind of pattern, no? By this logic we might even assert that the intricate improbability of a truly random […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Dissociative Beauty

“My beauty was my curse, so to speak; it created an impenetrable shield between people and who I really was.” ~Hedy Lamarr There really does seem to be something of a deep and irremediable sorrow in all great beauty. We might say the same of a beautiful mind as much as of an attractive face […]

Categories
Philosophy

True Beauty Runs Deep

The most beautiful people and cultures exist far beyond any simple experience of desire for material acquisition or cosmetic attractiveness; it is a little melancholy that an implicit loveliness that comes with knowledge and wisdom is hardly the most celebrated property of any human being in a world (like this) that endures endless tides of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Beauty, Truth, Duplicity

Beauty has two faces. One is the natural symmetry and resonant eloquence of the parts as they are manifest in and as a whole, of unified pattern and unity. The other is the abstraction and symbolic token of value and meaning that we cultivate (and inherit as culture) through language and tradition. The first is […]