B is for Beauty

Beautiful
What is perhaps merely being itself. What is your eyes with tears knowing you are loved. What is you never looking more so than turning a smile. What is a poem I do not understand. What is strange. What is familiar. What is the late sunlight through bodies of water. What is the crevice of your neck. What is the sound of voices in harmony. What is the strength of tigers. What is the crush of waves. What is your dark and silent eyes. What is your small, small hands. What is you as a stranger every morning. What is trees. What is her breathing almost imperceptibly. What is the hot night air and the nearness of the ocean. What is nothing that I really understand. These things in their strangeness, their immensity, their distance, remind me I cannot swallow them, I cannot comprehend them, yet they hold me in their gravity, drawing me to them from a distance I cannot cross. Aporia. Bridges. But you see, the problem lays in my appetite. Beneath your skin, there is a depth that I cannot know, I’ll admit this, happily - there is the infinitude of your potential, your loves and fears and choices, thoughts, cares, emptinesses, all of those frightful things that make you and I others, and this is as it should be and as it should remain, yet my desire (desire is too kind – I am just a lusty boy) insists that I cross that space, that I devour you. The arch of your back, your innocent eyes bright cheeks your smallness I long to wrap myself around or inside or and into within and immersed and not alone and silent and next to and always “Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,” and yet I, like Keats, know that I cannot possess you in any real sense. Any semblance of my possessing you only exists in my imagination, for I must first imagine that you are not infinite and this is a lie. My possessing you can only happen in an unreal space. My possessing you requires that I deny or destroy the beauty that first drew me towards you. What makes you beautiful is that there is more to you than what I can receive, I am, “‘held’ by something that binds us only in it’s not quite-arriving” (Milbank) and to force that something to arrive is impossible unless dreamt which is then false, and this falseness, in a very real sense (a perceived sense), destroys that which was beautiful by refusing to acknowledge its excess. Simone Weil says that, “distance is the soul of the beautiful”, she understands that, “The attitude of looking and waiting is the attitude which corresponds with the beautiful. As long as one can go on conceiving, wishing, longing, the beautiful does not appear. That is why in all beauty we find contradiction, bitterness and absence which are irreducible”. She says all I am trying to say. “The beautiful is a carnal attraction which keeps us at a distance and implies a renunciation. This includes the renunciation of that which is most deep-seated, the imagination. We want to eat all the other objects of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be.” B, you are beautiful, and the desire of my heart is to see you as you are but my flesh is strong and longs to tear into you, knowing it will destroy you, knowing it is not even you, I desire to consume you, to strip you of that infinite depth which is yours as given by God and to hold it inside of myself. God grant me the strength to know her only and always as beautiful.

C is for Consume (don't forget consummate)