Modesty, Part 2: The Heart’s Truth

It’s been a while. If you need a refresher, Modesty, Part 1: Beauty’s Condom is here.

You find yourself in a bustling city, tucked in one of those pouches of manicured nature in a quad somewhere in the Upper West Side. The quad is walled in on three sides with brick buildings chewed by a century and a half of weather, giving your afternoon a decidedly collegiate feeling, though without the ivy.

Old iron with rust sores arch the gateway into the quad, making you feel like you had broken a rule in slipping through, but the gates had been removed some ages past making the archway foreboding but toothless. Through the naked archway, you look out to see a metropolis of soft watercolors warming in the sun and the din of city life reduced to pleasant ambient noise.

The smog has abated to a faint, sour tinge on the air. But you don’t mind – it adds to the juxtaposition of city and nature, and perhaps feeds you a thought about man’s dominion of creation, or domination thereof, and tuck the thought into a pocket of your mind to be snacked on later.

A window opens in one of the third-story apartments and out floats a bit of Vivaldi riding a violin and bounces around the brick. You imagine a privileged third grader still in her catholic school uniform reluctantly reciting her scales with clumsy, staccato strokes. And it fits. The situation calls for a novice; a virtuoso nailing Vivaldi doesn’t jive with the scene, because you are a novice yourself, cutting your teeth on the beauty of architecture.

Sun slices in through the high-rise buildings and glances off a statue set in the grass just ahead of you – a marbled woman draped in cloth, baleful eyes mourning the dead sparrow she holds in her hands. Cherry blossoms pink the grass around her feet and the city’s grime collected at the eyes has mixed with dew streaking her white face with black tears.

After a weekend trip to a friend’s cottage in the Bar Harbor, a humble thing on an acre of grass overlooking an unwelcoming sea, you concluded that you like to be inside beautiful things and avoid ugly things – as much as living in a world of ugly things allows. To understand this phenomenon of humanity, you purchased An Architectural History of Manhattan, which you have read through several times, and are currently on your first expedition into the jungle of hard beauty hidden in plain sight.

There you sit on a park bench, a part of the painting, stroked into the scene with a palate of colors, sounds, and smells. You fit. The scene called for a silent observer, a witness to one of the billions of one-act plays written for humanity for the edification of human souls, often played to an empty theatre.

To your right, sitting next to you with his legs crossed, smoking a pipe, is Truth personified. He has an in-extraordinary face, with quick, uncompromising eyes – a man of precision, calculation, and dispassionate evidence. There is nothing particularly lovely about him, though your head feels clear having him next to you, as though all the sopping clouds of ambiguity fuddling your mind were burnt off by his light.

In the deep creases of his brow, you see his repetitive history of ridicule followed by violent rejection; one of showing up at inopportune times and dazzling gradually. He has a comforting and unequivocal smell, like peanut butter, making you wonder why Truth should even have a smell, but then concluding that smell is really the first sign of his proximity. Folded in his lap, his hands, knuckles chapped and raw from knocking on many doors.

And let us imagine that you are at ease with this Man, completely at your leisure, knowing a simple proof as 2+2=4 will be enough to bring a solemn smile to his ancient, youthful face. Though you are not so sure of the Woman sitting on the next bench to your left just beyond whisper shot: Beauty.

The first sensation that made you aware of her presence was a queasiness, a disturbance of placid abdominal butterflies – the same agitation that makes chickens flutter and cluck when they cannot immediately distinguish friend from foe. It was the jittery sensation just before the starting pistol, the slow crescendo of a roller coaster as it clinks to the crest. You feel uncomfortably hot. It is a flushed heat, the kind that paints cheeks in bashful red; instinctually, your hand moves to slide a piece of fallen ponytail behind your ear, wishing ugly attitudes were so easily adjusted.

Furtively, you steal a glance out of the corner of your eye to see…but how will you describe your observations? She shot forth peculiar graces. There was something of the rose: petals, leaf, and thorn. With each breath of her heaving breast was the rise and fall of the seasons, the undulations of the tides. The sinews of her neck were strung in the minor key of Bach’s cello prelude. She smelled like grass and the oily purple of lilacs. Her complexion was like the Moon: the creamy, soft white of summer’s eve inspiring lovers and bad poetry, but also the bloodless, bone-white of the wild autumn moons, when she is high and cold and on the hunt. Her’s was not the face of a woman plastered on magazine covers, just prettier by one; she was not one of Plato’s Forms dripped down from the heavens to be xeroxed. She is Beauty, and in her all claims of beauty must pass before her scrutinizing inspection.

Your eye moves from her ivory neck to notice that her dress is ripped at the shoulder and filthy at the hem, though nothing in her face belies fear or shame. On her wrists were cuts and bruises; the deep purple of fresh trauma and the old, bile-colored injuries fading from the skin into memory, all in the shape of thumbs and fingers and the red rake of fingernails.

She sat on the bench, a smirk playing in the corner of her perfect lips as she beheld the marble statue. Yet, at the same time, her eyes were unfocused, looking beyond, or perhaps through, the statue to some reality hidden from you.

Then you have a curious realization: of all the beauty swimming around you, the most unexpected finding is that Beauty is a person. There she sits. From your recent history of foraging for beauty and finding there are as many opinions of what it is as there are opinions, it is odd that such variations could ever take the form of a single person, unless that being was some hideous chimera of contradictions, paradoxes and opposites.

Since Truth happens to be sitting next to you, maybe he can shed some light.

You turn to him and say, “It just occurred to me that Beauty, well, seems to be a person. This doesn’t seem to fit. I don’t know why, but it seems much easier to think of you, Sir, as a person than her.”

“And why is that, do you think?” Truth responds.

“Because a person has likes and dislikes, preferences, things they are and things they are not. I suppose because a person has boundaries. And it is easy to think of you as a person because I know you have boundaries; there are things that are said and done in your name that you would have no part of. If someone were to tell a lie, they are trying to make another person believe that you are on their side. It’s as if they were saying ‘If Truth were here, He would testify to what I say.’ Things are true or they are not, and opinion doesn’t change that.”

Truth said, “Yes, that is true. I don’t sidle up along an opinion and I don’t show up just because my name is stuck on to a thing.”

“But can the same be said of her? She is a person, and I have to say that I was surprised. I mean, in some ways nothing makes more sense in the world, but in other ways, I have a hard time making sense of it. Does she have boundaries? Are there things people call beautiful that she would consider a ‘lie’ about her?

Truth responds. “Many have attempted to unravel that enigma. It’s the ones who think of her like a game of chess that don’t fair so well. The mad poets do alright, though, and children. But why do you think it is hard to make sense of?”

“Because the way we talk about beauty, I suppose, and what people think of as beautiful can be so dissimilar. A song is beautiful, so is a sonnet, so is a picture, an experience, a smell. One person thinks a thing is beautiful, another doesn’t; one prefers this, another that. And some twisted men call beautiful what is truly ugly. And who is to say? At least with you, one can test a statement for truth, and verify or falsify it with an experiment. I mean, even the fact that we disagree about what is true and what isn’t seems to prove that you are real and not only the product of our opinions. But it seems like the difference in opinions of Beauty only proves she wouldn’t be a she at all, but more like an it; a feeling that comes from us, not a reality that exists outside of us.”

Truth laughs through his nostrils. ” ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ I think is the phrase you are looking for. No, that is not Me. I do not ‘testify’, as you put it, to that ridiculous statement.”

Beauty rises from her bench and walks towards the marble statue, gazing at it as in a mirror. Truth watches her admiringly and, closing his copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, puts his arm around your back and leans in.

“We have a complex relationship, her and I,” He says. “The fun for you is that you get to puzzle it out. But you can’t think of us in the same way. The reason why you can’t make sense of it is because you are trying to think of Beauty as Truth. But that will not work, and for the same reason you described. Beauty does not land on each person’s heart in the same way, and because of this you see obvious contradictions since you could not take one person’s experience and make it into a universal imperative that would apply to all people. That is to think that each person’s experience of beauty is a cold hard Truth, like math; that is to make Beauty a Truth of the head. But Beauty is Truth of the heart.”

The phrase immediately stinks in your nostrils and you find it hard to hide your disappointment.

“If you will excuse me for saying so, but that doesn’t sound like something you would say at all. ‘Beauty is truth of the heart?’ It seems very ambiguous and, well, kind of lame; like Beauty is all opinion anyway, which was exactly my point. And to be quite honest, it sounds like something I would read in a fortune cookie or printed on the inside of a chocolate foil.”

“Not at all,” Truth laughs. “You think Beauty is opinion because she is found in many different places by different people, and you see this difference to mean that something becomes beautiful just by someone calling it so, or by some reflexive response arising from the juices of the brain. But that is because you are thinking of Her like me. I am like the Sun, an objective reality available to all men equally and in the same way. I am shining, or I am not, and am not changed by opinion. And, like the Sun, not only do people see me, but by me they see everything else, all the tiny truths of your day. I shine from heaven to earth so that men may see.”

“But Beauty, she works from the other end: she flows from earth to heaven. She whispers to the heart through those personal delights and peculiar opinions – as you put it – but they all lead to one central Reality. She is infused into creation. What you find beautiful is a faint echo in the heart of the real Song, a few notes of the music – the real, objective truth of Beauty. I tell a man where he is; she reminds him where he has always wanted to be. She is a missionary sent to find you in your shadowy world and catch your attention and calls you to ‘come and see’. She is meant to be followed.”

“Followed where?” you ask.

“Where? You know. You all know. That is the chief deception of your time, that is the reason for her ragged dress and bruised arms. She means to take you to the “far off country”, the memory of the place you have never been! Beauty trickles in the heart and beckons to follow her back to the Headwaters. Blocking out the sun from shining onto earth and damming up the beauty from flowing to heaven has the same disastrous consequences.”

“Oh,” is all you manage to say.

You watch as Beauty walks around the cobblestone path circling the marble statue, her porcelain feet peeking out from under the dirty hem of her pale blue dress. Your eyes follow the line of her profile tracing up her thigh and around the goblet waist, down the shapely arms, tracing the line around each slender finger, back up again to her neck, engraving the collinear circles of her forehead and nose, over the tangle of hair, and back down over the bare shoulder, dipping into the small of her back, and back to where you started. Her perfection was circular.

If only she would come and stay with you, bless you, sit with you. If only she could be next to you, then you are certain you would be happy. It awakens in you a longing, not only to be with her but to be in her and to have her in you – to trap her in your heart, to be coheirs of the admiration of the world. Then the world would be captive of you and stare at your form, as they trace your figure with their eyes and engrave you into their minds, as they follow you, and beg to drink from your springs. In you they would find all the journey of their desire.

There she is, so close, the food for your longing to be longed is paces away. You could take her by the wrist and…and why shouldn’t you? Why shouldn’t she be yours?

“Careful,” Truth says. “Careful, now.”

Stay tuned for Modesty, Part 3: The Handmaiden