Thanksgiving Food, Porn, and Beauty

Beauty was an important concept my mom instilled in me and siblings while growing up. There was a kind of longing for it in every part of life. Though this may sound superficial, the way we were taught to think about beauty itself was metaphysical rather than simply physical. It's not that the substantive aspect of beauty didn't spill out into the material realm, but something couldn't be beautiful without its deeper counterpart. Beauty always derived its power from the intangible. And something could be beautiful without necessarily being sensually attractive. All of this very much stemmed from my mom's Catholic view and it's still something that influences me.

Years ago I had a boss that, right before Thanksgiving, said he was only going to eat mashed potatoes, turkey, and gravy for the holiday. It was a resolute statement, because he didn't want to "get full on all the filler foods" like stuffing, corn, etc. He, in his mind, was cutting out all the crap, so he could make room to amplify what he saw as being the important part of the meal. This struck me, because it seemed like a good analogy for a very human inclination. We often misidentify the essence of stuff, so we can double down on what we think is at the heart of the experience. When we pair things down though, we are often left a husk. Something that can't sustain us and is ultimately unhealthy.

Around the same time as this Thanksgiving moment I had another similar circumstance happen. A friend found a giant box of VHS tapes that was on a curb with the garbage. He grabbed it, because it was full of movies and we were in our early twenties and poor. Carrying a giant box on the metro bus was a small price to pay for free entertainment. As we were going through our treasure at one of our apartments, in the mass of videos was a porn titled, something like, "101 Cum Shots". I can't help but see the appeal of this compilation as being the same as the Thanksgiving situation. Magnifying what one sees as the desirable thing about an experience by hyper-focusing on it, only to misdiagnose what it’s all about to begin with.

So, what does Thanksgiving food and porn have to do with beauty?

Lately I've been thinking about how difficult it is to create something beautiful. What I see most people do, including myself, is put too much effort into making things attractive. Though there's nothing wrong with attractive, it ultimately becomes a trap. Pursuing what's pretty, as opposed to what's beautiful, only increases superficiality and puts things into the world from which nothing that can be taken. It separates and disconnect, so that we can have all the niceness without any of its bitter opposites. A life of eating spoonful's of pure refined sugar and boxes of processed food that taste good, but offer no nutritional value. It's thinking that consuming anything but turkey, mashed potatoes, and gravy for Thanksgiving is a trick, or views sex as a simply a long list of moments of ejaculation. There is no sustenance.

What is beauty then? This isn't easy to answer of course, because it lies in being able to identify the essence of something from the start. And essence is opposed to reductionism despite its simplicity. In fact, there seems to be an effect that runs contrary to reductionism within essence. Essence, like beauty, makes things expand and reach out in an almost limitless way. Perhaps this is why beauty is so striking to begin with. It necessarily connects with the infinite. And there's something inherently frightening about this, which is probably the reason we try and cut out anything we find non-desirable. We want all of the good without anything we might deem bad; pleasure without pain, beauty without ugliness, good without evil. I can’t help but wonder if we’re able to see the positive without some contrasting element to its negative counterpart.

Creating something beautiful then, necessarily has to implement some kind of cosmic tension. This doesn’t have to be overt or over the top, despite the melodramatic phrasing, but has to allow us to see reality. Through contrast we can differentiate and distinguish and allow ourselves to know what something is. Beauty rests somewhere in this place.