Once, a friend, reacting to a tickle on her arm, saw she had smacked a lacewing—green-filigreed and sheer as a breath. “Oh, you’re so beautiful, I’m sorry,” she said, before finishing it off.
As if its beauty might have saved it.
What then of stinkbugs and worms, silverfish, earwigs (awful, shivery name), the armored and pincered, jiggly and larval, slick with ooze, sweating in sun—the uglies removed without hesitation. Or opossums, those quiet, shy creatures as smart as dogs, who can’t overcome their pointy, ghost faces and needly teeth, whose bright black eyes are cold and beady—the same dark eyes that in dolphins signal the presence of soul.
A beautiful thing makes a live air, looking upon it fills the eye up, and as the eye rests on the graceful or lush, the heart swells, the breath slows, and in beholding, one’s strength is confirmed. A beautiful thing flatters us into care.
A slug also catches the eye, reflecting sunlight like a prismy tear—which we meet with no desire at all, no urge to scoop up and tuck under a shady leaf, to “make a dwelling in the evening air, / in which being there together is enough.” Slugs, too, keep us back, but skinless, unshelled, like stuff meant to be washed from the body, their softness is a contamination, an outward sign of an inward fragility (unnervingly tender, like liver or brains on display in the butcher’s case). In motion, a slug is peristaltic, embarrassing. It can’t rush away. It has nowhere to hide.
Or let me try this: it’s not the beautiful’s need to be cared for, but its independence that beckons and holds us. The beautiful possesses an abundance of form-color-scent-gesture, and with such riches is sufficient unto itself. Looking on, gathering the radiance in, it’s we who are fed on its plenty. And thus inessential, extraneous to it, like any discounted lover, we’re moved—compelled even—to sidle up and be near.
Or because “beauty is the beginning of a terror we are just able to bear,” the sidling up must be done with care. Beauty as proto, early-stage, fresh. Not yet an excess, not yet the sublime—those full-force gales, deep gorges, and dark, brooding, overhung moods.
If one is moved to incline towards beauty, willing even to be wounded by it—that brief “Oh” in “Oh, you’re so beautiful”—then the quick recoil at the sight of a slug is a kind of protection. A slug is already on the decline, a slippery clot, a leak threatening borders. It melts and sags. Confronted with the delicacy of a slug—how under the slightest nudge it’ll wince—something deep in the body takes over and we veer away. Or, if intent on hastening the end, we dissolve them with handfuls of salt.
A beautiful, say, zinnia in bloom is alert and upright. There’s spine in its comport, no hunching, no crawling along on its belly. Propped in a vase, a cut flower asserts the absolute present, intensifies it, makes of itself an extravagance.
Easy to say a day’s beautiful—sun, nothing cruel in the wind, a sky that shouts its color out, fingerings of breeze, exhilarants of scent. All the component parts are upfront, and lit. A gray sky has its brightness, though it doesn’t impose. It’s not so full of glare and assertion. Gray is the register of underseen things, of tinctures and compounds. It’s not on the scale of beautiful/ugly, it occupies instead a dimension, like epochs at the heart of a stone.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” being “all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” is a comfort. An assertion sliding between fixed points. Gray, though, makes you look harder—what else is there?—squint until you skid off the track, where those creatures who live neither-here-nor-there hide—edge of a cliff, side of the highway, in gaps and passes. Transitional spots are neither safe nor contained.
And there, in the regions where things unsettle, you might linger until the lace on a wing turns back to veins, till what looked like a simple head clarifies and you see in its place a welter of eyes. Angled just so in soft, plain light—a light that does not desiccate—a slug might iridesce, its eyes incline toward your words and breath, its gaze be gently inquisitive. There would be no start or end to your sight. The jesses would slip from slug and lacewing, and in falling away their forms be released, the language of measurement break into pieces, and each moment of seeing be again its own shining grunt of creation.