All I've ever really wanted, really and truly, is a lifetime of connection to transcendent beauty.

Soul sister!

I'll be thinking of you as I venture toward Organ Pipe today.

I'll be thinking YOU in Organ Pipe, Chris. Can't wait to read all about it.

What, for you, is transcendent beauty?

Did you watch The X Files? There was one episode that I really loved. Mulder has to investigate an invisible body in a morgue and it turns out to have been a guy who got three wishes from a genie. Mulder finds the genie and the rest of the plot is about how Mulder would organize his wishes to get a good outcome. The best thing, it turned out, came when he asks the genie what she would wish for. She says what she would wish for is one perfect day. Mulder makes the wish, for her. The show ends with her enjoying a cup of coffee at a cafe, apparently no longer a genie, and nodding in acknowledgement to Mulder.

I don't know if it would meet all three of your conditions -- lifetime, well, yes, a lifetime lived in a moment. Beauty, depends, but once Mulder could see the unselfish wish it did strike me as beautiful. Transcendent...maybe not, except in that paradoxical way that transcendence is in the here and now.

What, for you, is transcendent beauty?

I'm going to wiggle out of answering that question by quoting Karen Armstrong in The Great Transformation:

"A transcendent value is one that, of its very nature, cannot be defined--a word that in its original sense means 'to set limits upon.'"

And its ineffable nature is part of the whole point for me, and why I am not, like my friend Dr. Sweet Baby Jesus, devoted to the systematic study of aeshetics.

Anything I will say about it will be inadequate and incomplete, but here's something I'll venture:
The point is not the things that explain beauty, but the things that connect you to it. It's not the things in themselves, but the way you train or allow yourself to respond. It has to do with the sublime, and with the awe I used to feel when I encountered certain things. It's why I like to climb to the tops of mountains, all alone, and look down, and then up, and then just sit still. Or why I really, really wanted to be an astronomer when I was little. Or why I used to weep in museums.

I have worked at responding to the world in ways--trying to be more grown-up, wiser, etc--that have made it harder for me to feel that, and I miss it.

Spike--I never saw more than a couple of episodes of X Files. The story you mention sounds lovely.... but the approach of looking at this particular moment in art and saying, "does it meet these three criteria?" is not part of the the experience I am mourning. It's not that moment, but a certain profound electric sense of seeing what such a moment MEANS that I'm talking about--the intensity and thoroughness with which "it did strike [you] as beautiful" for Mulder to understand the import of the wish.

Hey Beautiful-
All I've ever really wanted, really and truly, is a totally awesome life.

I have a feeling we might be going for the same thing. May we both get want we want, really and truly.

Love,
SO

I was going to say something smart like Jeez Holly, I'm right here. But I'm not. But I am a beauty!