February 12, 2003

Beauty

Hello Again Dear Journal,

I woke up today with a clear and refreshed head. I had the strangest dreams. I had a dream within a dream. But in the dream that's most prominent, I dreamt I was in Africa, standing underneath a waterfall cooling myself in the water. I was almost naked. I woke up to be talking to one of my professor's about a book called Poets Unbound. I wished I could be unbound like the poets. She talked to me about the 1960's and the black power movement, and black poets, and then i woke up in another place. I put on my clothes. I started to collect my things, and then I was leaving. And I woke up. I woke up to my roommate in her bra, looking at me like she wished I'd die. But in my dream, I had peace, and serenity, and beauty, and home. Africa is such a mystical home place...the dream is better than the reality(?). I don't know. I've never been. But it gave me peace. And I felt my troubles rush out into the water.

I woke up thinking about love. I woke up thinking that I love a lot of people. I love my friends. I love my family. I even love people who for all I know hate me. I am in love with love, with the way it feels, the way it tastes, the essence of it. I am in love with love.

I want to find this all encompassing love, this thing that I would be swept up in. I let myself get swept up in the first thing that I found, without checking it out good enough first. All signs were go. But something was always amiss. And still I love him--very much so--even now. Why? Why can't it just disappear? Why doesn't it go away like a cold, gradually, instead of sitting and festering in my head like a sore?

I wonder what makes people love other people? What makes anyone love anything? What triggers that response in someone, what electric current, what smell, what taste, what sense, what place and time? I wonder and wonder and I don't know. Does anyone know?

Some people feel like they've got it all worked out. I'm not one of those people. Half of the time I hardly know myself or what I'm going to do next, or how I'm going to react to something. I'm not a psychic, obviously I can't predict the future...no one can...but some people seem like they've got it all tinkered out in their heads...and you're an impassive mountain in the way of their making it happen.

No--in many cases...no. Wait what am I saying. I don't even know anymore.

The dream was beautiful. It was peace.

It was a break from the cannibalism nightmares that have been plaguing me, the symbolized nightmares that have been prying at my brain for weeks now ever since we broke up and got back together. I dream of a house, dilapidated on the outside, and falling apart, but inside, and up the stair, all beauty, all beauty and light and shining gold and glass. Inside it is beautiful and I want to stay. But outside there is a monster in his mother's skin, trying to get in. A monster that wants to hurt him, but he doesn't even see it. And I don't feel his mother is a monster. Not at all. But sometimes I feel like she made him unsettled. And it makes me angry. And I guess the house is him, or how I want to see him, falling apart on the outside, but oh, in the inside so much beauty.

I have a fixation with beauty, especially when it is linked to tragedy and turmoil. Inner conflict and strife only serve to make me more transfixed on the way that something is underneath all of that "bullshit" or that conflict, and the painful things that no one wants to see--the way underneath it all, life and people are still beautiful.

With Greg, I thought that I could help him, and be a beacon of strength for him. (Me and my Saint complex. ) I felt like I could help him, I could be a martyr for his humanity. I felt like inside no matter what there was a good person in him struggling to get out. And every once and a while I would see glimpses of it...and it would reinforce my struggle. I tortured myself, I became my own death doctor and made lampshades of my own skin against the torturing conflict of words muttered in darkness and solitude. That imagery is troubling me...even as I write it. But my fixation lately on Sylvia Plath and her assertion that every woman adores a fascist brought that comment out of my subconscious. I wrote a poem to Dear Sylvia. I am in agreement with her. A fascist is a thing some women do seem to love. But when you put a stake in its fat black heart the monster will not die. He only laughs at you, and the villagers do to.

There is no beauty in pain.

Or is there, sometimes I think there is. Philosophically of course, only in theory. The person experiencing that pain does not see beauty, only the one with free time to muse over it, and question it's meaning, and it's existence...they get the beauty of it. So maybe pain is beauty to the people who experience it in the third person(?).

I called it tragic beauty in most of my poems. I thought it beautiful the way a trainwreck is beautiful. The twisted metal over twisted metal glistening in the sun, shimmering in light against the gray smoke rising in the the air. The moment is not beautiful. The thing is. The inner you wants to see the train crash even though you know that its going to be a horrible thing, its spellbinding, and you simply must watch. I guess that's the way it feels. Like a thing that you don't want to see, but can't help staring at...but despite your disgust at yourself, you find pleasure in.

What makes us do the things we do?

Why do you have to hurt so much before you find peace? Is anything worth losing faith, and once it's lost, can you get it back?

I always think that I see something no one else sees, that no matter how ugly and evil something is on the outside it can be beautiful on the inside. And sometimes the things people think are beautiful on the outside are really ugly on the inside. I guess that's the significance of the monster in his mother's skin, and the beautiful house within the ugly frame that's falling apart.

His mother looking beautiful on the outside is a monster. And he inside the house in solitude, the house that is ugly and dangerous and falling apart on the outside, sits in solitude within a place with so much beauty that the light of it blinds the eyes.

Maybe beauty is over rated.

Posted by dana at February 12, 2003 09:26 AM
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