In the Beginning...Beauty

I only have a minute. I'm at work and am heading out the door. First, though, I want to jot down some thoughts in honor of beginnings...and beauty. I've been thinking a lot about the latter concept and am beginning to imagine that it is vital to my search for understanding. I have so much to learn, but what I do know now--today, this very minute--is that beauty is not the same as attractiveness or loveliness. Rather, it's the fragile splendor of the breakdown (Frou Frou), the residue of immense patience (Witter Byner), the beginning of terror (Rainer Maria Rilke), the blood-indigo hue of pain (Trent Reznor), and the "Other" that Plato, Jung, Woolf, Faulkner, Tillich, Gluck and other seekers said is the sole object of soulful desire. More so even than truth, which Keats insisted is synonymous with beauty. I also like what Robinson Jeffers called it: "the sole business of poetry." Everything else, he said, is a reason but not the reason. I want to catch a holy glimpse before I die of this paradoxical ideal the Greeks referred to as kallos--from which we get the English calli. Calli + graphy = beauty-filled writing. Since beauty encompasses much more than what is aesthetically appealing, however, I think it's only fitting to name my web log Calli + graffito (Italian for colloquial, often vulgar and defacing, inscriptions). So welcome to my quest for beauty. Welcome to Calligraffiti.