Sublimation

Beauty is a fossil. 

We find a vertebra, a rib, a claw, a tooth

beneath layers of hard compacted sediment, 

turn them over in our hands, 

and they are beautiful. 

Beauty is a relic,

some armour, or an ancient scimitar, perhaps, 

exemplars of a lost craft, displayed in a museum 

on a wet midweek afternoon.

What we find beautiful 

are the worst things ever

once they are no longer useful,

no longer instruments of evil

or what we might describe as evil

under other circumstances,

obsolete weapons drained of cruel intent, 

so obsolete we no longer recognise 

their original purpose, just the artifice, 

the effort, the elegance, the decorations, 

the style, without the substance, 

grace notes adorning a scream,

an exhausted, hoarse, forgotten grief 

from a throat cut long ago,

desolation reduced to ritual and conceit

with no meaning beyond the dance

we perform to summon indifferent deities.  

All beauty is terrible. 

Only the deadliest naivety 

would consider this remarkable, 

and imagine we can say when it was born. 

Nothing is changed, utterly or in part,

except the appreciation of those 

who ever thought it benign. 

Maybe beauty is a kind of amnesia, 

a kind of anaesthesia, a numbness, 

numbing the pain. Pain and loss are islands,

mysterious, exotic islands we encounter

on our journey to some domestic Ithaca.

Maybe beauty is not something 

we could or should survive. 

Maybe that's why what we call beauty

is so often filled with lies, so many lies,

advertised with lies until truth

is diluted to homeopathic concentration

and we roll and writhe in beautiful lies.

Maybe it is a serpent in our marrow,

something we will die from 

if the cure doesn't kill us first. 

Civilisation is the etiquette of barbarism,

savagery refined and distilled to a minuet,  

the battlefield a ballroom, the blade a fan,

and nothing will survive the fire, 

the inevitable Savonarola moment

when we burn everything good

and kill all our imaginary friends, 

all the pagan gods and nymphs and satyrs 

we rescued from antiquity 

and brought to life on our canvases, 

now burning in the public square,

killed with weapons forged in darker dreams

inherited from monsters we can't understand

beyond the dark gifts they bequeath to us,

that allow us to perform the moral alchemy

we need to transmute evil into good, 

beauty into uncompromising truth. 

Maybe beauty is something 

you are only allowed to experience once.

Everything after that, every song you sing, 

every poem you write and recite

is what you say as an excuse for not being dead, 

for betraying beauty with every breath you take,

because what coward continues to live

who has experienced true beauty, 

and that is why we burn it and call it vanity?  

We lie to express a deeper truth

but people believe the lie 

and remain unaware of the truth 

for which it was a vehicle,

and whatever beauty they perceive

is our failure to communicate.  

Maybe we all belong beneath the earth,

abandoned to the anonymity of a mass grave

with the nameless victims of some genocide,

or buried at sea where our bones become coral, 

our eyes pearls, or scattered across the sky, 

dissolving into the clouds with the hot exhalation 

of the crematorium chimney at the railway terminus, 

because we don't belong here anymore. 

We don't belong here anymore. 

Maybe we should be a comet, or a constellation,

or a relic or fossil for someone else to admire

in the midst of their own ecstasy and amnesia, 

their own fever and delirium, part of the hallucination

that sublimates a world beautiful and true to them.