She appeared before them, and around her burnt feathers hung like snowflakes asked to pause descent in the winter air. She moved like a--oh? Oh what did they see? You mean to say, what did she look like? Well she was beautiful.
I take your frustration as dissatisfaction. Very well, I will belabor the point and halve the elegance of the word.
Listen. There are two beauties in the world, for the only intent or purpose that beauty matters.
The first is the beauty that brings you pleasure, and this is the kind over which we bleed. Generally, there are a set of aesthetics agreed upon, for the common man and common taste. Of course, with a humanity such as ours, exceptions can and will boil over, frothing with new beauties and new blood to be spilled over them. The piano, the song, the dancer, the dance, each to a purpose and a form designed and destined to wash one over with mounting and ever more perfect ecstasy. This is a chase and a thrill that runs side by side and weaves like a helix strand with the chase and the thrill when we stumble after love and lust. It moves and it moves us, ever closer to its climax, but of course to never reach it. Ever more perfect, ever moving, ever falling just a hairs breadth short. We need this, of course, we need the pursuit. Let us dream it, together and alone, let us dream and sing and paint and write of our beauties and what they are and what they could be and what they mean to us. Let us dream of what the culmination of any of these beauties would even look like. What would it do to our frames and our minds and our souls? What would it take from us, to stretch and crack like so much plaster in its hands? What spotlit pedestal would it circle slowly in the howling dark and then like quiet lightning strike upon to sunder every atom from every atom bound? What blind fright would it induce upon our every staggered beat from our ever more failing hearts? It would be the unseen primal, the terrible apotheosis, and it would be perfect. But such are our arts and the things we choose to behold, of course: that which we dream of, together and alone, the flawless iteration of our ever more beautiful works. That which occupies our souls and whose pursuit keeps the perfect one across the divide, at indescribable distance. That which brings us pleasure, that of which we long for and hope for and that which never satisfies us no matter how we lie and claim we are sated.
This is the first beauty.
The second is the first's unreachable perfect.
Death? She was beautiful.
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