This is my entry for the inkwell fiction challenge- Week 3.
Enjoy!
Week 1: The Secret
Week 2: The Doll
All The Jewels of Heaven
Make it beautiful, you say? Ha! What of it, madam? You start throwing around fancy words like that, and we might start having fanciful notions indeed. What do you know of beauty, my dear lady? Let me rephrase that, what do you think you know of beauty? The beauty of a fair maiden perhaps. Or a strapping young lad who’s strong as an ox. A sunset. The light falling o’er the highlands, ay, back in the old country. Brings a tear to mine eye. The smile of a newborn babe. A dew drop on the flower. The glittering jewels on your skin. A work of art. A melody. Beauty. Ha! You think you know beauty, her ladyship Smith, but you know nothing of the sort!
You cannot experience true beauty unless the doors of perception are cleansed, to put it academically. It simply cannot be done! You need to alter your biochemistry to see the raw machinations of the universe and be able to wipe the lenses of perception clean. To see things as they are and not as you are. Only then you know it. It. The place where Beauty coils and roils and flows and it’s writ with a capital B!
It is the undiscovered country that oh so few of us ever visit, though we all yearn to reach. A sorry tale, m’lady. For we come to this world, and we see many things and hear many things and experience so much more. But we do so like automatons. Programmed by the vagaries of biological and environmental fortunes. The lens of experience grows dull with age, and we’re not even aware of it. We are born, we mature, grow old, and die. Ever ignorant of that world where true Beauty lies, cognizant only of its distant echoes.
I’m just a cranky old fool and a swindler, you might reckon. But I’ll have none of that, my good woman! True BEAUTY is a cosmic factor that eludes the rational mind. Of that there is no quarrel. Even my attempts at putting it into words with grammatical flourishes are pitiful in comparison to the naked processes that can only be experienced by the keen sense organs in an altered state. It is Van Gogh’s starry night coming to life while you stand there within the frame looking up at the stars and the whole cosmos flows like fluid dynamics; it is the song that whisks you away to Orion, across the great expanse of constellations, all in mere seconds; it is the Blakean delight in the eternity of a grain of sand; the infinite grace of the tyger as it quantum jumps strawberry fields; the burning rose; it is the indescribable, and all the things that live and breath with an ‘is-ness’ of their own.
Although I do not know its name, I call it Beauty. Everything else is just fog in the rear-view mirror. True Beauty exists, as real as my boots, but it’s ever beyond the reach of normal consciousness. That is the way of things. A woeful tale, I call it. Not for those who exalt in the knowledge of it. But for those who will come and go, never even knowing that it was there all along. The old bards were right when they sang about “the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion, never glimpse the truth, then it’s far too late when they pass away…”
You might object on moral or ethical or other grounds that impact the health of an individual and community at large. A lady of your standing surely has not meddled in such arcane matters that are the bane of baser classes. Ye can’t find beauty in an elixir anymore than ye can find God in a witch’s brew. Ain’t that right? Oh, I’ve heard all objections, m’lady. The skeptical mind recoils in fear of the unknown and withdraws from further inquiry. Be that as it may, that is none of my concern. I’m here to shed light and not to master, as they say down at the station.
But would you look at that? The sun is setting, splashing all those pretty colors, and soon it will be dark. How the clock hands hasten when the company is fine and the spirits are high. Alas, I should be heading out for it’s a long road ahead and old Billy doesn’t have the legs he used to. Besides, you must be sick of hearing me prattle on. Kinda feels like me tongue is gonna fall, if I’m being honest. I shall return in two days’ time with the replacement frame and tools to set her up beautifully. You’ll be warming those lovely toes by a roaring fire in no time at all. Ha! Fare thee well, madam, and until we meet again.