Riding Off and All That

Yo Peeps,

Keats got me a little, though sorry to say, Goodie, he left you out. But tautologies don’t work so well three-way. And don’t go nitpicky, True, lovey; maybe what he said isn’t a tautology at all. But it’s reversible anyhow, so I’m a fan—and also, it takes me seriously. Shame, really, that now almost everyone referring to him makes him measure of wish-that-were-true.

Devils: sure. For being universals and transcendents, my dear family, you’re all a bit dim in the eyes. First of all, you should see his horse. No one riding Night could really be evil, as you would all know if you’d been there, and if you bothered looking animals in the eyes. Which you must—how can you live otherwise? D. has a brother, too, and we go on long walks and he says the most provocative things and can’t keep his eyes off me, but even much too far away for anyone to hear me if I screamed, I always feel safe with him. Well—safe’s the wrong word. He burns my mouth when we kiss.

Where we walk is volcanic, and the volcano is old and has gone back to sleep but the last time she blew she changed the face of this place, miles of ash, mud, miles of force become matter, and the land unable, even thirty years later, to lie still. The rocks are pale green, deep red. Everywhere are rims ready to avalanche. And yet there’s a beaver-pair damming already, there are stunted firs with deep yellow needles, there are patches of turf hanging over the edges of precipices, not letting go.

He’s the caretaker here, though I don’t see how anyone could take care of this, and when he’s with me he’s never actually doing anything other than grabbing me before I vanish over some new ledge. His name’s Justice. I guess it’s working, though: between tremors, in the breathless-smooth pools, you can count stars at night. And if you have patience for it, you can trace bullfrogs by their sound, and see them swell and boom, swell and boom.

Always,
Beauty

Tough Love

Goodness,

Allow me to channel your sister Truth for a bit and be blunt. I don't want to hurt you, but you need to understand where you came from before I can answer your question.

You say that Truth would tell you that when love is elsewhere, it can't be with you. But that's exactly why I needed you, daughter. There is too much for me to do to be everywhere at once, and so I made you and your sisters with specific aspects of who I am, to try to bring part of my love to the places I am not.

You're going to ask why I left you in that tower if I wanted you to do work for me. But you're my children, darling, not my creations, so I had to let you grow up and figure out what you were supposed to be doing on your own.

Goodness isn't the highest aim. Neither is truth or beauty or joie de vivre. Love is the highest aim. Goodness that grows out of love will be happy; goodness without love can be neither happy or good. I understand you want to rebel against me, daughter, and I'm sorry to give you such a hard truth. I want you to learn to be good, and happy, because you are loving. Being good will not necessarily make you happy, but I hoped that learning to be happy could make you more loving: and therefore more good.

I chose a hard life for you when I gave you the attribute of Goodness, my dear daughter. You have fulfilled the letter of your duty admirably. You say you are crushed that you haven't done enough for me: but there will never be enough for me. I will always want more from you because I want to make you and your sisters perfect. But I will also always give you more of myself.

Love,

your mother

A Maternal Exhortation to Wayward Daughters

Dearest daughters:

I'm sad to see you fighting among yourselves like this. Didn't I teach you better?

Truth, who told you to stay in that tower? Really, dear, I thought you'd have realized by now that you can't do any good if no one can hear what you have to say. Your sisters have learned that at least. Get out. See the world. Find your sisters, if you don't know what else to do.

Goodness -- it's lovely that you're helping people, but you needn't sound so self-sacrificing about it! You've learned that you need to be a doer, but you mustn't just do: you must let yourself enjoy it. It's in your nature to enjoy the work you're doing, if you'd just stop being uptight and worrying about what Truth tells you. Of course you can't win against nature and time. That's why you're needed.

Beauty, my dearest baby: couldn't you make time to visit your sisters once in a while? You look better with them than you ever could alone, you know. Bring your devilish friend; maybe if Goodness has someone to argue with she'll recover some of her joie de vivre. You were right to go gallivanting off, my dear. You were the first to realize I never meant you to stay in that tower forever, but you need to come home, at least occasionally.

I look forward to seeing you all as soon as I can get free of my business elsewhere.

Your devoted mother,

Love

Goodness To Truth, A Difficult Letter Indeed

Dear Truth,

I wish I could say it was always pleasant to hear from you. Of course I miss our days together in the tower, but you always knew I couldn't be happy there, sitting around. Now, out on the barricades—why, I could almost be happy, if it weren't for your carping in my ears. This is why I haven't written until now.

Why do you hurt me this way? You tell me that I'm powerless against time and against nature. You remind me that bad will keep on happening even if I root out evil. You tell me how many people like Beauty better than me. But isn't the youngest sister always spoiled? A lot of people don't like you either, and for good reason.

You ruin happy families. You try your hardest to show your sisters up or put us down; and you do it well, with words that cut our clothing into shreds. Naked, Beauty may get by all right. But no one wants to see Goodness in the nude. I'm hard, and I'm emaciated, and I'm so good people get scared that they can never live up to me. But if you would keep quiet and let me do my work in dignity, even in disguise, I could get a lot more done and be a lot happier.

I do need you, Sister; and I do miss you when I plunge this far into battle; it is even a comfort to know that you are there, keeping the tower in order and making the books of use—

But for now, since you won't come out to help me (and I know you probably can't) I wish you would please shut up and not write to me for a while.

I love you, really I do.

Goodness

To Beauty, with Love

Dear Beauty,

Maybe you never answer my letters because the address I have for you is wrong. That story the townspeople told about you riding off with the devil –- could it be they were lying? Since Goodness left, saying she can’t be herself in an armchair with books only, that she’s a doer, I haven’t heard from her either, though I’ve written to the poorhouse once a week. That’s where they said she went. And it’s not like her to ignore a letter –- you, I never know about; you always took strange fancies. But Goodness -– well, if I can’t trust her, where does that leave me?

So now I’m beginning to wonder whether this tower is the right place even for me. I dearly love these books. But they are coming to feel too small to hold me. Where are you?

Yours quizzically,
Truth

Theresa’s post on truth, beauty, devils, goodness, cookies, and Dangerous Liaisons raised all sorts of interesting questions for me, especially about beauty. If we are going to grant this classic triad of transcendent values (and for now, let’s, though that is a whole other interesting argument to have), then it seems one of the essential things about them is that each one is inherently valuable. Each is in itself worth pursuing, and needs no source outside itself to prove its value.

Another important thing about these three is that they are conceived of as a unity. In order to be ultimately good, something must be propositionally true, morally good, and perceptively beautiful. They are equal, and special, and unified, precisely because each to some extent requires the others. And so our thought-experiment, in splitting them into three persons with separate wills, is misrepresenting them a little from the get-go. Keats said truth is beauty; I’d say real truth must be beautiful, and real beauty must be true. And I’d extend this reciprocity to goodness.

There are all kinds of problems with the little missive I’ve given Truth above. For one, if she’s Truth, shouldn’t she know where Beauty is? My favorite problem, though, is the question of the trustworthiness of beauty. Can beauty lie to us? Can beauty be evil, or at least, can it be subverted and used to further ends that are evil?

This is a question that I have not heard raised in the same way with goodness and truth. Things can be made to look true, certainly, even though they are false; but this is a subversion, if anything, of reason, not a subversion of truth. No matter how it is presented or perceived, a statement is either true or it is a lie. In the same way, things can be made to look good even though they are evil, but this is hypocrisy or self-righteousness or, again, lying; it is not a subversion of goodness. And yet with beauty we think differently; when something appears attractive, or interesting, or entertaining or awe-inspiring, in spite of being unjust or untrue, we say beauty itself has been subverted to the ends of oppression or falsehood. If someone told us Truth and Goodness had run away with a dashing devil, we’d ask What have you been smoking? But when we’re told Beauty took his hand and hopped on the black stallion behind him and rode down into hell, we shake our heads sadly and say What a shame.

I think we’re wrong; I think we don’t know Beauty very well at all.

Gun Hill

In Ithaca, the hill I walked up in the morning to school, and down in the evening, is called Gun Hill. It’s named that for the enormous hulk of disused factory which sat (until this past spring) across the street from glossy apartment buildings like a transplanted piece of inner-city Detroit. I loved the building since I first saw it for its scarred face. Ithaca Guns were made there, and since production was moved away, the empty building sat on prime real estate, glowering out over Lake Cayuga, untouchable because the lead content in the building and the plot around it were so high there that no one could afford to tear it down and decontaminate the land. They figured something out, apparently, because a developer put up signs for more brick apartments, and a wrecking crew tore the building limb from limb; first the windows, then the walls, then the pillars with their steel supporting cores. When I left town, there were twin heaps of rubble under big tarps, like a massive deformed bikini top. I think the tarps were meant to keep the lead dust down.

It was fall when the building first stopped me dead in my tracks, on the way down the hill in the late afternoon—through the third-floor corner window, I could see all the way down onto the lake, bright as molten metal. The whole top corner of the building was a burning eye. On clear days I began timing my descent in hopes of catching that moment of light. I sat in front of the factory. I photographed it. I painted it. I tried to write it into a poem.

The chain-link fence around the building is (this should all be past tense but it still feels present) too easy to climb to deter anyone able-bodied and curious. The building’s insides are tattooed, painted, crusted with graffiti—stencils of the face of Edgar Allan Poe, “FATE” in black over doorways, huge rainbow bubble-words battling each other in the main ground-floor hall; on the third floor, on a patch of otherwise unmarked drywall, there are three elegant simple cartoons, and in a small side room, a whole wall lettered in hot pink French reminiscent of Rimbaud, about a fish going over a waterfall.

Two years later I’m still working on the poem. It’s nine pages long and counting. The window-eye, I’ve realized, is like the left eye of Christ in the Pantocrator icon from St. Catherine’s in Sinai. Even when I saw it first in grainy photocopy, that icon’s divided face stopped me, unsettled me, just as the factory did. Both the icon and the factory were embodiments, to me, of the connection between beauty and sorrow that Makoto Fujimura describes as the central tenet of the 15th-century Japanese aesthetic movement called mono no aware, “beauty in the pathos of things.”