BEAUTY IS INDELIBLE

Years ago, I was on the cross town bus in New York. I can't remember where I was going - for that matter, I can't remember where I was coming from. The one thing I do remember is at some point looking up, and there standing across the aisle was the most beautiful boy I've ever seen. He had the kind of beauty that compels you to stare and I couldn't look away. He was tall, with rosy cheeks, light eyes, dark hair - I guessed he was fifteen or sixteen. I suddenly thought, he's at the peak of perfection, and he may never be this beautiful again. 
     Why do I remember him all this time later? I think it was shock that imprinted him on me, the shock of coming upon beauty suddenly, all unaware. The usual things float past on any given day but only a few of them actually register and fewer of them stay with me for very long. But looking up and seeing the boy split the day open. I wanted to drink him in, take him, the sight of him, inside me. I understand now that I did take him inside; his beauty has stayed with me. 
     A few years ago, I saw a show of photographs by Josef Koudelka. In black and white, there was a series he took of gypsies - musicians, little boys pretending to be musclemen, the small village in which they lived. Other series were landscapes with ancient ruins and portraits and some that were almost abstractions of light and shadow. Many were candid shots of people encountered on the street doing all the ordinary things people do, transformed by Koudelka's eye into time-stopped importance. It's not quite right to call them candids; they're very carefully framed, many with the converging lines of a deep perspective. All of them have a feeling of stillness and space. I thought they were art and they were beautiful, not only the images but the meticulous way they were A. There was a lusciousness to the blacks and that's what drew me. The depth of the blacks, their richness, gave me the sense that no matter how long I looked, I'd never come to their bottom. I couldn't look away.
     Over the centuries, philosophers and others have filled the world with words about Beauty. A vast number of people have put out their own versions of Beauty's definitions and standards and aesthetics. I've read some of those words - writing and reading about Beauty is an interesting way to pass the time. You can talk about the Platonic ideal and what Kant and a good many others said about Beauty with a capital B, but those concepts are very far removed from the actual experience of beauty, the interplay between subject and object, of merging with the object, that creates the intense feeling I recognize as beauty. This is what the boy on the bus and the Koudelkas have in common. They gave me the same experience - they pierced me to the bone, stopped me in my tracks, made me unable to look away. 
     Of course I remember them. Beauty, that intense experience of beauty, turns out to be indelible.