Brain stutters, beauty

[wispfox]

In the context of my pending hair cut, being reassured that someone (who I have admittedly been dating a long time) is certain that I will continue to be beautiful with short hair, evidently makes for a mental stutter (hiccup? not sure).

IM may have meant my mental stutter was non-obvious, I have no idea. I did manage an appropriate thank you in a reasonable amount of time.

I think I was bemused for a number of reasons. First, the notification of pending short hair was meant to be informational. Mind you, we had just been talking about my leaving grad school, and I'd pointed him to my recent posts on the topic. (This was in large part both a 'fyi' and a 'this likely means I'm not visiting you this year'.) So he had good reason to believe I might need reassurance in general.

But, and I think this is the more interesting aspect, I have trouble thinking of myself as beautiful if the context is purely appearance-based. It's not that I don't think I'm attractive (although, yes, depression is not helpful there), but that to me the concept of physical beauty is both highly unusual (I think a _very_ small - perhaps nonexistent? - number of people are beautiful when based solely on appearance) and needs to be to the level of breathtaking/awe to make sense.

So what's beauty?

I can't think of a way I use it purely about people's appearances. A still photograph of someone just can't be beautiful to me. Water, sky, the play of light on things: things like this can be still shots and be beautiful to me. Not people. (and perhaps not animals or plants, either. Not without light/water/sky things going on)

Once you add motion, it's no longer just physical appearance. It's going to include how someone expresses themselves, how they move, how they carry themselves. Even if you ignore possible sound/vocal cues, there is a _lot_ of info in motion.

One example for which I am pretty consistent relates to graceful movement. If someone nearby is doing something graceful, and I notice and don't have a good reason not to, I will become entirely distracted and just watch. It's absolutely about awe and beauty and things for which words are not coming. And it is entirely possible that my jaw will actually drop.

I have a similar reaction to enthusiasm being shared with someone, where, if it's with me, it's usually stronger than if I just happen to get to watch other people enjoying that experience. Enthusiasm and glee about things are absolutely beautiful.

Other ways people move can be beautiful, although it's not often something I'll notice if I'm in the middle of a conversation with someone (paying attention to conversation trumps noticing physical things). I think it may still tend to involve either grace or enthusiasm, now that I think about it! Or sometimes the way the light catches someone.

Perhaps my bafflement at being called beautiful is simply that I don't have many contexts in which I find people beautiful. So it's a temporary (and often fleeting) thing ('estar'), not a constant thing ('ser'). Which, why do we not have two "to be" words like Spanish does?

What do you all find beautiful?

Comments

[theloriest.livejournal.com]

I love this topic, thank you for bringing it up.

I also totally agree that I wish English had two "to be" words.

But as to your question: what do I find beautiful? That's really freaking hard to answer!

I find certain pieces of architecture to be beautiful. Like Sacré-Cœur, the Golden Temple, and the house my best friend grew up in. A beautiful piece of architecture can leave me breathless.

I think the drive from Anchorage to Seward is the most beautiful scenic drive I've ever taken.

I think a Porsche 911 Turbo is a beautiful car.

I will often find a pair of shoes beautiful. Or an amazing garment.

You're very right when it comes to using "beautiful" to describe a person, though. I never use it to describe a person as a constant. Whenever I think "that person is beautiful" it is always in context with other things going on. So more, "in this moment, I think this person is beautiful."

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

What do you all find beautiful?

1. You.
2. Also other stuff.
3. AAVE has ways to conjugate verbs like that (if I understand correctly, "she be beautiful" vs. "she beautiful")...

[mirrored-echo.livejournal.com]

Interesting post. The (female) human body *is* probably the most beautiful thing in the world -- in my own experience and most people's -- but it's a *very* transient thing, and beauty in humans usually means youth and/or artifice, and coveting it usually ends badly. And mistaking a person for a work of art is very bad.