Immune to Beauty

I post this as a note for development: immune to beauty.

I love beauty: in music, in women, in painting, dance, sculpture, ideas … I love to tell a beautiful woman that she’s beautiful, I love to show her what that means to a male, to this male, what she does to my flesh, how I respond to her. I love to let her see and feel how beautiful she makes me as I love her.

I was a funny looking kid, big ears that stuck out sideways, a Milky Way of freckles … skinny, but females always found me attractive, said so, showed it. Now at seventy-two I’m used to beautiful women telling me how great looking I am, how wonderfully I dance … Yes: whether I knew it or not, I too was trying to be beautiful, to add beauty to a world in which I so devotedly consumed beauty.

I loved it in college when professors, friends, told me that my mind was beautiful, my ideas, my expression. Sure: I’d written like a star since age ten, since age ten people told me my writing should be published.

But: many of the things I responded most keenly to in the culture, were known in the culture (or how would I have known them?) Some made money in the culture — Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory … Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton … Miles Davis, Horace Silver … Federico Felini, Akira Kurosawa made a great deal less money than my enthusiasm might have projected. Muddy Waters made money, wore good suits, had people to wait on him; but he was a pauper compared to Elvis or to the Rolling Stones. Elvis, and the Rolling Stones … have qualities; but not in proportion with their success. Fellini, Kurosawa won Hollywood Oscars; yet I found their work to be embarrassingly undervalued in the suburban theaters I attended.

aside [Last night I watched Fellini's I Vitelloni with my Jan: the other month she sat with me for 8 1/2. A year or so ago the first “great” movie I showed her was La Strada. But was she seeing what I saw? A year ago we watched Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. A Franciscan brother lives his Christianity, right before our eyes. Another man feeds the poor, puts himself at risk to do so … In I Vitelloni the wastrels steal a statue of an angel: beauty personified, love made tactile … The village’s brain damaged fisherman plants the wooden statue in the sand of the beach … I was conscious of radiating my Christian understanding of these complex symbols; I felt no other radiation in the room: Fellini’s to me, mine to the room, to my love … and … I felt nothing come back to me: except from Fellini’s: old work, of the early 1950s.
Jan graduated college in 1953. Had she seen these masterpieces then? What did they communicate to her how? Nothing? I felt nothing in the room, but her fatigue, her worry over her son, over her granddaughter.]

For forty five years I’ve tried to tell, to show, people what Shakespeare’s Sonnets mean to me, should mean to all of us: and it ain’t what’s usually said. Shakespeareans just interrupt me: they don’t want new views, don’t have the attention span to encompass what I’m saying, don’t have the scientific training, lack the requisite Korzybskian semantics … They take my tuition supposedly to read me, to listen to me, but then just interrupt … and iterate their own narrow view. Frauds, thieves: the government who gives them the monopoly to understand and explain, enforcing fraud, lies. And the people whose pockets are picked back the fraud, the lies. The society demands falsehood.

You know, I don’t think the public’s deafness to Miles’ music is just racial. It don’t think it’s merely that black genius sticks in the culture’s craw. Shakespeare’s meaning sticks in the culture’s craw too. This art is incompatible with our Christian and democratic hypocrisy: just as Jesus humanity (let alone divinity) doesn’t jibe with ritual-bound, superstition-bound, priests: using Jesus as a magic bullet.

The culture is blind of much of its own beauty while it’s staring straight at it!

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A memory just flooded me. I had a friend in college, Alan. After college he invited me to room with him, rent free. But then he turned against me: I think it was primarily because he lusted for Hilary. I think he came to see how I mistreated her without seeing how she’d mistreated me. Anyway, while were were still sort of friends, he took up with Maria Theresa, an Italian film student who as yet still spoke little English. I met her at a party: and we thought we loved each other: I said, “Fellini!” And she would beam. She would say, “Antonioni!” and I would applaud. I would say “Rossellini” … “DeSica” …

I said, the angel on the beach in I Vitelloni, and she exclaimed aloud.

The next time I saw Maria Theresa she’d learned quite a bit more English. We didn’t agree on anyting! We couldn’t stand each other! And Alan: Alan had completely gotten absorbed by her Communist esthetic! It turned out that Maria Theresa thought the wooden angel on the beach, stolen by a spineless lecher and his no good wastrel friend, meant that the workers had to overthrow Captialism and its evil religious balderdash! She though that all of Antonioni, all of Rosellini, all of DeSica, Fellini, and all of Bergman, Kurosawa, and Hitchcock meant that the workers had to overthrow Captialism and its evil religious balderdash!

On the subject I’ll tell another Maria Theresa story. Alan had been Anton’s friend, they went to Fieldston together. Anton was my great friend, Alan became also my friend. (Then Alan became my ex-friend and active birddog enemy, Anton eventually, way later, became my ex-friend. Anton and his Rose were in Italy. they visited Alan and Maria Theresa in Rome. Anton and Rose had a friend with them, some guy from grad school, Madison WI: a black guy. Maria Theresa latched hold of this guy and launched a tirade on American racism. The guy agreed with everything she said, but also invited her to consider that racism wasn’t unique to Americans. He invited her to notice how badly the Italians treated the Sicilians.

Maria Theresa dismissed his piffle, there was no comparison: you see, American racism is based on nothing but pure selfish wrong-headedness; American blacks seem lazy and dishonest because they’re victims of social injustice; whereas Sicilians are really stupid, ignorant, lazy, dishonest … It’s not prejudice at all!