Beauty as Completion

Many years ago I read an interesting quote which today I cannot remember verbatim. 

The idea of the quote, however, resonated with me. 

I had been reading a newspaper - I believe it was The Globe and Mail, though again, I'm not sure - and there was a section of odds and ends. Amongst the columns of forgotten words and quip-like phrases a woman author said something rather pertinent regarding beauty. She said unattractive women are the ones who become artists, who gravitate towards finding themselves and completing themselves in art. The beautiful women, because they are beautiful, feel complete, therefore, they don't look for art, for that missing spiritual link in their lives. 

The impact of those words burrowed in me. I wish I had the exact quote, the exact wording because I wonder how deeply my memory is tarnished in attempting to reconstruct the ideas of this now anonymous writer. 

Over the years, the quote continued to hold a light up to truth for me, especially in regard to my social life.

Many years ago I dated two artists, one in Vancouver, one in my hometown of St. Catharines, Ontario. 

In regard to the above quote, I have to mention that in both cases, I wasn't truly attracted to their looks but their ideas, to the conversations I had with them. In our North American society, we are often culturally bereft due to the dominance of television, movies and the music trends of the moments. These two women, each with their own charisma and faults, their distinct personalities and desires had no real winning beauty in their features. But they had thoughts, ideas, they struggled with concepts. 

The Vancouverite, yes,  was a bit dark. She smoked, she said cynical things about love and channeled the  anger from her previous relationships' break-up into her writing, music and the paintings I heard about but never saw. The girl I met here in Ontario, worked in a print and framing shop. She painted a hockey player for her youngest brother and other beautiful images - lonely fields, women at windows, gazing out. She read me Tennyson's "Lady of Shalot" and quoted from the letters of Keats.

I was attracted to the aesthetics of their being, their outlooks but not once was I in awe of their physical looks.

This often saddens me. The majority of attractive women I meet or encounter typically have boyfriends, like to watch The Batchelor and listen to pop music and hip hop. They are pretty but conversation gets no further than pop culture. They often glance at me with a weird, tilted head expression when I mention my interest in opera. 

Speaking of the opera, even when I go to Toronto, I rarely find a striking or beautiful female face  in the crowd before viewing a Wagner or Verda performance. Passing from one level to the next at the Sheraton Centre for the Arts, I often see the same kind of women. They are interesting to gaze at but they have a certain severity to them as if sterilized. Often they look like the female alternative to their male counterpart. 

But why am I dwelling on something so superficial as looks? 

Well, I suppose it has to come down to reflection. Reflection in the sense of being pensive but also how the interior and exterior can reflect one's self. The female artist that isn't pretty, is she then searching for truth? In Martin Heidegger's essay, "The Origin of a Work of Art", "art is truth setting itself to work." Those who create must feel they don't have what they are looking for. They are working towards beauty. Are they then looking for beauty in a spiritual mirror? If they can't find it, do they use art as vehicle to fulfillment? Are they exploring the beauty of truth beyond the physical?

If Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Margaret Attwood, and Margaret Lawrence (to name a handful) been attractive women, would they have written a word? Probably not.

If we lack something physical, do we make up for it with art? Charles Baudelaire wrote that sex is the lyric of the poor, meaning they give up creating because they offer themselves to the world of love making. The energy invested in sex could have gone to art. But no. Once they finish their love, they'll turn on the television, watch Letterman, check their email and go to bed.

What always attracted me to the artists I dated was their ability to communicate and be somewhat detached from the expectations of the world around them. They critiqued the status quo, felt the media offered nothing more than useless distractions and no real answers to the rigomarole of life. 

Yet they also wanted the same thing as their friends - namely to find someone, to fall in love, eventually get married. They both expressed interest in the idea of family. The girl in St.Catharines wanted to get married, perhaps because her younger sister was already married and had her second child.

In this regard, I couldn't offer them anything. In both cases, the relationships never progressed beyond the initial basics of dating and getting to know each other. In one instance with the girl from the print and frame shop, there was intimacy but I couldn't go forward. In public, I couldn't hold her hand because I didn't feel a love or even a passion for her physically. She had everything I wanted mentally and emotionally but not in regard to her appearance. I simply couldn't hold her hand because in public I wanted us to appear as friends, to still feel single. We spent an afternoon in Niagara-on-the-Lake, walking around downtown. She tried to hold my hand and I took it resentfully while gazing at the other attractive women around me. 

And that's just it. Every time I engage with a woman who can offer me something intellectually, she offers me nothing in terms of physical beauty. Whenever I've performed at a cafe or attended an author reading, the female listeners are rarely if ever pretty. In North America, intelligence is for geeks, not goddesses. The beautiful women go to the bar, get drunk with the idiots and go home. When they get a little older, they look for someone with a good job or they spend most of their time in their career which limits them. Art rarely touches their lives while television, texting, emails and ipads make up the gap. They get no further than the columns of newsprint and read books that if they were edible would have the same nutritional value as a digestive cookie or sugary Special K. 

Maybe when I read that authoress of long ago with her solemn take on female beauty and art I was highly impressionable. I keep asking myself, did I take the author's words as a kind cue and allow the idea inherent to shape me or did the truth exist there in that long ago reading and I've merely spent my life acknowledging and accepting it? In other words, in regard to the latter, those words warned me.

I feel that long ago author spoke the truth, especially in regard to North American culture. If a stranger or alien were to ask me about the female gender here, I would no doubt mention that the prettier ones lacked culture while the unattractive ones had depth.

I shouldn't say this applies for all, just most. The majority really. I know I sound unkind in my assessment and really, I'm being subjective as opposed to objective, using what could really have been a made-up quote to justify my distaste in the North American female. But to quote Spinoza: all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. 

Finding brains and an appreciation of beauty matched with beauty in a single package in Canada is the rarity.