Transcendental Absence

Short on particulars today. A wedding that was an American-style, short, simple affair; just the ceremony, no worship or sermon as such - something new for me. A mixed North and South American group.

Another sunny sky, bright briliant blue, in the morning, giving way to rain, by mid-afternoon, just in time for the wedding. But, again, the glistening, shining, matted, leaves, on the ground.

There is an order behind, beneath, all things. Is 'Beauty' one of the Transcendentals, which mediaeval scholasticism inherited from the pagan Greeks? If not, it should be. But how to define it? How to discern it? That this is a rational order of objective realities and truths, which underlay the visible, is an article of faity for the cultural conservative. The Golden Mean, of architecture, for example. But I am an heir to the destructive Twentieth Century, in which all norms were dissolved, in favour of the arbitrary and whimsical; deemed to be actually impositions of western, rationalistic, and male, white, dictatorship. The standards, the measures, of beauty, of so much else, now being seen to vary immensely, between cultures.

More than the rivalry of classical-enlightenment vs romantic-radical sensibilities and worldviews; this introduces a variety of opposing, binary, opposites - instead there is a myriad, Deleuze;s multitudes, of viewpoints, subjectivities, and identities. I wrote a poem for a competition, when I was a lad, where I lamented the absence of the ideals, which were poetry, in the real world. The editors thought I believed poetry shoud contain these images and ideas; whereas in reality, it meant that i though poetry was therefore false, untrue, to the real world, of dirt, noise, and pollution. Quo vadis, Beauty?