a thing of staggering beauty, say, a batch of yellow blotch peony just mussed into a plane vase. isn't this just a most crippling sight?
last night, i fell into this magazine article by chance of the life of a medieval, no, renaissance, aesthete, and i couldn't goad myself to finish reading it. it was just petrifying, the very idea of his life.
or could it be that i'm just jealous? envious of his almost tragic vulnerability to beauty?
today, yet another one of those gorgeous spring days that i'm starting to get alarmingly used to. and while waiting for my take out mochacinno from a starbucks near the bus stop at 56th and lexington, i saw a stray napkin on the counter, pristine and still crisp, but with a red inked scrawl on it. a confessional, really. "it's such a lovely day...i called in sick," confided the latte drinking malingerer.
i was immensely jealous of the skulker's daring. the courage to act on an impulse beautiful. whereas, i am just paralyzed by the sight, much more the proximity of anything, anyone of beauty.
on a clear day, such as today, new york is just untouchable. and what do i do? i run for cover. i make up these excuses. i go cower under the sheltering sky of my ill-lit apartment, because, as i reason out-to whom, exactly?- i need to write about all this beauty. i need to celebrate new york, my town, my life, or whatever alibi i can come up with. for what? to exonerate myself? from my shabby timidity towards beauty?
i must be really growing old. i'm nostalgic mostly now of my callowness, that which afforded me then glorious valiance.
i remember when i was quite young, my school posse used to steal away from the donkeywork of our gardening classes every friday afternoons. and almost always, we went to just loiter at this craggy overhang, what must be a prehistoric corral cliff overlooking bantayan sea. sometimes when we got lucky, after a storm had just breezed by our island, we could see the snubbed outlines of mt. kanlaon in faraway negros island.
and on an especially one lucky day, one which i particularly remember because of the preponderance of dribbly swells in the water, a clean blue pipe of a wave just bulged out of the muck of white froth. and we were just sandbagged.
but nature, being what it is, could not help but showed off. we realized just moments later after the pipe swelled that a school of stunned--or were they just frolicking?--sting rays were caught in the barreling wave. as the wave peaked again, we could see the tails of the rays sticking out of the wet wall like limp spokes of a runaway bicycle tire.
being young, foolhardily young, we just jumped thereafter into the water, starched school uniforms, spit shined leather shoes and all, just because.