the science of beauty

Looking up toward the sea in the sky, in the white blue haze of a dream, everything drifts. For a long while I stare up into its great white eye and just think about it, thinking it into inconsequence.

I think of all the cumulous clouds, the stratus and the cirrus formations at work; I think of the water cycle and of condensing moisture falling and draining. I think of the gases like oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide falling on top of each other in layers according to density; I think of this stratosphere suppressed under all the other layers of atmosphere piling on top of one another, climbing up into deep space as the energy keeps getting used and used just for upkeep.

Mostly, I try very hard to think about these things in terms of their unimportance. Back to the truth that it doesn't matter if I know its name, know the methodology, or the experiment conducted that discovered it – the science of its composition. After all these things, what everyone knows is that it comprises something of beauty – some sort of beauty. Even if it's a polluted, toxic, noxious sky, what it is is more than science or a new article covering ten inches of the front page newspaper. Higher up than the elite, more important than research, this beautiful something is experiential and intellectual. It is both, because nature is both, creativity is both, and pleasure and pain is both. Given the science of beauty, it is challenging enough as it is, and in many ways my job as an intellectual, as a scientist, or even as a psuedo-intellectual, is done from there.