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"the beauty that has terror in it": and what beauty hasn't got a little?

The post-Enlightenment, post-post-Protestant Reformation, pre-Freudian psychological poets--Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, and their ilk (and Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams before them)--drew me in because they pointed to the fierce hostility within representation, to the way image can make invisible gods and invisible people most anywhere of most anyone, and to the way it usually does, for image is ordered in so many ways towards feudalism. Yes yes, there is beauty in this world offering up insinuations of unities, depths, completions, escalations, orders, all of which the mind craves, but beauty is a trickster, an illusionist, an idolater, not a moral barometer pointing to a stable source of goodness. Anyone suffocating inside a three-sizes-too-small identity suit knows that.

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Last night's simple grill: sliced tofu, asparagus, button mushrooms, red & yellow peppers, in a marinade of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, sea salt, and liberally sprinkled with fresh chopped parsley. Served with thick wedges of perfect avocado.

(A summer gift from Karen Leona Anderson's grill in Ithaca, 2007)

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