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laire, the perfection of the face of a woman you love - we want to keep them and hold on to them, to save as well as savor them. But the glow of beauty fades, and we return to ourselves. The memory of the rip, the tear in our self-regard just will not do, after all: it must succumb to, must be made to work for us - we must rule it, master it. We have to prove, over and over, if only to ourselves, that we are the master of everything that lies inside us. And so we set out to denature that decentering, to re-center it; haul it in and overpower it. We explain the beautiful phenomenon in nature, we dissect the work of art, we overrule the artist, we under-mine the person we love. And as a result, the avatars of beauty wither in us because we can-not bear seeing anything more wonderful than ourselves for long, no matter how much joy it gives us; no matter how much misery and un-  | happiness to ourselves our dominance, our redominance, will bring. We kill the beautiful thing on the altar of our minds in a perverse sacrifice to ourselves, and soon come to doubt if it had ever been. But then one day you are broken like a vessel on a rock, your little dinghy of self capsizes, you skid off a road into an abandoned quarry in the twilight and are left shaken in the silence, a young girl looks up at you and reaches your heart with her eyes - and dazed, in shock, hum-bled, through that wound to Narcissus, that cut in your self-regard, a splinter of the brightness that lurks around you enters in, quickening the wound with salve and salt and balm, smiling to you, with that strange sadness seen in the faces of angels in certain paintings in certain haunted museums, and bearing you almost unknowing to joy.  | |||
