Greg Anderson:  

There is a poem that was written many a moon ago. It is a sweet and sad maddening sort of poem that makes one wish one had never read the poem in the first place. I recently saw a movie that made me feel much the same, and only later was reminded of some sculptures I saw at that big fancy museum in Paris, France. I stared at that sculpture for hours. I wondered if the person that created it felt the same tension I could see in the figures before me. Perhaps he/she didn't want to make the thing but were impelled by the nature of life at the time. Perhaps the artist hated to do it, and beauty it is for sure, but so much tension was there I must believe the artist paid too high a price to produce the thing. It moves me to tears and I would call it Beauty. So I wonder if those things which are the most beautiful are witnessed and produced to be so from a well of great pain and suffering. Certainly this is ancient knowledge. I am a simple man. I must understand these things for myself. So. To me, beauty is only framed by its measurable opposite. So to speak. Again, I write here not of the sort of common beauty a thuggish sort of fellow may mention to a comrade in a gruff sort of mannish way (ostensibly about some part of female anatomy). Nor do I speak of the beauty that some femme fatale ala vacant vassal might mention about a flower or a sunset or the great galactic disk. No. I speak here of the sort of beauty that offers its own innocent life that another may live or be reborn. It is at once terrible and comforting that such a thing lives. It is at once the sort of thing that cannot be described and as common in stories as youth in heat. This is the beauty that can reside in the heart of the suffering and pain of war as well as crystal clear understanding of the beauty of holding the newly born innocent in one's arm. It is a story often told, often written. It is a story that is handed down to children and an unspoken story that old-folks knowingly nod to one-another. I write these things because it is here in this cyber-space tha...Expand for more