The Aguila Azteca creaks out of Nuevo Laredo at twenty-seven minutes after nine. There is that desert in the night and there is this moon shedding silver from what always looks like a horrified face to me no matter what they say about beautiful or green cheese or rabbit (if you are Japanese) and there is a.k.a. Victor Mature. He and I are sealed into a cama matrimonial. We’d imagined cama matrimonial was for a married couple as the name implies, and perhaps it is, but we are not quite married and even if we were, it would not be married in that way. Cama matrimonial is a sleeping compartment for one sold for two who are either counting their pennies or who imagine becoming as one might be beautiful and want it. That does not describe me and a.k.a. Victor Mature. We don’t want fusion, or we want it, but cannot. The air-conditioning is in and out. Mostly out. There are no shutters or blinds on the double-glazed windows, and each time the train stops (Monterrey, Saltillo, Santiago de Querétaro) people stare in at us, those two, those pink big gringos sweating and contorting themselves away from each other and into a space they don’t understand.

a.k.a. Victor Mature is drawn to anything he imagines to be almost lost, me and Sanskrit for example, and he has brought with him just for the train an anthology of Greek lyric poetry. He drags it out and reads Sappho Fr. 16 to me. At first, where some lines and words have disappeared from Fr. 16 into time or dust or both, a.k.a. Victor Mature puts in blah blah, but blah blah turns out to be not at all the effect he wants. a.k.a. Victor Mature fears blah blah gives a disparaging impression that what Sappho wrote that has disappeared since she wrote it might be drivel. Absence invites all kinds of invention. Oh, what to do? a.k.a. Victor Mature stops. He flattens those wide lips. He flares those geometric nostrils just like the real Victor Mature in that old Hollywood movie about Samson and Delilah, and in that one called The Robe, tightens his lips and flares his nostrils when faced with temple pillars in Gaza, when tortured by Caligula’s minions in Rome; a.k.a. Victor Mature is just like that Victor Mature.

A year before a.k.a. Victor Mature and I in a cama matrimonial on the Aguila Azteca, Norma Mapagu met a.k.a Victor Mature who was not yet a.k.a. Victor Mature and said, “He looks like Victor Mature, that old Hollywood movie star. You will be sorry.”

“Isn’t Victor Mature dead,” I said, and, because I don’t take kindly to warnings, ever, I also said, “I fail to see any resemblance. You need spectacles.” Even so, saying things makes things real, and my mother had always sighed over Victor Mature the movie star and would sigh over a.k.a Victor Mature when she met him so by the time a.k.a. Victor Mature and I are in that cama matrimonial on the Aguila Azteca from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City, I see Hollywood Victor Mature every time I look at him, yes, that nose, yes, that mouth, those cheekbones, those hooded and drooping eyes, oh, yes, those shoulders out to here. Norma Mapagu was right about the resemblance, but Norma Mapagu was not right about the rest: I could be sorry about a.k.a. Victor Mature but I am not. I am not sorry about him or anything.

Ever.

Well, anyway, a.k.a. Victor Mature reads Sappho Fr. 16 again, ponderous from the beginning including the title, which he reads in a way that sounds underlined: “Sappho Fragment Sixteen.” This time, he fills the gaps with ellipses. He says dot dot dot where Sappho’s words are missing. On each dot of every ellipsis, a.k.a. Victor Mature dot looks at me that way he does dot and he tilts his head, do dot you want it, and as usual, dot I can’t look away. This is because a.k.a. Victor Mature is beautiful to me and his beauty is more than some beauty assigned to any old face because that any old face sees the beauty in me and thereby becomes beautiful in my sight. No, a.k.a. Victor Mature’s desire for me does not make him beautiful to me. He is an objectively beautiful man. There is never disagreement on that. a.k.a. Victor Mature is so beautiful he can handle me like an object. He can touch me everywhere and as often as he likes and he does, and on the Aguila Azteca that night, he is so beautiful I know letting him go will ache forever, although, to be honest, for reasons that may become clearer, when the let go happens, which is seven years in the future, letting a.k.a. Victor Mature go turns out to not ache forever. But we are not yet at the letting go time, not even near, there in that tiny sleeping compartment on the Aguila Azteca in the beautiful night north of Monterrey.

Sappho Fr. 16

some say a host of cavalry
is the most beautiful thing upon the dark earth
others say infantry, a fleet of ships,
but I say it is whatever a person desires

it is perfectly easy to make this
understood by everyone: for she who far
surpassed all mankind in beauty,
Helen, left her most noble husband

and went sailing off to Troy with no thought at all
for her child or dear parents,
but dot dot dot led her astray dot dot dot
easily dot dot dot

dot dot dot
dot dot dot lightly dot dot dot
reminds me now of Anaktoria,
who is absent

I would rather see her lovely walk
and the radiant sparkle of her face
than Lydian chariots
and infantry in arms

There might be ten thousand questions one could ask of Fr. 16, ten thousand interpretations, but a.k.a. Victor Mature says, “So Sappho was a lesbian.”

I say, “I’m not sure lesbian existed as a category in Archaic Greece.”

a.k.a Victor Mature says, “How can anybody find armies and weapons and death in battle beautiful? Were Greeks actually into that?”

I don’t say, but some do say, that Greeks felt so much guilt about the war with Troy, they turned it into a thing of great beauty as a way of forgetting without forgetting or remembering without memory. I could also ask a.k.a. Victor Mature why he pores over pictures of Soviet long-range bombers and fully armed examples of the General Dynamics F-16 in the latest issues of Flight International, but I do not ask. Nor do I bother with the matter of the bond between heroic death in war and eternal beauty, still richly extant in our own time. We’ve both been to the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne and Arlington National Cemetery just across the Potomac River, although we’ve not been to these places together, and even though a.k.a. Victor Mature might admit to the beauty of a fighter jet and a bomber, I imagine he would flare those acute nostrils at any suggestion of beauty in a war memorial. Neither do I talk about heroic civilisations although I would if I could.

Homer describes beautifully two-hundred and forty beautiful heroic deaths in the final weeks of the Trojan War: Forthwith Ajax, son of Telamon, slew the fair youth Simoeisius, son of Anthemion, whom his mother bore by the banks of the Simois, as she was coming down from Mt. Ida, where she had been with her parents to see their flocks. Therefore he was named Simoeisius, but he did not live to pay his parents for his rearing, for he was cut off untimely by the spear of mighty Ajax, who struck him in the breast by the right nipple as he was coming on among the foremost fighters; the spear went right through his shoulder, and he fell as a poplar that has grown straight and tall in a meadow by some mere, and its top is thick with branches.

I’ve been to where once was Troy and where once those beautiful Homeric deaths of men as beautiful as poplar trees occurred. It was beautiful. I went in the summer in the company of Fairy and Helmut and Fabian and Jutta, and we wore shorts and got very pink legs and they made clever remarks about giving head in German in the sunshine at the ruins of Troy, which was right on the sea at the time of the beautiful deaths in battle but is now miles inset and with long views from the reconstructed ruins across fields bristling with wheat out to the hard shine of the Aegean Sea. We could see all the way up to Çanakkale. We could see all the way over to the peninsula of Gelibolu which is Kallipolis in Greek: beautiful city. Australians call Gelibolu Gallipoli, and, especially in late April, visit from hotels in Çanakkale to worship the beautiful graves and memories of the thousands of beautiful young men who died in battle there in World War I, heroes, they are and they are now beautiful for all eternity, oh, lest we forget. Fairy and Helmut and Fabian and Jutta and I stayed at a hotel in Çanakkale and smoked nargile on the roof, but I have never been to Gallipoli itself and not because I object to the beauties of war memorials and cemeteries so much.

Yasemin ordered the windows and French doors of 5 Kat opened to the first truly warm evening of the year, to all the lights down to the sea, to the lights moving on the sea, to the lights glinting on the Asian side. I did shots of rakı with this Australian woman at the bar. She had just attended the annual memorial service at Gallipoli, “My great-grandfather,” she said, “served.” Memories of memories she did not have made her serious. Sunshine down there in the bright Dardanelles had pinkened her neck, her décolletage, her arms, her feet, and she was now the same colour as the roses on the tables and almost drooping, yet she managed to tell me that the war cemetery at Gallipoli and the dawn service for the beautiful Australian dead were the most beautiful things she had ever seen. “There’s the Bosporus,” I said, pointing, and she said, politely, “Yes, there is that.”

On the Aguila Azteca a.k.a. Victor Mature gives me question mark eyes. My answer is: “By Sappho’s time, those military and hero things were no longer the acme of beauty. Death in battle was no longer the epitome of sublime. Some say even Solon just wanted to die old and in his own bed. Hang going out young and gorgeous with some arrow in your heel or some sword driven through your head or heart and lungs, liver, like Achilles and Paris and Hector and Simoeisius at Troy. Homeric Greece was another time. Beauty in time is not always the same beauty.”

I confess: the sword, any sword, all swords, katana, scimitar, sabre, dao, Scythian short sword, keris, the Spartan xyele, the paramerion, cutlass, rapier, and the sword as synecdoche of weaponry does have a kind of deathless beauty to it. Also, that box in Tutankhamen’s tomb painted with the young pharaoh himself gorgeous in an exquisite chariot hounding his enemies is as beautiful as anything I’ve ever seen, and I feel sure that the men who did the terracotta soldiers at the tomb of the emperor Qin Shu Huangdi outside Xi’an designed and arranged them to be both fearsome in the afterlife and beautiful to see. The six-five-four-three-two-one-ignition-blast-off giant rockets heading for space from Cape Canaveral and the Baikonur Cosmodrome and Wenchang are designed, I think, to be beautiful and dreadful at the same time in the one thing, the same thing, and out the crowds come to watch, to feel the beauty and the threat, out they come, much as the middle class of Boulogne-sur-Mer donned their bonnets, fixed their boutonnière, and called a carriage to take them out to enjoy the military beauties of Napoleon Bonaparte parading his Grand Army in the meadows beyond the town. Out came one hundred plus Londoners for a cruise to the Crimea on a paddle steamer called City of Glasgow from which they also took day trips with picnic hampers supplied by Fortnum & Mason to the battlefields where there was a war between a British, French, Ottoman, Piedmont-Sardinia alliance and the Russian Empire, and where the chance to watch men die, British artillerymen hurled high into the air by massive explosions, their bodies appearing in the distance like birds on the wing, only added to the beauties of champagne, potted ham, devilled eggs, sunshine, sea, and the steep and lightly wooded shores of the Black Sea at Sevastopol. And how many of us do not swivel our heads and turn our eyes onto a military parade and find it both beautiful and awful. There is yet some Homeric Greek in us, I think, some Nuremberg, some gun, some Prussian corpuscles of the mid-eighteenth-century blood of Herr Professor Doctor Thomas Abbt bubbling in our veins: When I behold the king surrounded by his brave soldiers, living and dead I am overcome with the thought that it is noble to die fighting for one’s fatherland. Now this new beauty that I am reaching for comes more sharply into focus: it delights me; I hasten to take possession of it, tear myself away from anything that could hold me back.

“I love anything in a uniform. Gorgeous,” Big Denise says.

Some people wonder if Gertrude Stein was a bit hot for soldiers and heroics: I was a passionate admirer of General Grant. She had a soft soft soft spot for Philippe Pétain, Marshal of France and the Lion of Verdun, a Great War hero, but not dead in battle, and by 1943 less hero than fool whose collaboration with Adolf Hitler at Montoire in the autumn of 1940 to create the neutral-but-not-neutral French state of Vichy had not turned out well. Still, I can’t imagine that Gertrude Stein found Philippe Pétain beautiful or weapons beautiful or war itself beautiful, or any kind of death beautiful (she was, herself, reluctant to go) although maybe she was a bit creamy about doughboys and Ernest Hemingway, goo-goo eyes for those heroes of Italian Fascism billeted in the homes of Bilignin. Well, anyway, Gertrude Stein might have written at this point, as she does again and again to mark transitions in Everybody’s Autobiography.

Well, anyway: there was that man I fucked who said, “Look at my beautiful cock, would you, and would you like to look at my collection of beautiful military issue handguns?” I was allowed to touch one but hands off the other delicately lit and displayed like a collection of Japanese netsuke or Kutani porcelains in a large vitrine in the living room where there was also a wide double-glazed plate-glass window with a distant view of the Jefferson Memorial dome lit like art. There was a Colt Single Action Army 1st Generation 44-40 Win Revolver from about 1880, very valuable, the man I fucked said, but I saw no beauty in it. There was a Ruger MKII Stainless 22LR pistol, not so valuable, the man I fucked said, yet beauty satined its stainless-steel barrel, I could see that, smooth and lethal, the undying beauty of the sword redolent in it, and it terrified me for how this kind of beauty is ever-present. Elaine Scarry says Beauty brings copies of itself into being, beautiful replicates itself, it is viral, which may explain why so many human beings in so many times and so many places find beauty in heroic civilisation, in war machines, weapons, war violence and war men, and too few of us, including me, see what Friedrich Nietzsche saw: any beauty that masks the terrible and the hideous is not beautiful at all.

At this point, a.k.a Victor Mature thinks I’m faking it: “That’s one of your myriad fabrications,” he says. “I don’t think Nietzsche said anything like that, did he.” a.k.a. Victor Mature tells me beauty may be found anywhere, even in ugly, even in this ponderous and uncomfortable train journey through northern Mexico, “But not in men dying for their country,” and upon that, a.k.a. Victor Mature disappears to the club car where there is mezcal and the air conditioning is constant.

—————

What O taught me:

美 is not the only beautiful in Japanese. 美 does beauty duty in utsukushii and many other kinds of beauty, but 美 is not the only beauty. There is flowery uruwashii, which I know mostly from two or three literary and speechifying references to the weather, and has no 美 beauty in it. There is especially kirei, which seems more flexible about beauty than either utsukushii or uruwashii and is as important about beauty as anything 美 does yet has no 美 in it. Kirei uses two characters: one refers to a kind of figured silk twill fabric much admired for its beauty, the other is 麗 which is a more difficult character to write, of course, and is also used for uruwashii beauty, which may imply something more complex about 麗 beautiful than 美 beautiful. I don’t know. Anyway, kirei may be used to describe the beauties of art, the view, the human face and body, nature, a K-pop star, Marilyn Monroe, and to describe the beauties of clean, neat, tidy, pure and clear. Some say the distinction between utsukushii and kirei is the distinction between high and low culture, between the ruling class and the rest, between formal and colloquial ideas of beauty in Japan. Some say, clean is never an aesthetic condition and so, cannot be beautiful. I am unqualified to remark on that, except to note that clean is often a virtue anywhere and beauty is usually a virtue too, especially if you are one of those neo-Platonic types.

I rented beautiful rooms on the upper floor of Mrs Ikeda’s house just a little northwest of the old imperial palace in that not-beautiful district of Kyoto where I liked to live until I discovered the gardens and rice fields and trickling spaces and streams of Iwakura. A sister-in-law in rooms at the back of the house occasionally gave me beautiful painted and lacquered fans disinterred from a paulownia wood chest. Mrs Ikeda and her husband, who seemed habituated to moxibustion, lived below. The moxibustion didn’t smell like fun. On the first New Year’s Eve, Mrs Ikeda put out her Mild Seven, mounted the stairs, and presented a quiver of dusters and brooms and cleaning cloths and agents and a vacuum cleaner and a red bucket and a mop with an extendable handle because you are so tall. “Make it all clean,” she said using kirei which meant she might have been saying “Make it all beautiful.” I didn’t know which meaning kirei had there, but since Mrs Ikeda had used the imperative form of the verb “to do”, I got on alacritous to spraying wiping scrubbing vacuuming sweeping dusting mopping polishing until Mrs Ikeda doused Mild Seven number fifteen, up the stairs, and scrutiny. “Done!” she said. “You’ve made it very clean,” and a beautiful smile opened on her face, or is it that Mrs Ikeda said, “Done. You’ve made it very beautiful,” and a clean smile opened on her face. I don’t know.

Australian English is wanton with beautiful. Beauty pops up in not the usual beautiful places there, thereby revealing the radical contingency of beauty itself, probably unintentionally: beautiful, Australians might say of a pork sausage, which seems a surprise at first until you realise that beauty does not exist before we say it exists, for beauty relies entirely on disclosure for its existence. That lucky sausage.

It was seventy years before the beauty of Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography for The Rite of Spring became beautiful. Critics at the first performances of the ballet in 1913 and 1914 found Vaslav Nijinsky’s steps anything but beautiful and said so, said so vociferously until Léonide Massine was hired to re-choreograph the entire ballet into a form that the critics and the audience could disclose to themselves and the rest of us as beautiful, look, how beautiful the steps. It was not until the 1980s that researchers and Joffrey Ballet recovered the ugly Vaslav Nijinsky choreography from some filing cabinet in a museum or somewhere and staged the ballet, as intended, with Vaslav Nijinsky’s steps, which had been so unbeautiful in the before but were now disclosed as extremely beautiful, so beautiful that even were I to think not, I lack the spine needed to say, ugly.

I don’t know who first identified the beauty of JMW Turner’s Venice, From the Porch of Madonna Della Salute. Maybe John Ruskin was the one to say, “How very beautiful this is,” while peering at his friend’s latest work on the opening day of the 1835 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition in London. Some may not have agreed with John Ruskin upon the beauty of the work at the time. Venice, From the Porch of Madonna Della Salute seemed unfinished, some said. Some who knew Venice saw immediately that, in his pursuit of beauty, JMW Turner had made adjustments to Venice in the painting in order to disclose the beauty of Venice the place: he rotated the campanile of St Mark’s Cathedral through forty-five degrees so that we see it end-on; the view itself is not from the porch of Madonna Della Salute; he doubled the width of the Grand Canal to make it grander; he painted over the dilapidated, mean, and suffering condition of Venice as it was after the end of the Republic and occupation by Napoleon. Yet, the painting itself is now so beautiful, and in this indisputable beauty, which is also a kind of lie, there might be what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls an experience of truth that has nothing to do with either aesthetic theory or the real, but beauty itself. The truth of beautiful Venice in the beautiful painting copies itself onto the truth of Venice the place no matter how flooded, how reeking, how clattering, how stuffed with tourists the city is, no matter how many mammoth cruise ships loom on the waters. “Oh, Venice, so beautiful, it looks just like that Turner painting,” Harry says, his muddy eyes shining at it, and I wish myself as beautiful as Venice in a Turner painting. Look at me like that, go on.

Of me, my sister said: bullet head, pig nose, fatty, hideous, ugly lump. Mrs Moller in the red brick house on the corner spoke from slightly on the other side of her usual veils of Rothmans smoke and tincture of opium: “It’s no good telling me you want to be beautiful. Little boys don’t become beautiful, they become men.”

Perhaps pretty, then.

Look how pretty I am, Muhammad Ali said when he was still Cassius Clay. My long trim legs and my beautiful arms and my pretty nose and mouth. I’m a pretty man, I know I’m pretty you don’t have to tell me I’m pretty.

My stepfather and his brothers twisted their bitter mouths upon this improbability. “Pretty,” they scoffed and used racial epithets. “And what about the way the bloke dances when a man should be fighting. Pretty.”

Mrs Moller again: “Pretty is not beautiful. Remember that. If you’re going to go on with a hopeless quest, at least think big.”

My mother spent hundreds of dollars she might have preferred not to spend putting my sister’s nomad teeth on the road to regular beauty. My own incisors and canines were left to break away and wander around my mouth, willy-nilly. My sister told me I looked like an old fence when I smiled. “Don’t let the sheep get out.” Mr. Shepherd filled her decaying back teeth with shining amalgam, but he yanked out mine. My sister whimpered at night because her braces hurt. I made pictures of a beautiful me on the backs of my eyelids, and the next Sunday, I painted my face with oily crayons, green eyelids, magenta lips, and a chocolate brown beauty spot right there. I turned a Davy Crockett hat and scraps of lamb’s wool and coloured paper and my pajama pants into hats and turbans and strapless bodices. I kept my lips closed. I smiled at myself in the mirror, and oh, with those teeth behind painted lips I had become beautiful, more beautiful than you, my face had become a beautiful landscape, what a picture I made of my face, and if the beautiful landscape looked like a girl, well then, this is how to be beautiful, I thought, disappear into it.

That critic of Japanese cinema, Donald Richie, disappeared from Tokyo to the islands of the Seto Inland Sea in 1968 or 1969 and found a paradise, an ideal sea garden, intensely beautiful. The islands are still beautiful now, but it’s mostly a silent and unmoving kind of beauty. Back then, the island towns and villages still had plenty of people in them. Ferries shuttled regularly between all the tiny island ports and piers. Back then, the two great leprosaria on Nagashima had thousands of suffering residents. There were farms and orchards and family businesses on the islands then and local festivals and temples with a priest and priests with a shrine and sex workers here and there and bars and local gentry and travelling theatrical troupes on the islands (watch Ukigusa if you get a chance). Then, those soaring bridges had not yet flung themselves across the beautiful waters taking the human beauties of the islands with them.

In the book Donald Richie wrote about his travels around the islands of the Seto Inland Sea in 1968 or 1969, he disappears himself into the beautiful landscape and he disappears the landscape into the beautiful people. The beautiful place vanishes into the many beautiful boys and girls Donald Richie fucked or tried to fuck on many of the beautiful islands: Perhaps nowhere on earth is there more beautiful skin than in Japan. Usually hairless, it is not like a mere covering. It is as though the entire body, all the way through, were composed of this soft, smooth lustrousness. I touched her arm. She looked at me, her eyes dark under the darkened sky.

Donald Richie never mentions Ōkunoshima, that beautiful island in the Seto Inland Sea populated with thousands of rabbits and only a short boat ride from the little town of Tadanoumi. Here, the government of imperial Japan manufactured mustard gas, lewisite gas, phosgene gas, hydrogen cyanide gas, tear gas, sternutator gas, and weapons delivery systems for the gases. The rabbits living on Ōkunoshima now are the great-great-great-great-great-and-many-more-greats-great grandchildren of the rabbits used to test all these poisonous vapours before, which the Imperial Japanese Army then released against Chinese resistance to Japanese rule in north and northeast China in the 1930s and early 1940s. The endurance of these gas weapons is not as long as the endless life of the beautiful sword but they do go on. Beautiful Chinese children and sorghum farmers all bronzed and lovely in the Manchurian sun or rosy amid quilts of Jilin snow are even now maimed and killed by chance encounters, and entire villages have been depopulated by accidents with decomposing Japanese poison gas weapons lying around for more than seventy years in river sands and bamboo groves. Across the Yellow Sea and the Straits of Shimonoseki, the thirteen-, fourteen- and fifteen-year-old local Japanese girls forced to work in the poison gas factory on the beautiful island of Ōkunoshima probably had soft, smooth, lustrous, deep skin, all the way through, but years later, that beautiful skin broke out in cankers and ulcers and the girls, who were now women, died of the cruellest kinds of cancer.

—————

On the Aguila Azteca, three large shots of mezcal in the club car make a Buddhist of a.k.a. Victor Mature. “Some people say impermanence is the ultimate beauty, constant disappearance,” he says.

Oh, sage.

Dawn leaks lavender and candy pink, seams of white fire into the eastern sky. How beautiful. “But impermanent,” a.k.a. Victor Mature says; he is difficult. This is difficult, the possibility that the greatest beauty of all beauties may be the beauty of everything fucking off in one way or another. Could it really be that the constant change of all things and all conditions is more beautiful than any thing or any person, than any gleaming squadron, than the best Japanese skin, than that girl with the charming swagger in her walk, than that art, than a piece of floral jade, that Acropolis, those starry heavens seeming to turn above us, that wet, those shoes, that scimitar, sex on the beach beneath the palm trees, that Angkor Wat, that red Amaryllis in the winter window, any beautiful place, that beautiful view of sea and islands. Is everything ending and disappearing more beautiful by far than Anaktoria was beautiful to Sappho, than that human relationship which always has the power to leave you feeling, as Emily Dickinson puts it, like a crescent of who you were before. a.k.a. Victor Mature says, “Things disappearing is beautiful and difficult. You have to say yes to it all.”

Yes: in The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche says yes to the beauty of constant change as a part of the formula for greatness in a human being. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! Some day I wish to be only a yes-sayer to everything including suffering and catastrophe, Friedrich Nietzsche means, although it’s hard to imagine him talking about how beautiful and amor fati and saying, yes, yes, yes to a tsunami as tall as a twelve-storey building, or saying let this be my love henceforth while plunging on a summer evening with five hundred others into a Japanese mountain on a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 that has lost its tail. The Buddha, on the other hand, might have been all yes with even the cruellest and most radical kinds of impermanence. He proposes constant change as liberation from all delusions of greatness, and part of the progress toward total kindness: Dhammapada 227. All created things perish. Those who know and see this become passive in pain; this is the way that leads to purity. What could be more beautiful than that?

Well, there is the matter of my own mother, who many men found beautiful, and so she was beautiful, and who was also as permanent as a woman may ever get. Because of her lifetime commitment to permanence, my mother was steeply inclined to No. She was only Yes, and thus at her most beautiful, when moving in the direction of disappearance, heading for its lip, when leaving, or was it escape, when let’s go for a drive. She was never purer, never more beautiful than on those hundreds of long road trips she took more for the sake of going than for Aunt Whoever at the other end. She once drove for five hours through a dark night, winds like fists, rain in slanted sheets, then back again until dawn to rescue me from the side of the highway because my face was too swollen and cut up and my stance too fairy for anybody to see my thumb and give me a lift, and when I apologised for the inconvenience, my mother made not any variety of I’d do anything for my child response, just smiling. “Tell me why you look so happy,” I said to my mother, and at the wheel, illuminated by soft light from the dashboard, burnished by her bout of mobility, on the move, she said, “You know. There is hot soup there in the flask.”

At the end of summer in Oregon, the sea and sky tarnish like neglected silver forks. There are a woman and a giant black poodle on the beach. In the untidy light, the waves suck at themselves, soft ribbons of fog unfurl upon dark necks of rock, and the woman ups her skirts and takes a rake with which she quickly — although it takes two hours — and precisely — although she makes many mistakes and must redo things — etches a great and intricate mandala into the damp sand. She works from centre to perimeter. The giant black poodle watches the work. Once or twice, the dog steps wagging into the mandala and out again as though testing the way to heaven. Language passes between the dog and the woman until the dog finally plants its behind on the sand and waits for the woman to finish the last flames in the outermost ring of fire, the burning border across which any seeker must pass before tacking toward the core where exists or does not exist enlightenment itself.

The woman finishes. She lowers her tool to the sand. She lets out a holler. She lets down her skirts and she dances, and the giant black poodle barks and dances too, leaping into the air, twisting, and when their dance is complete, they leave. The swelling tide laps in, tongues the sacred pattern fresh-made on the sand. What could be more beautiful than this, not so much the beautiful mandala in the sand, not so much the seascape, not the slatternly light, but the woman and the giant poodle walking away from their creation without a single backward glance, and most beautiful of all, the disappearance of the mandala itself into the sea, into absence.

Beautiful Surtsey, fuming and dark, has been saying goodbye since it began. Beautiful Surtsey is constantly moving away from us in the iron sea south of Iceland. Beautiful Surtsey first appeared to the cook aboard a fishing trawler: apparition in the dawn, black pillars of volcanic ash climbing from the Atlantic Ocean, a mountain puts the crown of its head above the water for the first time. Did that cook experience some sublime upon the appearance of an island in the sea or was it fear at the arrival? Beautiful Surtsey, within a fortnight forming a brittle island of scoria rock, which is like heavy pumice, and hardened lava, rising one hundred and fifty-five metres above the sea. Within two years of Surtsey’s beautiful birth, diatoms appeared in the littoral and soon the seaweed, Ulothrix, green and filamented, and then, quickly, colonies of vascular plants upon the new land: sea rocket which is a mustard and has pretty but not beautiful white and purple flowers in the summer; sea sandwort, an edible purslane and vividly green; sea lyme grass used by Inuit, Cupiit, and Yup’ik peoples for weaving; three types of willow; ferns and horsetails; mosses; lichens. Spiders appeared. Great black-back and herring gulls arrived and nested, formed colonies, and shat all over the place, opening Surtsey to permanent settlers: earthworms, beetles, snails, butterflies, and fleas. Common seals haul out for winter on Surtsey now, and in autumn, grey seals breed on the northern spit. Yet, beautiful Surtsey dies as it lives, and that is why beautiful Surtsey is beautiful. Each year Surtsey loses some of itself, the island walks away on wind and high surf, and at some time in the future, Surtsey will be gone, or it will be just a dusty bone of itself, like you and I one day, barely a memory there, the land will be sea again and the sea will be land again. This is not a wheel, it is the exquisitely beautiful walking of mountains.

Giorgione’s La Vecchia may never disappear from us now. Even were the waters of the Laguna di Venezia to rise up and suck the entire Gallerie dell’Accademia down to the silty bottom and La Vecchia with it; even were the airplane carrying La Vecchia for a visit to the Cincinnati Art Museum to plummet from the heavens in flames, the aura of La Vecchia would endure, indelible, permanent, constantly circulated by all the copies La Vecchia’s beauty has made of itself in prints, museum catalogues, jpegs, png, tiff, minds, ineradicable until human beings finally off themselves entirely, and even then there will be a tabby cat or a mollusk that appreciates art. Is there not, though, something at odds in the ineradicable permanency of La Vecchia as beauty itself and the mission of the painting itself, which is to disclose and represent, realistically, the many lineaments of old age as beauty. The woman is luminous, worn down to exquisite erosions. Her face is a waterfall of experience. In her right hand, a small paper notice inscribed with Col tempo: So it happens with Time. Which is most beautiful here? The beautiful repute of La Vecchia, Giorgione’s painting itself, or the unstoppable changes and disappearances it describes, our universal path unto death?

Some Buddhist texts recommend the practitioner first go to a mound to observe the stages of a decaying corpse, such as the stage of turning bluish black; for a deeper contemplation, step back and sit at a place and contemplate the image again. Other instructive stages are fresh corpse, bloated corpse, corpse leaking stale blood and fluids, corpse now bluish black, desiccated corpse, corpse eaten by animals, skeleton, scattered bones, and dust. All states of decomposition disclose the beauty of endings and uncontrollable change. All teach us to see the beauty of it.

On the dock at Koh Mak, where twelve people wait under the probing sun for the fast boat to Trat, this monk shares his bright golden parasol with me. I give him a wad of baht which must be more than the worth of the shade cast by the bright golden parasol because this monk delivers a homily: “Make an autopsy on yourself. Cut yourself open. Look at your innards. Touch your personal filaments. Put your fingers on your liver. There. Then you will know how everything does not last and you will love what you know. You will see the beauty of it.” I put my hands together and I bow, and the fast boat for Trat comes in. The sea is choppy. The spray turns to salt in my hair and when I look back, the bright golden parasol has gone from the picture.

Seven pictures of Fairy, who is somewhere else being beautiful now, who knows where. I could find it, but I would rather see Fairy’s lovely walk, that slightly arrogant saunter and the radiant sparkle of her face in a picture or in a memory than in some encounter with Fairy again in life where I may face again the yearning for unchanging:

Picture #1: Fairy in plaid pajamas grinning and pink and drinking me in because I have used brown eyeliner to paint the moustache of a cavalier on her top lip which somehow makes her even more beautiful than she is.

Picture #2: Fairy in Kassel misses me in Istanbul already. She sends me this selfie still wearing her this-is-serious-business deep blue suit. The lighting in her Novostar Hotel room casts upon Fairy in a way that turns her skin to ivory and her lips Morello cherry red and enigmatic, but I know what Fairy wants: she wants to make me here and there present forever.

Picture #3: Fairy on the parquet floor of that almost empty apartment overlooking the Bosporus. She looks at me or at the camera as though what she sees might beatify, not beautify, her.

Picture #4: Fairy stands in the shallow end of the horizon pool with a view of the Straits of Malacca behind her. I aim the camera. Warm rain jewels the lens and Fairy beckons, saying to me, “Come in, come in, darling, and swim between my legs.”

Picture #5: It’s at a diner down the street from Lechmere Station on the Green T Line and though Fairy’s profile is beautiful, there is no not seeing the No in the angle of her head.

Picture #6: At that glassy bookshop in Erfurt and Fairy is as rigid as bone. She looks at me but not at me. I can no longer see into her aquarium eyes.

The seventh picture I have of Fairy is what Maria Stepanova might call a memory of a memory. In what I remember of what I remember, we fuck in the before-dawn shadows of the great city we fuck one of the first times. So close to it, Fairy looks like beauty, she looks at me, she looks like she might stay, she is cinematic. Fairy’s swollen lips, her blooming cheeks, her breasts are like some fat Technicolor chrysanthemums, but her cries and the heaving remind me of Sigourney Weaver in Alien Resurrection, which is a cheap image, I know. I can’t help it, I can’t help wondering if something terrifyingly new may burst from Fairy’s chest, or from anywhere on me, or from the great city outside where the müezzin down the street calls fajr, Prayer is better than sleep. Prayer is better than sleep, but looking at Fairy is better than sleep, then, now, forever, to see the beauty that cannot be kept, no matter how much I want it.

“If they knew,” Fairy says.

“It is Istanbul not Riyadh,” I say.

—————

Some people find a kind of beauty in making other kinds of beauty die; you should kill it before it kills you. In 1950 and one of those hot, wet nights you get in Kyoto in July, a novice monk by the name of Hayashi Yoken set fire to the gilded fourteenth-century pavilion known as Kinkakuji, part of the Rokuonji Zen complex. Kinkajuji was renowned for its great beauty then; it is a UNESCO World Heritage site now and thought to be one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. You have to like gold. In the novel Kinkakuji, Mishima Yukio, who was all for heroic civilisation and found beauty in military matters, in war, war machinery, and valiant death in battle, depicts the young Buddhist arsonist as so ugly and tormented by his ugliness that he cannot bear beauty apparent. He cannot bear beautiful Kinkakuji, and after weeks of planning and a final inventory of all the golden pavilion’s beauties, he crouched down by the straw and this time struck two matches together and whoosh, the great beauty was gone.

A team of Czech and Azerbaijani researchers found that the beauty of a snake correlates to fear of a snake. The more beautiful the snake, the more dangerous, some people feel: run from the beautiful glistening serpent or kill kill kill before the beauty of the beautiful snake kills you. Beauty terrifies us, Rainer Maria Rilke says: For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Beauty suggests a higher form of reality to him, so high, it may be unreal, sidereal even, alien, or the power of angels, gods and celestials, oh, bow down to the floor or die, you. That radical Whig, Edmund Burke, thought beauty a delightful horror, and in some idle moments, I wonder if there may be a Sappho poem somewhere, completely disappeared but waiting for the light, a lost Sappho lyrical about the horrifying potential of Anakatoria’s sublime beauty, and Sappho considering whether erotic beauty might be just as awful as the beauty of a host of cavalry, a fleet of ships, and heroic death in battle?

As you know, to put the eyes on beauty is to put the eyes on death, Luchino Visconti says in some interview about his 1971 movie Death in Venice. Some say trans anything is beautiful and are talking about themselves. Some say trans anything is beautiful and are talking politics, for there is some idea that beauty might be a precursor of liberation. Some say trans anything is beautiful and chase it. Some people have mixed feelings about trans beauty. Some people want it and wanting it makes them want to burn it, hit it, run away from it, jeer at it, blame it, prohibit it; they are frightened to death by the beauty they find in or on trans women although the death is usually the trans woman’s death, not some people’s. Some people do not care about trans anything at all and just see the beauty in you, period, like the man I fucked saw the beauty of those guns without question, like Donald Richie saw perfect Japanese skin, just like a.k.a. Victor Mature saw me. “Are you a chaser? Do you find trans beautiful?” Norma Mapagu said to him, a bit too much chardonnay and weed. a.k.a. Victor Mature gave her violent eyes.

I think sometimes about Anaktoria’s facial angle. Was it the sublime ideal of 100 degrees devised by the Greek sculptors and painters of Sappho’s time as the true measure of human beauty. Was Anaktoria’s facial angle so gorgeously steep no sharp ocean-going prow nor acutely angled spear or sword could rival that face for Sappho’s affections. Nineteenth-century ethnologists estimated the average facial angle of the Indigenous peoples of what is now Australia to be 85 degrees, much steeper than the 20 degrees facial angle of a dog, but impossible to be beautiful. The 20 degrees angle of the usual dog face should have meant that dogs are ugly and unintelligent, but I doubt those imperial ethnologists gave up saying Clever Dog when Spot sat and stopped praising the beauty of their favorite pug or whippet. Mary Wollstonecraft had ideas about the beauty of Indigenous women no matter the acuity or not of any facial angle. Indigenous women, she thought, were beautifully untrammeled. But the beauty she saw in Indigenous women had nothing to do with Indigenous women and everything to do with transformation white women’s lives in late-eighteenth century England and Europe. For Mary Wollstonecraft, Indigenous women were beautiful for the lesson they taught about the female face and body liberated from the oppressions of corsets, voluminous and modest dress, primping, tweezing, perfuming, dainty, deportment, comportment, and encasements. As a child on unceded Wiradjuri land I almost never saw a Wiradjuri person or any of the other First Nations people who lived in and around the town. Nobody mentioned the angle of Wiradjuri faces, but what I heard was that Aboriginal men and women were indisputably ugly, that even Lois Briggs who was a model and Miss Melbourne in 1961 was only as beautiful as she possibly was because of all that white blood and remember that you can’t trust the pretty pale ones because they throwback unpredictably and her baby could be as ugly and as black as the rest of them, and anyway, they’re all disappearing, eventually.

—————

a.k.a. Victor Mature disappears from the Aguila Azteca. The guard advises tranquility please and “Why not a tiny disappearance at San Luis Potosí, perfectly understandable, do you know the old city has a number of important and very beautiful Baroque buildings in the Mexican style and of course graceful parks, and, of course also, Enchiladas Potosí.” He has the club car waiter bring mezcal to the cama matrimonial. I add two blue diazepam, and tranquility arrives, and I go on to Mexico City a bit sprawled even akimbo in that little compartment suddenly large. a.k.a. Victor Mature reappears five days later at the Hotel Versailles, which has a beautiful cocktail lounge done out with divans and gauze draped like the veils of Salome and lit by tender crayon-coloured spotlights and will itself disappear in the 1985 earthquake. I ask why. a.k.a. Victor Mature gives me flamethrower eyes so we go down to the beautiful cocktail bar and lie on divans and finger the beautiful gossamer drapes in the pink and primrose lights and listen to jazz and drink mezcal, and later, a.k.a. Victor Mature vomits torrents in the shower, so much, I wonder if he is disappearing down the drain.

a.k.a. Victor Mature disappears from a hotel in Vero Beach. He disappears from a Delta Airlines Lockheed Tristar about to close its doors at Atlanta for the flight to La Guardia. He disappears into the hot night in Colombo and is gone for weeks. a.k.a. Victor Mature disappears from dinner parties and backyard barbecues, from the middle of Act 2 of King Lear, from a box at the Booth Theater as soon as David Bowie makes his entrance in The Elephant Man, from the opening credits at the world premiere of the first Mad Max movie. a.k.a. Victor Mature almost disappears permanently one pouring morning when he drives my red Alfa Romeo GTV high speed into the back of a parked truck. (We call this “The Accident”.) He disappears to Caracas. He disappears into the sky in a Nimbus 2 sailplane, up into the cumulus towers and gone, and when he has not returned to the field eight hours later, there is talk of calling the police but then a.k.a. Victor Mature drops yonder, blazing like a shard of fire in the lowering sun. “Here I am,” he says.

a.k.a. Victor Mature disappears from home a dozen times in nine years. He wants me to see how fast he moves. He tells me I am beautiful, and I am. He wants me to recognise the beauty of things going, he wants me to do the beautiful thing and let him go, and I do, I do, I do. I am diligent. I do see the great, implausible beauty of impermanence. I see it until I see too much to see it again. I see myself disappearing. Mahalo and aloha nui loa, I write on a pink PostIt note and stick it on the door of the refrigerator. a.k.a. Victor Mature watches me going. He seems impassive as I vanish, but Norma Mapagu tells me that before I even reach cruising altitude on Air New Zealand, a.k.a. Victor Mature weeps and gnashes his not-so-beautiful teeth and it goes on for weeks, this grief over that of which he had always said: beautiful.

Recently, I heard, also from Norma Mapagu, that a.k.a. Victor Mature is living now in a flat in the Ermita district of Manila, although I suspect Norma Mapagu might be hiding something from me. She does. I am not sure a.k.a. Victor Mature has gone so far. I’ve caught glimpses of him on platform ten at the station. I saw those wide lips coming the other way down the mountain road in a tiny green Lotus Elan, its fibreglass monocoque as unruffled as though just off the showroom floor. It must have been a.k.a. Victor Mature looking disappointed in the dark at that Matsui Yayoi installation. It must be a.k.a. Victor Mature who sends me that email on my birthday, no good wishes in it, just a scan of a page from some book or magazine upon which, a poem by Voltaire Q Oyzon in a language I do not know and an English translation. I take the language I don’t know to be Tagalog; Norma Mapagu knows better. “What would you know about it,” she says. “This is Waráy. The language of Leyte and Samar, Eastern Visayas. It is a bit disappearing these days.” In her sweet and nearly beautiful voice, Norma Mapagu reads the poem to me twice, first the Waráy and then the English, and when she reads, there are no dot dot dots in it and nothing disappears from it:

‘Buklara an Imo mga Palad’ (Open Your Hands)

I find the email address of Voltaire Oyzon and write requesting permission to use his poem here at the end of beauty and its disappearances, and Voltaire Oyzon replies: Of course! What is the purpose of beauty if it’s not shared?

[1] It is a privilege to be able to share “Buklara an Imo mga Palad” here in the form intended and requested by Voltaire Q Oyzon (Leyte Normal University). Waráy on the left and the English translation by Merlie M Alunan on the right. Thanks to Efmer E Agustin (University of the Philippines Tacloban) for introducing me to Prof. Oyzon.