You can’t make something ugly into something beautiful. That sounds like a statement that would offend me if someone else said it. When I step outside, I feel an intense nagging in my spirit – the human body in all its forms around me, is begging to be showcased. I can feel the faces of other people imploring the universe that someone would decorate them.

I keep thinking of makeover shows, which have always struck me as closed-minded trend pushers. I feel the same urge to decorate people, and I can’t seem to help it.

I’m not sure, though, that makeover shows approach people with the idea that they are already beautiful. They seem to assume that it is something inherently ugly that begs to be covered up with a couple clean lines and some rouge. In my mind, things work differently.

You can’t make something ugly into something beautiful – and in every single case I can think of, the human body is inherently beautiful, or is the potential energy of beauty. It does not “contain” something beautiful that waits to be revealed and highlighted. It IS beautiful, and I can prove it. Anyone who has ever felt someone else’s body was calling out to be told it was special can already concede the point. How about the fact that the visual body is the only part of you that truly experiences the outside world as well as the inside one. How about the longing to be with someone beautiful? Why do you match your socks?

What I mean is, when I see something ugly, from an artistic point of view, it because that thing gives a message of ugliness for its own specific purpose. Sure, you’ve met people you wouldn’t want to sleep with. But I myself have never met someone whose very visage conveyed something without a spot of beauty.

And that’s one of the best thing about beauty. One splash of it can change an entire scene.

Does your skin have to be perfect? And your makeup flawless, and your shoes and purse matching? There’s a reason that we avoid overkill of beauty. It’s not meant to fill a space, but to accentuate the entire picture. A picture of complete beauty doesn’t really ring true, does it? Flawlessness always seems like a lie – even near-flawlessness. And that’s because beauty js a magical, desirable spice and flavor. It is not a meal.

Yet here we are, in these bodies, splashing our beauty onto this bleak earth, in overwhelming numbers.

To change the pace a little… I myself see hypocrisy in the idea that ugly cannot be made beautiful. On the one hand, ugly is art. It’s all art. Ugly is truth. But just like complete beauty seems like a lie, complete ugliness is hard to find as well. The mistake we make is in believing that ugly is the more powerful factor in an image just because its representations are the most numerous.

Why wouldn’t we feel that way, anyway? The journey to adulthood is really, for many of us, just a slow and deadening process by which we lose our belief in beauty. It all its mystery and power, in all its everlasting victory, and we learn to pity those who hope for beauty and still profess to know it’s at the fingertips of every one of us.

As a feminist, I make the mistake too, of assuming that human nature is the only kind of nature. Forgetting that it is a very special display of a certain kind of love.

My own love affair is with color. When color comes into play, I can’t seem to focus on anything else. I get stuck on small tasks for hours, trying to create beautiful color combinations.

Does color reflect another kind of nature? Sure! It’s so free, yet so governed by immutable laws. And time, another kind of nature. And math, one of my favorite art forms. So limitless, yet so concrete. Therefore, feminist though I am, I love the idea of the human body as an incomparable thing of beauty that can somehow display other natural beauties – and instead of taking away from its own, it highlights it. I love the idea that a green pair of earrings gives my eyes a beauty they didn’t have before. I love that I can cover the pink in my skin with tan, and bring out the whites in my eyes. I love that I can smile, and show a brilliant flash of white that makes the black in my lashes irreplaceable instead of clunky and out of place.

So if I say you can’t make something ugly into something beautiful, it’s because beauty is like what a candle does to a fallen cake. It takes something that was mundane all alone, and turns it into a celebration! I genuinely don’t know if it’s just me that the body calls out to as a canvas does to an artist. It seems that many people have the inclination to highlight those few qualities that stand out, and make good use of the splashes of beauty already at their disposal.

And I really believe the body is the perfect canvas for some of life’s most beautiful qualities, be they points in time, balances of numbers, or color theory’s favorite formulas. Sure, the perspective I hold is little but an angle. Then, I seem to find that my angles work for me quite nicely.

It’s very sweet to think of the way beauty overtakes an entire image. Are we predisposed to look for it? Are we all poets in that way? If ugly were really trying to make a statemtn, don’t worry, it would make it in just a splash too. But in cases where the glass is half full or half empty, individual perspective comes into play. Again, the mistake we make is in believing that because someone took a sip from the glass, that it is only half filled. That’s what makes a a perfectly nice person into someone who only dates skinny girls, or only sleeps with blondes. They have failed to acknowledge the overwhelmingly positive amount of water left. And again, that is what leads to our belief that ugly is just as common as beautiful.

The truth is much more accessible than that.

Does it make anyone else melt a little, to think about Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett as a couple? Here’s a guy who seems pretty rough, and he’s didn’t ever seem to be beautiful – not without his inner man, anyway. Along comes Julia, with all her charisma and intelligence and in my imagination, she just exudes life. *WHAT IS IT* that makes them a couple!? You know? It blows my mind! Until I think about this… There’s no reason beauty and ugly would marry each other. Just like Night and Day never show up to the same party, some things in nature are true opposites. Then I realize that marriages are not made of night and day, but of yin and yang, each of which never really shows up to a party totally independent of the other – arrive in separate cars though they may.

Like I said, beauty is best in splashes. If the glass is half beautiful and half ugly, there’s little poetry – only a choice for the viewer to make – no real truth. Opposites do not balance each other toward peace. Their juxtaposition strikes a chord that one of them is a lie and that the viewer MUST choose.

So 100% of either quality is not appealing to the soul, and neither is an equitable division of the two. And although I don’t believe people are ugly but rather some are blank canvases awaiting a splash of beauty, the perception of others is what makes all the difference between pretty and ugly. Essentially – that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Can you imagine if Lyle and Julia walked into your dinner party together? This idea blows my mind more than the fact that they are together – they find each other appealing. This means that there is some quality in the honesty of Lyle’s imperfection that Julia relates to… she sees herself in there somewhere. And when Lyle sees Julia he feels some of her beauty… he recognizes an honesty of a quality in himself… in her, somewhere. They aren’t 50/50. They are , conservatively, 40/10/40/10, still acknowledging that we aren’t talking about beauty vs. ugly, but the question of how pronounced beauty becomes when paired with the rest of the image on the canvas. What you’ll see is that it doesn’t take much beauty to make the whole thing worthwhile.

That, people, is poetry at its finest. Because now, remember that we the viewers have our poetic eyes peeled, foremost, in search of beauty. The 40 of mundane in Lyle relieves Julia of the obligation to be perfect. It also relieves the viewer, gently, of having to believe that there is such thing as an untainted beauty in humanity. And the 40 of beautiful in Julia makes visible a quality in Lyle we really never would have seen without her: the beauty in him. I mean the physical, visual kind of beauty. To me, that’s some kind of miracle. That’s some kind of life lesson, that the splashes of vibrancy, the reds and oranges of life, are worth all the trouble.

Sadly, I’m a grown up, and the idea of love no longer makes me euphoric. The hope for something beautiful has faded. And when good things happen, I take them in my palm and set them aside as though they don’t really represent my experiences, because they are so small and so infrequent. I can’t cause them or predict them or really explain them. I feel ashamed when they make me happy. I can’t consider them life, can I? At some point between then and now, I’ve accepted the idea that life is a string of awful moments tied together by deserted sections of a canvas.

Maybe my life is Lyle Lovett. It stands alone, with all this potential for beauty, but no one to recognize it. Maybe my body is Lyle. And maybe Lyle will be alone forever.

But I like to think there’s someone to answer that call. If color and form call out to me to bring out just a few pieces of them, and if I’m so tempted to respond that I can practically fall in love, then maybe my life calls out to goodness and virtue, imploring it to decorate just one thing: don’t fill me up; just use my glass for the overflow. Don’t make me over; just bring out my eyes. Don’t give me a mansion and a Rolex; just pay my bills.

When I think of it in those terms, I have to be honest. Life has given me beauty, over and over and over again. More than I need. Yet I insist that I am deprived of it.

You don’t want *too much* – you want splashes. You are interested in a balance, where beauty outweighs everything else.  That is a healthy sense of what properly decorates a life. Beauty does not come in like a flood on top of everything awful. It’s an ant carrying ten times its weight in food. It’s a flashlight under the covers.

When you think of life as I do, it’s easy to see why beauty would be lost. Here you work day in and day out with a puddle of black ink. Come on… you’re going to add a drop or three of red and tell me that makes a difference? Or maybe it’s not accurate to think of it as paint, but as light. Paint is for hiding things. Paint is for unwanted. Oddly, people seem to use it to cover blank spaces a whole lot more than to hide real ugliness… this is what I mean when I say ugly is artful and communicative. Hiding it deprives us of that. What nature abhors, as you might recall, is not a mess, but a vacuum.

There’s no conclusion to this for me right now, except to say that I know beauty is only beautiful when it is held next to something which isn’t… and pure, unadulterated ugly seems pretty hard to find. That you can read a book by the light of a candle, and that somehow that makes even the darkness essential, and the night worth enduring even though you get no rest.

Sorry that’s not a very eloquent ending. I’m just having a thaw of the hope for beauty; it’s kind of like when Belle is in the scary mansion and all of a sudden the footstool is drooling and the teapot is singing. Part of me is going, remember reality, but my mind just keeps saying to it, what if THIS is reality? So… you know, sorry for being confusing again. Goodnight,