There is a certain beauty that I miss, a beauty that has called to me since early this year. This has been a reflective year for many reasons: death, anniversaries, marriage. The more I think about this haunting beauty, the more I yearn for it. It’s there in my memories.
Growing up in the Midwest, I always dreamed of leaving. However, this year, I found myself missing home. For me, home is more of an idea than a place. It’s not somewhere I can return, even if I return to the Midwest. My family moved around a lot. Now, spread thin across distance, and distant in our communication, we are many instead of a singular family. Homes, instead of a home. In the absence, I occupy myself with my palimpsest of memories, an internal video I never finish editing. I observe how beautiful the hard years were. Hardship made them beautiful.
Before I go any further, I must define the beauty that has captivated me- the beauty that I now believe to be supreme. I call it “Baseline Beauty.” You find it in your lowest moments. When you try to imagine the absence of beauty, it is the beauty that persists. When everything hurts, it is the one tiny thing that hurts a little less, and that small relief feels like salvation, if only for a moment. The light of this beauty is so much brighter in contrast. It’s hard to fly away from the light. When you do leave- when you fly far away into the day, you think of how gorgeous that light in the darkness was, even though everything around you is so well-lit. It makes you appreciate the shadows. Baseline beauty is inextricably linked to life. It shows that as long as there is life, there is beauty, as though baseline beauty is of the same force as life. It teaches you to recognize life, truth.
A project for The Archaeology of Media: Film, Fashion, Montage course led by Professors Eugenia Paulicelli and Ulrich Lehmann gave me the opportunity to dwell on these thoughts. It is a creative project- the prompt is to create a film or design concept. I am working on composing a film of pictures- pictures that remind me of difficult times and the baseline beauty that I encountered there. Some pictures are a small part of a larger image- brutal scenes, and I took out the piece where I thought baseline beauty might hide. Other images are whole and ok, but one can rarely see the brutality of a moment by just looking at it. In these images, I imagine great disturbance and, therefore, a great, glowing baseline beauty.
This beauty is counter-culture to fast fashion, consumerism, and often luxury brands because the beauty speaks to an individual, not the masses. It comes with stories. It challenges cultural definitions of beautiful and ugly. While Gen Z fashion often embraces the beauty of the ugly, as do some designer labels, once something becomes trendy and capitalist systems consume it, baseline beauty is no longer a part of it because the light of baseline beauty cannot be controlled, forced, or bought. It is wild. It is the beauty found in truth. Especially when the truth is ugly.
Baseline beauty is found in what society defines as flaws. Today, we are surrounded by surgically perfected beauty and technologically perfected images everywhere we look. This abundance of beauty can disguise baseline beauty. However, appreciating baseline beauty nourishes one’s soul. It reminds one to embrace the parts of themself society calls ugly because humanity is not supposed to be perfect. It is the beauty of old and worn-out clothes, the ones that are out of style, stained, filled with history and memories. I encourage you to stand in awe of the presence of the absence of beauty.
I still have a week to work on this project. I welcome any feedback and all discussions. Thank you for reading!
