Beauty is what I see, if I chose the assemblage point correctly - those now invisible points that miraculously turn a girl into an angel.
When I was in the first grade, during a break, my friend sat down with me and said: "Do you want to see?". And he handed me a photograph, one of those that, as I later found out, were carried by the gypsies at one time on the trains, doing their small business with the help of lurid postcards with dogs, ladies and views of resorts.
I stared at the photo. It depicted a woman of an undetermined age for me then, however, I'm not sure what would define him today. So, it was a woman with a high haircut, a heavy and not very kind, as it seemed to me, face.
I tried to find a secret, because of which this postcard was shown to me, one might say, from under the floor, but I saw nothing. An ordinary, not very kind and completely ugly lady was not even looking at me, but somewhere to the side. I began to understand female beauty quite early - in any case, my mother's young friends said so, and looking at the image, I could safely say that there was nothing particularly outstanding on it.
I looked inquiringly at my friend. He leaned closer to me conspiratorially and jabbed his sweaty finger into the cheek of the beautiful lady. "Look, look here!" he whispered, not looking at me. And then I noticed. On the cheek of the unkind stranger, closer to the nose, three distinct points were noticeable, forming a tiny triangle.
“Look here!” My friend repeated, and I stared at three dots. “Don't blink,” he ordered me. And I stopped blinking. So I looked at the postcard for about five minutes, trying not to blink or be distracted. Most likely, it was after class, because no one kicked us out of the classroom, the sun was shining in the window and illuminated the whitewashed walls and the image in my hand, from which I did not take my eyes off.
Gradually, the unpleasant features of my lady began to blur and become unimportant, blurred, shaded. The three dots became more and more distinct, and the image fields left to peripheral vision blurred and faded more and more. Gradually, everything turned into some kind of light, cloud-like spot, and even three dots appeared on the surface and disappeared.
"Now quickly!" - commanded a friend. "Quickly look at the white wall!" And I looked. Hastily I turned my gaze from the blurry postcard to the whitewashed school wall, illuminated by the southern sun and, as I recall, located to the right of the black desk with chalk scribbles by Sasha the Losers.
And then I saw. Shimmering with golden light, pulsing lightly in the air, a creature of unearthly beauty shone right in front of me. Having lost the density and definiteness of any material lines, it called through my weary eyes, straight to my heart, yearning precisely in search of this creature and finally finding it.
I still do not know the technique of this matter. I didn’t understand the essence of the mechanism that transformed the bogeyman into an air angel, and I don’t know and don’t want to know how it works. Some of my friends, who are more sophisticated in these matters, tried to tell me what exactly happens with the help of the three points on the cheek, but I did not want to listen. And rightly so. There is no need to destroy a miracle by accompanying it with explanations as heavy as a lead pipe. It was a miracle - do not interfere, let me stay with him.
All my further school and university chosen ones in one way or another correlated with that magical vision that appeared to me in the first grade. The closest to the ideal seemed to me one French actress, a photograph of which, cut from a magazine, hung over my bed during the period from fifth to sixth grade.
This event can be viewed in different ways. Most likely, this can be perceived as a banal story of a romantically-minded Russian boy who missed his eternally absent mother.
But still. I did not know then these words, later read from Castaneda - "assemblage point". And I still did not know that Pushkin separates beauty from its bearer, that his beauty is an independent essence that no one owns, but some were lucky to “wrap themselves up” in it, and beauty did not reject them. That she can dawn on a beautiful lady, or maybe pass by. And if it overshadows, then the lady "rests bashfully in her solemn beauty."
And I did not know that later I would find in the same Pushkin an assimilation of beauty to a shrine. And a shrine is something that comes from other dimensions and spaces, and does not live in everyday life. Shrine, for example, in the church is called the miracle of the visible presence of God among us. “Reverenting piously before the shrine of beauty,” the poet once stood before his lady when it was revealed to him.
And today I am sure that true angelic beauty can be discovered, seen and admired in any woman's face. And this is done not only with the help of makeup, advanced cosmetics and a fashionable makeup artist. Beauty is what I see, if I have chosen the assemblage point correctly - those now invisible points that miraculously turn an ugly woman into an angel, and a beautiful face is framed into an airy illumination in which it shyly rests.
Shyly - this means realizing that beauty is from God, and not from the structure of the skull, and that she, beauty, immeasurably exceeds all our capabilities, for she is a sacred object.
Those three assemblage points are possessed by one who has a pure, chaste, loving gaze. Like a poet who wrote:
And if so, what is beauty?
And why do people deify her?
She is a vessel, in which there is emptiness, or a fire flickering in a vessel?
For beauty is created with your participation. Without it, it is packaging, ready to eat and dead.
